FCI Atlanta is one of the longest-running facilities in the federal prison system, opening in January 1902 under authority granted by the Three Prisons Act of 1891, the same law that established the penitentiaries at Leavenworth, Kansas and McNeil Island, Washington. Of those three original federal penitentiaries, only Atlanta and Leavenworth remain in operation today. The prison took in its first inmates via transfer from Sing Sing in New York and grew into one of the largest federal penitentiaries in the country, at times holding roughly 3,000 men. It was formally renamed United States Penitentiary, Atlanta once the Bureau of Prisons was created in 1930, and over the following decades it became known for housing a long list of high-profile inmates — most famously Al Capone, incarcerated there in the early 1930s before his transfer to Alcatraz. Other well-known names associated with the facility over the years include organized crime and white-collar figures. It has since been redesignated from a maximum-security penitentiary to a lower-security correctional institution. For families, it's worth knowing this is a facility with well over a century of continuous history, located within the city of Atlanta itself.