This is not strictly true. There were many escape attempts and several men actually got out and off the island. But none survived long enough to make it ashore because of the intense cold of the water, the strong currents and the sharks. The boat trip from San Francisco takes just a few minutes and as the island looms ever larger you can imagine what inmates must have thought as they were brought here.

Oddly enough they were transported across the water to the prison by train. Because the jail only took the most dangerous of criminals or those most prone to escape, it was deemed too risky to release them from the railway coaches which had brought them to San Francisco.

Instead, the train was rolled on to a ferry and sailed to the rock. The prisoners, of course, had only one way tickets and the trains returned empty.

The island is small and rocky. There are few buildings — among them a water tower, staff quarters and a small power station. The main feature is the cellblock. It housed 250 inmates in tiny chambers which had space for a single bed, a desk and stool cemented into the wall, two bookshelves and nothing else.

The cells had three thick brick sides and a panel of bars to the front. If a man extended his arms he could touch the walls; if he stood up he could touch the ceiling. There were no televisions and no computers. The notion that prisoners were allowed access to a telephone would have been ridiculed.

Exercise was usually restricted to an hour a week and many inmates felt the biggest punishment was being forced to remain silent. Nobody smuggled anything inside, there were no drugs secreted on a prisoner’s person because they were thoroughly searched.

When they weren’t in their cells they were clapped in irons, dragged a ball and chain and wore black and white striped suits with arrows on them. And they were there for decades — not the paltry sentences of today. Prisoners’ rights were, quite rightly, an irrelevance.

This is what a jail should be like, not the hotels where we house Scotland’s criminals of today. But it won’t be an issue for much longer. The guests will soon be checking out because our prisons are full to overflowing.

The sensible among us will welcome that news. It means that our police, prosecution service and courts are doing their jobs. If prisons are full then honest, decent, hardworking, peaceful, law-abiding people are safe because violent, dishonest, workshy criminals are off the streets. The sensible will understand that if prisons are full it means we must build more and fill them too.

To pay for this we should use the scandalous sums of money we spend on legal aid for recidivist criminals. Last year you gave £150 million of your tax money to greedy defence lawyers to represent people who neither work nor want to and who leech off the rest of us. Remember, defence lawyers are only there for one reason, to get guilty people off.

But no. Machine Gun Kelly and Al Capone, both infamous Alcatraz inmates, will be turning in their graves when they learn that in Scotland, instead of building new jails to house our growing number of prisoners, we will release them because there is no room for them inside.

I am in California on holiday. Despite its many and manifest flaws, the USA is always a great place to visit — especially at the moment when you get pretty well two dollars for your pound. It would be good value for money for those officials who work in our prison system to jump on a plane to San Francisco for an educational trip. Then they should hop on the ferry out to Alcatraz — and take 250 Scottish prisoners with them.

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