How many prisoners were recaptured after attempting to escape from Alcatraz?
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Executive summary
The clearest official accounting comes from the Bureau of Prisons: of the 36 men involved in 14 separate escape attempts from Alcatraz between 1934 and 1963, 23 were recaptured (that is, caught and returned to custody) while others were killed, drowned or remained unaccounted for [1]. Contemporary and popular accounts give slightly different breakdowns—some list 21 recaptured or different tallies of deaths and missing men—so the accepted authoritative figure for recaptures is 23 but the count varies by source [2] [3].
1. How many tried, how many got away — the baseline numbers
Alcatraz’s historical record commonly cited across government and encyclopedic sources states that 36 individual inmates (two having tried twice) took part in 14 escape attempts during the prison’s federal operation from 1934 to 1963 [4] [3]; that figure is the baseline used by historians and the Bureau of Prisons when assembling outcome tallies [1].
2. The authoritative tally: 23 recaptured, per the Bureau of Prisons
The Bureau of Prisons’ official history summarizes outcomes succinctly: of those 36 men, 23 were caught and returned to custody, six were shot and killed during their attempts, two drowned, and two were later executed for murder related to an escape attempt, leaving a small number unaccounted for in public summaries—this BOP breakdown is the most direct government source for the number recaptured: 23 [1].
3. Why other accounts list different recapture totals
Secondary sources differ because they group outcomes differently or use slightly different denominators: some travel and popular-history pieces count only those who reached the water or who managed to leave the cellhouse and thus report 21 recaptured [2], while one compiled list on Wikipedia frames the totals in terms of 34 prisoners with two repeat attempts producing 36 “individual” tries and includes categories like “gave up” and “caught” that can be tallied differently [3]. Those methodological decisions—whether to count repeat attempts separately, whether to include men who surrendered before reaching the water, and how to classify deaths versus missing persons—drive small but visible discrepancies.
4. The famous exceptions and the source of uncertainty
The single most famous and persistently ambiguous case is the June 1962 breakout of Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin: they definitively left the cellhouse and the island but their fate — drowned, dead, or living afterward — was never conclusively determined, and the FBI ultimately closed its long investigation without a positive conclusion, contributing to the “missing” or unresolved element in aggregate tallies [5] [6]. Likewise, earlier attempts in which bodies were never recovered (for example, 1937’s Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe) also seed uncertainty that leads some historians to hedge with phrases like “no known successful escapes” [7] [8].
5. Reading the totals: what “recaptured” means and why it matters
“Recaptured” in the official accounts means physically apprehended and returned to custody during or after the escape attempt, a definition used by the BOP to report its 23 figure [1]; other narratives that lower that number usually reclassify episodes — counting suicides, drownings, or prisoners who surrendered before leaving the island as separate categories — so the practical takeaway is that most escapees did not remain at large, and the most widely cited government statistic lists 23 recaptures while admitting a handful of deaths and unresolved cases [1] [2].