{"id":71235,"date":"2025-11-26T21:30:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T21:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/71235\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T21:30:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T21:30:07","slug":"terminal-island-the-storied-isle-prison-that-housed-manson-and-capone-to-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/71235\/","title":{"rendered":"Terminal Island \u2014 The Storied Isle Prison That Housed Manson And Capone \u2014 To Close"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN PEDRO, CA \u2014 Deteriorating infrastructure, including falling concrete, is among the reasons the federal Bureau of Prisons plans to close the low-security prison in Los Angeles County<\/a> that once housed Al Capone and Charles Manson, according to an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press.<\/p>\n

The agency will cease operations, at least temporarily, at the Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island, which sits in San Pedro between the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach, Director William K. Marshall III told staff Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The facility currently houses nearly 1,000 inmates<\/a>, “including cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and disgraced celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti,” AP reported.<\/p>\n

The decision to close the prison \u201cis not easy, but is absolutely necessary,\u201d Marshall said, adding that it is a matter of \u201csafety, common sense, and doing what is right for the people who work and live inside that institution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Randilee Giamusso told AP that the inmates at the facility will be moved to other federal prisons, a process expected to take several weeks.<\/p>\n

The storied facility, which cost $2 million to construct<\/a>, housed its first prisoners in June 1938, The Daily Breeze reported.<\/p>\n

Then, the facility transitioned into a receiving station for the Navy and then to \u201ca holding area for court-martialed prisoners during World War II,\u201d the newspaper reported.<\/p>\n

It functioned as a state mental institution from 1950 to 1955, until the state handed control of the facility to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, \u201cwhich converted the facility back into a low-to-medium security federal prison,\u201d according to The Daily Breeze.<\/p>\n

The prison was thrust into the spotlight at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic<\/a> in April 2020 when it had \u201cthe nation\u2019s worst outbreak in a federal penitentiary,\u201d with nearly half the inmates testing positive for the virus, The Los Angeles Times reported. <\/p>\n

After a string of COVID-19-related deaths<\/a> at the facility, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons in May 2020.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press Reporter Michael R. Sisak contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN PEDRO, CA \u2014 Deteriorating infrastructure, including falling concrete, is among the reasons the federal Bureau of Prisons…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":["post-71235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}