"My new home," wrote A.W. Davis in 1937, "was 7 1/2 or 8 feet from cement floor to cement ceiling, from 8 1/2 to 10 feet long, 5 or 6 feet wide....My bed was a steel frame bunk which folded down from the wall and a little chair you could sit on while writing on the table. There was a toilet, a shelf, a wash basin in the cell."
In this small world, Alcatraz prisoners spent most of their days. The long hours of boredom were reported both by guards and prisoners to be one of the more excruciating aspects of the punishment.