Quand on pense à une prison sur une île, on pense bien souvent à Alcatraz, The Rock. Il y avait également McNeil Island dans l'état de Washington.
"For over a century the picturesque waters around McNeil Island had a job to do: they kept the inmates in.
Convicted criminals arriving at "the prison without walls" soon found out that attempting to swim the three miles through the frigid Puget Sound was a death sentence.
But after 135 years, Friday will be closing time at McNeil -- and the water off its shores will no longer be needed to deter escaping prisoners.
When McNeil Island Corrections Center first opened in 1875, it was a territorial facility since Washington had not yet gained statehood.
An island prison in the remote Pacific Northwest made sense, at least in theory.
"Puget Sound was the waterway or the highway for carrying out commerce, but it also came with some treacherous problems," said Dick Morgan, the prison's last superintendent.
"You could only travel the water when the weather would allow. So whether or not you had food on the island was a matter of if you could stock a rowboat and get it across three miles of water. Sometimes people would be socked in for a long period of time.""
L'article complet et un montage de photos sur le site de CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/04/01/last.prison.island.closes/index.html?hpt=C1
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