Terminal Island — The Storied Isle Prison That Housed Manson And Capone — To Close

SAN PEDRO, CA — 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 that once housed Al Capone and Charles Manson, according to an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press.

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.

The facility currently houses nearly 1,000 inmates, "including cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and disgraced celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti," AP reported.

The decision to close the prison “is not easy, but is absolutely necessary,” Marshall said, adding that it is a matter of “safety, common sense, and doing what is right for the people who work and live inside that institution.”

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.

The storied facility, which cost $2 million to construct, housed its first prisoners in June 1938, The Daily Breeze reported.

Then, the facility transitioned into a receiving station for the Navy and then to “a holding area for court-martialed prisoners during World War II,” the newspaper reported.

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, “which converted the facility back into a low-to-medium security federal prison,” according to The Daily Breeze.

The prison was thrust into the spotlight at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020 when it had “the nation’s worst outbreak in a federal penitentiary,” with nearly half the inmates testing positive for the virus, The Los Angeles Times reported.

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

The Associated Press Reporter Michael R. Sisak contributed to this report.