Alcatraz (3 page)

With a group of well-trained, enthusiastic graduate research assistants working on the files, we began the process of locating former inmates, former employees, and BOP officials for interviews. To conduct interviews with former Alcatraz inmates who had returned to (or were still doing time in) federal prisons, we needed to know at which prisons they were housed; the Bureau of Prisons provided this information. If former employees were to provide any useful information during their interviews, they needed to know that the prohibition against talking to persons outside the Bureau could in this case be ignored. To this end, former director Bennett notified the Alcatraz Alumni Association, an organization founded by former employees, that the study had his approval and that, after many decades of silence, the officers, lieutenants, captains, and other members could finally describe their experiences and talk to me about events and personalities on the island.
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I interviewed prisoners never released or returned to prison as parole violators or with new sentences in federal penitentiaries in Atlanta, Georgia, Leavenworth, Kansas, Lompoc, California, and Marion, Illinois; at federal medical centers in Springfield, Missouri, and Rochester, Minnesota; at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, and the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, California; and at state penitentiaries in Jackson, Michigan, Stillwater, Minnesota, and Folsom, California. Because these men were always available and almost all turned out to be quite interested in talking about their experiences at Alcatraz and other prisons, some were interviewed several times.

Former prisoners on parole or who had completed postrelease supervision were in most cases interviewed in their homes or locations they selected—several chose Alcatraz as the setting. Interviews with almost
all former employees took place in their homes; three were interviewed at Alcatraz. Lt. Isaac Faulk, Lt. Maurice Ordway, and Capt. Philip Bergen, all veterans of many years on the island, were each interviewed several times, as was former warden Olin Blackwell. For those inmates and employees interviewed on the island, that setting was very helpful in bringing back memories of events and the specific places where they occurred. Altogether, more than four hundred hours of interviews were conducted with fifty-four Alcatraz inmates and forty-six employees and Bureau of Prisons officials.

Because such a large proportion of the National Institute of Justice funds was expended on coding data from the inmate files, resources to underwrite much of the cost of travel to conduct interviews was provided by a series of grants from the University of Minnesota Graduate Research Office and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. It became necessary, however, for me to use my own funds for travel expenses, particularly to meet with inmates and former employees for repeat interviews. Federal rules did not allow compensation for men in prison who participated in any research project, but Norman Carlson authorized the payment of a $50 honorarium from the Bureau of Prisons to retired Alcatraz employees to encourage their participation. (Although some declined payment, all former staff members interpreted the offer as support for the project by Bureau headquarters.)

While record clerks in various federal prisons sent us the files of the Alcatraz inmates they could locate, the records for a number of men are incomplete, most notably, those of men still serving time (“active” cases) during the period that records were being assembled for the University of Minnesota project. The postrelease records of inmates who were deported could not be located, nor could the complete files for several prominent prisoners, including Arthur “Dock” Barker and Al Capone. Former Director Bennett told me that file cabinet drawers of correspondence and other Capone materials may have been lost when the U.S. Navy took over the Terminal Island prison during World War II. (Prisoner files follow federal inmates from one prison to another, remaining at the final prison at the time of release.) In Bennett’s opinion, “some day” files related to Capone will be found in a naval records center.

It should also be noted that prison staff did not assemble these institutional and inmate files for archival purposes. For example, some end-note citations from the files made available to us are not complete, such as the day, month, year, titles, or authors of some reports—particularly newspaper and magazine articles. To reduce “souvenir hunting” by staff
even in Bureau headquarters, some administrative materials were sent to the University of Minnesota archive for safekeeping until the entire collection of Alcatraz records was returned to Washington, D.C. In 1972 James Bennett donated his personal files to the John F. Kennedy Library but because he had begun drafting chapters for his own book about Alcatraz he had assembled considerable materials that he kept in his home—some of which he made available to me during our visits. He noted in a July 26, 1974, letter to me the loss of one important set of records, “the monthly reports of the Warden and other information about operating problems I suspect have been destroyed. Indeed, after I left, no one [until Norman Carlson] was interested in preserving historical records.” Mr. Bennett wrote to me again on September 7, 1976, that he was working on case histories of “prisoners I have known in my personal files”; two years later, October 3, 1978, he informed me, “I found Fred Wilkinson’s detailed report on the escape (June, 1962 Anglin-Morris). I have put it in the folder I am saving on the official documents re Alcatraz.” After his death the remaining Alcatraz materials were lost.

As the Bureau of Prisons became more bureaucratic after 1948, more information about inmates was compiled and records at Alcatraz were made in multiple copies. We were able to locate some missing inmate admission summaries, special progress reports, annual reviews, and other information in federal probation offices across the country. This collection of records for the University of Minnesota project is the most complete set of records compiled for any federal penitentiary but, for the reasons listed above, there are missing materials.

During or after their interviews, a number of former Alcatraz and Bureau employees gave or loaned me parts of inmate and administrative files, letters, reports of incidents, training manuals, San Francisco newspapers—many with front-page stories about escape attempts or killings on the island—cell house keys, photographs, and a wide variety of other Alcatraz memorabilia. By retaining these items as “souvenirs,” their owners helped increase the breadth and comprehensiveness of our information about Alcatraz. Of particular note was a large collection of valuable records and photographs saved by acting warden Richard Willard after the prison was closed. (Several years later the island was occupied by protest groups and these items would likely have been lost, destroyed, or at least separated from the official records collection.) Three ex-prisoners gave me copies of books they were writing about their experiences in and out of prison.

