The Tate-LaBianca Homicide Research Blog

Lynn Writes:
We took a boat trip last weekend in the Harbor-Port of Los Angeles, near San Pedro. 
Very educational... we saw where the Coast Guard is located and saw the actual Coast Guard boat that goes out and puts the buoys in the water... they also repair them. 
We also went by Terminal Island Prison... it was built in the 1930s, and was once a maximum security prison.  The famous prisoner that we heard about during our cruise was Al Capone.  It now houses Level 3 prisoners or prisoners with medical issues. 
We got back home and did some research and Charles Manson was there.  I would have taken better pictures, if I had known that… LOL

Lynyrd’s Terminal Island "Fast Facts":

--The first prisoners, 610 men and 40 women, filed into the new 21-acre federal prison near the southern end of Terminal Island on June 1, 1938.  The Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution consisted of three cell blocks built around a central quadrangle, and cost $2 million to build.

--In 1942, the U.S. Navy took control of the prison for use as a receiving station, and then as a barracks for court-martialed prisoners.
--After the Navy deactivated the facility in 1950, the state of California took it over for use as a medical and psychiatric institution.
--The state ceded control to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in 1955, which converted the facility back into a low-to-medium security federal prison.

The prison has housed the famous and the infamous over the years...

--Al Capone spent the last few months of his 10-year sentence for income tax evasion at Terminal Island in the late 1930s.
--Charles Manson, did two stints in Terminal Island before his 1971 conviction in the infamous Tate-LaBianca murder case.  In the mid-1950s, he was sent there after his conviction for car theft, and was paroled in September 1958.  He returned in June 1966 and was paroled in March 1967, while serving out a sentence for cashing a stolen check. (He was first sentenced to McNeil Island in Washington state in 1961, but ended up back at Terminal Island in 1966)  When he was released in 1967 he told the releasing officer that he did not want to leave.  He’s currently serving a life sentence at Corcoran State Prison.
--In 1974, LSD guru Timothy Leary and Watergate co-conspirator G. Gordon Liddy were incarcerated there at the same time.
--Sara Jane Moore came to Terminal Island in 1976 after her failed assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford.
--Hustler publisher Larry Flynt spent time there after shouting obscenities at a judge during one of his trials in the early 1980s; he was transferred after allegedly punching prison staff members.

The prison was coed, with women prisoners housed in a separate area, until overcrowding forced authorities to transfer the women to the federal prison in Pleasanton in 1977.  It has been male-only ever since then.
--During the 1970s, Terminal Island became known for escape attempts.  In December 1979, the San Pedro News Pilot reported 12 escapes during a single 2 1/2-month period.  Fortification including more barbed wire and increased armed guards were added to dispel the facility's "Club Fed" image in the early 1980s.
--The prison was rocked by a corruption scandal in the early 1980s that resulted in the indictment of six Terminal Island federal employees between 1982 and 1984. The charges involved bribes, cover-ups, marijuana sales to inmates and other types of corruption.
--Up until that time, the scandal was the most serious in the history of the federal prison system, because of the high-ranking officials involved. These included Charles DeSordi, the prison's former chief investigator of crimes committed, the highest-ranking federal prison official ever to be indicted.
--As of Thursday, August 19, 2010, the inmate population stood at 1,099. More than half of its inmates are in prison on drug-related charges, and more than 60 percent of its inmates have no documented history of violence. 

Thanks Lynn!!!  You Rock!!