Alcatraz (26 page)
Authors: David Ward
On September 11, 1937, Warden Johnston notified Bureau headquarters that J. Edgar Hoover had visited Alcatraz two days earlier with Clyde Tolson, Guy Hotte, and J. H. Rice (Hotte and Rice were FBI agents from San Francisco).
They arrived shortly after the prisoners had left the mess hall following the noon-day meal but in time to see the details lined up in the yard preparatory to going to their assignments in the work area. I then took them through the prison building, cell blocks, library, auditorium, kitchen, basement, bathhouse, hospital—in all of which they seemed to be interested.
Mr. Hoover seemed to be very keenly interested in our set-up, the routine, handling of prisoners and safety and protective measures. When they arrived, Mr. Rice had told me that they would like to go back on the boat leaving here at 3
PM
and so I made that arrangement. . . . I was very glad indeed to have the opportunity of a visit from the group and Mr. Hoover expressed himself not only interested but pleased with all that he saw.
5
According to Alcatraz records, inmate Jerry Cannon was in a basement cell at the time of Hoover’s visit. Johnston’s letter did not indicate whether Hoover’s tour included the cells there.
From October 1937 to June 1938, since no strikes occurred, the basement cells were not needed. George Sink, however, had the distinction of being sent to the dungeon on four separate occasions between June and December 1938. His periods of confinement were brief: June 4 to 5, July 9–11, July 22–24, and December 8–9. His rule infractions included
ALCATRAZ PRISONERS PLACED IN LOWER SOLITARY, 1934–38
Inmate | Dates of Confinement | Reason for Placement in Solitary |
Leo McIntosh | 9/8 to 9/28/34 | For yelling to other inmates while in solitary |
John Stadig | 10/1 to 10/3/34 | For circulating a petition |
John Messamore | 12/2 to 12/14/34 | For “writing a letter . . . inferring an escape plot” |
James Grove | 12/3 to 12/14/34 | Daring guard on wall to shoot him |
Charlie Berta | 12/3 to 12/15/34 | For “sending out defamatory comments, agitating and promoting trouble, making slanderous remarks about guards and hollering at officers on the wall” |
Clyde Hicks | 12/3 to 12/4/34 | For conveying a note from one prisoner to another |
Edward Wutke | 12/27/34 to 1/4/35 | For refusing to work, insolence, and “profanity” |
Edgar Lewis | 12/31/34 to 1/14/35 | For refusing to work, insolence, and “cursing guards and the deputy warden” |
Charlie Berta | 2/2 to 2/8/35 | For insolence and challenging a guard to fight |
Samuel Berlin | 1/21 to 1/31/36 | For “agitating” and participating in a strike |
John H. Carroll | 1/22 to 1/31/36 | “He is one of the ring leaders in the strike and is a communist . . . while in solitary he kept hollering to other inmates . . . kept making insulting remarks to the guards and making personal challenges for them to come in and fight” |
Lafayette Thomas | 1/22 to 1/25/36 | For “verbal attacks made to officers” |
Jack Hensley | 1/22 to 1/31/36 | For “whistling, hollering, and creating unnecessary noise” |
Frank McKee | 1/22 to 1/31/36 | “Due to personal verbal attacks made against officers” |
Walter Beardon | 1/22 to 1/30/36 | In isolation, “he continued as one of the main agitators of the hunger strike, yelling at the top of his voice trying to get other prisoners to join in the strike” |
Olin Stevens | 1/22 to 1/30/36 | “When he got down in the basement he said, ‘I’m not going any further.’ I put one hand on the seat of his pants and one hand on his collar and pushed him to his cell” [Lt. Miller] |
John Donohue | 1/24 to 1/30/36 | “He was in D Block calling to someone in the dungeon in a very loud voice” |
Harmon Waley | 8/21 to 8/23/36 | For singing in a loud voice |
John Kulick | 9/20 to 10/8/37 | For being “a dangerous agitator . . . participating in strike . . . he urinated on the walkway outside his cell” |
Walter Beardon | 9/20 to 10/8/37 | For “beating his pillow on the floor of his cell and yelling at the top of his voice trying to get other prisoners to join in the strike” |
Jerry Kannon | 9/20 to 10/2/37 | For “agitating and creating a disturbance in the cell house . . . had his coveralls off and was beating the floor with them” |
Richard Neumer | 9/21 to 10/3/37 | “At intervals of 45 minutes to an hour he would start clapping his hands, yelling, and whistling. This continued from midnight until 6 |
Ludwig Schmidt | 9/23 to 10/4/37 | For insolence and making threats |
Charles Bequette | 9/24 to 10/5/37 | “He wanted all the privileges that other prisoners had in other institutions” |
Harmon Waley | 9/27 to 10/10/37 | For participating in a strike and “creating a disturbance in the isolation section of the cell house” |
John H. Carroll | 9/28 to 10/8/37 | For participating again in a strike and for “trying to remove his toilet bowl from a wall in a solitary dark cell” |
Bob Phillips | 9/28 to 10/9/37 | Agitating, yelling, creating a disturbance in isolation |
George Sink | 6/4 to 6/5/38 | |
| 7/9 to 7/11/38 | |
| 7/22 to 7/24/38 | |
| 12/8 to 12/9/38 | For various infractions |
Frank Brownie | 8 days [dates unknown] | “Agitating” [joining a work strike] |
Source:
Information abstracted from prisoner files.
Continuous hollering and agitating;
Causing commotion in the cell house by hollering and [for] his free use of obscene language directed at Warden Johnston. While being taken to lower solitary, Sink broke away from Lt. Starling and Jr. Officer Roberts as they entered through the basement door and ran about 20 feet. He picked up a window sash weight and threw it at Lt. Starling. Lt. Starling hit [Sink] with his gas billy [a heavy 9½-inch metal club with tear gas], which went off, the gas striking Sink in the face.
