It was on McNeil Island in Puget Sound in unincorporated Pierce County,[1] near Steilacoom, Washington.

[4] In the 1910s, inmates included Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz", who fatally stabbed a prison guard in March 1916.

During World War II, eighty-five Japanese Americans who had resisted the draft to protest their wartime confinement, including civil rights activist Gordon Hirabayashi, were sentenced to prison terms at McNeil; all were pardoned by President Harry S. Truman in 1947.

[6] The State of Washington began to lease the facility from the federal government in 1981,[7] and later that year the state department of corrections began moving prisoners into the facility, renamed "McNeil Island Corrections Center."

[8] In November 2010, the department announced its plans to close the penitentiary by 2011, saving $14 million in the process.