Join historian and journalist Brendan Riley as he describes another Mare Island legacy.  The Navy’s first land-based prison was built on Mare Island in 1868, and that prison soon became infamous throughout the fleet.  The Navy was in transition from a time when ship’s officers punished errant sailors by flogging them with a “cat o’ nine tails.”  Following an 1850 congressional ban on flogging, the Navy experimented with alternative punishments, but it soon became clear a land-based prison system was needed.