Making so much noise the Associate Warden [usually, “deputy warden”] could hear it while at his house eating dinner.
6
George Sink was the last prisoner to be sent to lower solitary; his misconduct represented that mixture of disciplinary and mental health issues that characterized a small number of Alcatraz prisoners. After he accumulated twenty-nine disciplinary reports during a two-year period on the island, a neuropsychiatric board diagnosed him as “paranoid” and “psychotic”; he was transferred shortly thereafter to the Federal Medical Center at Springfield, Missouri, for treatment.
In June 1938 Warden Johnston described the problem in dealing with Sink’s disruptive behavior in a letter to Director James Bennett:
when in Solitary, he became very noisy and made repeated efforts to disturb all other occupants of the cell house. After consultation of the Associate Warden and Chief Physician, Sink was removed to the Hospital, but there he
proved to be a disturbing factor, upsetting other patients and participating in two fights. Dr. Ritchey checked him out of the hospital and reported him as one who should be held to account and subject to disciplinary action.
The Associate Warden placed him in Open Cell, just for purposes of segregation, and gave him two meals a day. On the night of June 4, 1938, he began yelling and disturbing the occupants of other cells in the several cell blocks. . . . He was so resistant to all appeals to keep quiet that the Lieutenant of the Watch sent for the Associate Warden. Failing to get Sink to stop, he finally removed him to the Basement Solitary.
When you are here on your next visit I would like to show you the Basement and have your advice concerning what alterations are advisable in order to make occasional use of the basement cells for just such instances as I have named above.
7
Four years after the Bureau of Prisons took custody of the island, Johnston was still informing Bureau headquarters of the existence of, and need for, “the basement cells.”
8
THE SPECIAL TREATMENT UNIT
Noise making was the primary offense that earned prisoners trips to lower solitary during the 1930s. No inmate involved in an escape plot or attempt or who assaulted or killed another prisoner or an officer was ever placed in the dungeon; even Burton Phillips, who attacked Warden Johnston in the dining room, was not confined to the most punitive accommodation on the island. The need for a newly designed disciplinary segregation unit separated by a solid concrete wall from the other cell blocks was answered by the remodeling of D block, which came after an attempted breakout in January 1939 by five prisoners. That escape plot clearly revealed the weakness in the A and D block isolation areas: the failure to install tool-proof bars to replace the old flat bars left over from the military occupation of the island had allowed prisoners to cut through the bars of their cells and the windows in D block and reach the waters of the bay.
On August 28, 1941, a new “special treatment unit” opened with three tiers of cells fronted by grills of tool-proof steel bars. Six cells on the main floor were constructed with steel floors and featured solid steel doors in addition to barred grill doors. Two of the six cells had “oriental toilets” (a hole in the floor). The new design allowed for isolation of rule breakers from the general population and solitary confinement cells for those who continued to make trouble even in a punishment unit. From that
date forward Warden Johnston and Director Bennett could honestly deny that any prisoner on the Rock was locked up in the dungeon.
As the trial of an Alcatraz convict in 1941 demonstrated, the earlier use of the dungeons would continue to trouble Bureau of Prisons officials who did not want to be held responsible for having employed such a primitive means of punishment. The grills that covered the fronts of the basement cells were removed and discarded and their use as places of punishment appears to have been forgotten by Alcatraz wardens after James Johnston. Sanford Bates’s successor, Bennett, denied these cells had been used when after his retirement he was asked if dungeon confinement had been an early feature of the Alcatraz regime. He contended that while he was aware that many prisoners had claimed that the dungeon was used, “If the Alcatraz staff had actually placed prisoners in these cells Bureau Headquarters would have known about it.”
9
Despite correspondence reporting the use of lower solitary from Warden Johnston to Directors Bates and Bennett, and despite the numerous entries referring to these cells in prisoners’ files and in other Alcatraz records, James Bennett’s position remained as expressed in a letter to Supreme Court Justice Harlan after the Bureau had ceased operations on the island:
I am personally much interested in the history of the island and the purposes it has served over the years. When we occupied the island there were frequently charges that we were utilizing some of the alleged dungeons under the institution for the punishment of prisoners committed to the island. Apparently there was a time when some of the caverns on the island were used but this was long discontinued before we ever took over the administration of the institution from the military.
10
The tension between Bureau headquarters and James Johnston over the use of a form of punishment that lent credibility to charges that confinement at Alcatraz was brutal and inhumane was never clearer than in regard to the use of the lower solitary cells. Lieutenant Maurice Ordway summarized the disagreement between Alcatraz and Bureau administrators:
Johnston and [his deputies] said, “We’re going to run this thing and we’re going to run it our way.” They did. And they used those cells.
11
Toward the end of 1935, the initial mix of military, McNeil Island, Lorton (D.C.), Leavenworth Annex, and Lewisburg prisoners combined with
the more sophisticated, long-term offenders from Atlanta and Leavenworth had changed markedly. Many of the relatively short-term, lesser offenders had been transferred, more real convicts from the two penitentiaries had arrived, and more of the big-time felons, such as Dock Barker, had been caught up in the government’s dragnet and shipped to the island.
As the inmate population approached more the character originally envisioned by the Department of Justice, it was only a matter of time before prisoners organized another work strike. On December 25, 1935, and again on December 31, rumors about a strike were frequent and specific enough that the guard force was alerted to the possibility of trouble. Then again on the morning of January 20, 1936, all staff were advised that a strike was to begin that morning in the laundry. Extra guards armed with gas bombs were dispatched to the laundry and sent to the towers, gun galleries, and cell house.