While the interviews were being conducted, the coding of the inmate files was completed, and we were able to analyze the data. The results confirmed what had been indicated by the preliminary analysis: Alcatraz releasees had indeed succeeded in the free world at a much higher rate than anyone had thought they could. One-half of all the Alcatraz inmates—and nearly two-thirds of those who served time during the “gangster era,” 1934–1948—could be considered successes in that they never came back to a state or federal prison.

At this point in the research we had put together a remarkably complete set of records for the most hidden and notorious prison in America, giving us access to a massive collection of memos, letters, official reports, and records that no one outside the federal agencies from which they came even knew existed. Through our interviews with the aging men who served time and worked at Alcatraz, we had extracted knowledge, facts, and experiences that would otherwise have died with the men who related them. Perhaps most important, we had produced results that contradicted both conventional wisdom and expert opinions about a prison that would subsequently become a model for how to deal with the most dangerous, escape-prone, and troublesome inmates in prisons across the country.

Given the interest of 1.4 million visitors to Alcatraz each year, it became clear that what we had learned about this unique penitentiary would be of interest to a wider audience than federal criminal justice officials and academic criminologists. Moreover, we had accumulated far more knowledge than could be conveyed in journal articles or research monographs. Thus I began laying plans for a book written for a general audience. Because the study had focused on documenting criminal careers both in and out of prison, the book would take a similar approach, including detail about the lives, experiences, and perspectives of inmates as a way of documenting the prison’s history.
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Preparing a book about Alcatraz and the fates of its inmates led to years of additional research and writing. The prison had to be placed into an historical context, the rationale behind its creation explained, and the lives of many of its inmates—not just the “public enemies”—would have to be constructed from prison, parole, and FBI records, and from interviews.

After completing much of the writing, and following the advice of Jim Clark at UC Press, it was decided to limit this book’s scope to the gangster era at Alcatraz. Broadly considered, this period corresponded to the years of James Johnston’s tenure as warden—1934 to 1948—before Alcatraz took on more of the features of a standard penitentiary in terms
of rules, programs, and population. The inmates imprisoned on Alcatraz during this period, compared with those who came after them, were the most successful in staying out of prison after release, lived under the most punitive conditions, included some of the most engaging personalities with the most interesting life stories, and most consistently followed the informal rules of conduct contained in the convict code. In other words, Alcatraz during the gangster years represents the “pure” version of the prison—the Alcatraz of legend, the Alcatraz with the most to teach us about the complex interplay between inmate personalities, conditions of imprisonment, and postrelease outcomes.

Finally it should be noted that the history of Alcatraz from 1949 to its close in March 1963 was quite different from its gangster years. During the 1950s, inmates found new ways to resist the regime, race relations became tense, and inmate-on-inmate violence increased. In 1962 two highly publicized escapes occurred. Those escapes and the growing criticism of “dead-end penology” (no effort to reform or rehabilitate prisoners) led the Bureau of Prisons to conclude that rather than concentrating troublemakers in one small prison, they should be dispersed through many prisons. That strategy, however, began to fail in the 1970s as violence related to prison gangs and drug trafficking increased. In October 1983, after two officers were killed on the same day at the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, the Bureau’s highest security prison, an Alcatraz-type regime called “indefinite administrative segregation” was reestablished, and the supermax was conceived.

A second book will describe the last half of Alcatraz history and the experiences of its inmates after they left the Rock, some to successfully return to life in the free world and others to end up at Marion—“the new Alcatraz.”

When James Clark signed this book up for the University of California Press he never anticipated the amount of time and the many revisions that lay ahead. After he became director emeritus Jim continued to exercise due diligence as the manuscript went through multiple revisions; he explained the university’s rigorous review process and urged patience as more changes were requested. Jim Clark should be proud of the stature the University of California Press achieved during his years at the helm; we hope this book will add to that reputation.

Several years ago when this book was hundreds of pages longer than the final version, Jim expressed concern that the story of the prison was becoming lost among lengthy accounts of the criminal careers of the prisoners. To help in the painful process of cutting pages that had taken so many months to produce, I sought the assistance of my longtime colleague Gene Kassebaum. Gene and I first met at UCLA where we co-authored two books based on studies of California prisons. He accompanied me when I visited Alcatraz in June 1962 to discuss a study of that controversial prison. Years later he agreed to edit the current book to make sure that the focus stayed on the prison, not the prisoners’ criminal exploits—exciting, daring, and outrageous as many of them were. He recast many sections to improve the organization and flow of material, applied his superior analytic and writing ability to basic themes in the story line, and reviewed multiple drafts. For a project in which a major problem has been how to extract the essential elements from an overabundance of data, documents, and first-person accounts, the value of a colleague knowledgeable about the topic but not emotionally attached to the various drafts cannot be overstated. The final version of this book reflects the encouragement and support Gene gave over the last four years along with pushing the “delete” button, adding chapter summaries and transition passages, and asking when he would receive “revised chapter X.”