Alcatraz (35 page)

Left to himself, William Martin had made his way to the south end of the island, where he was trying to climb down a twenty-foot cliff. Lt. Faulk and Deputy Warden Miller walked along the beach past Young and McCain’s raft and waded along the base of the cliffs with their flashlights shining among the rocks. According to Faulk, they had gone close to one hundred feet from the cove where McCain and Young had been captured when he caught a glimpse of movement above them. At that moment, Martin—naked except for a pair of socks—fell from the cliff, struck the bank, and fell into the water. He surrendered peacefully. Injured in his fall, he was taken to the prison hospital.
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In the hospital Stamphill was treated for shock and several bullet wounds. Martin was treated for exposure and the multiple bruises and abrasions suffered in his fall down the cliff. Barker had been shot through the left leg, and another bullet had entered his neck behind the right ear and emerged at the corner of his right eye. According to the medical report, there was bleeding from the right ear, indicating a fracture of the skull. Semiconscious, and complaining of pain in his leg and of feeling cold, he mumbled to Deputy Warden Miller, “I’m all shot to hell. I was a fool to try it.” His wounds were dressed; he was treated for shock and given a sedative. Later in the morning he appeared to have periods of consciousness but uttered no words. During the afternoon he became more restless and his breathing more labored. At 5:30
P.M
. his condition rapidly worsened and ten minutes later he stopped breathing.
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Since Henry Young and Rufe McCain had not been injured in the break, they were locked up in isolation. Deputy Warden Miller and an FBI agent came around two days later to talk to them, but Young said he had absolutely nothing to say to agents of the FBI or to any employees of the Bureau of Prisons. McCain refused to discuss the escape, only saying, when asked why he tried to escape, “I just wanted to go home.”

Stamphill and Martin also declined to provide any information regarding the escape when questioned by Miller and several FBI agents. Earlier that morning, however, immediately after he had been brought up to the prison hospital, Martin had been interrogated by Miller and talked about the escape, with his statement recorded by the assistant chief clerk. Martin reported that the escape had been planned before he was
sent to D block, that cutting the bars took more than a month, that Stamphill had smuggled the files and the bar spreader into the isolation unit, and that the five men had gone to the cliffs together but then separated in order to find boards and other materials to make a raft.
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Stamphill, later reflecting on this and other attempts to break out of Alcatraz, noted the preoccupation of so many escapees with getting out of the buildings on the island, while giving so little thought to means of surviving the cold currents of the bay and getting to the nearest land, a mile and a quarter away: “The amazing thing to me is that in escapes all you think about is beating the institution. . . . We never planned beyond that. Escape from the institution—that’s all we concentrated on . . . as soon as the fog came in, off we went.”

Five days after the escape, Director James Bennett wrote to Warden Johnston. Noting that there were many “lessons” to be learned from the incident, Bennett suggested a number of measures for improving security:

• Place an extra officer in the gun gallery during meals so that D block would not be left unsupervised.

• Discontinue use of the cells on the lower floor of D block, where the obstructions posed by the two solitary confinement cells allowed the escapees to saw away on the cell bars, hidden from the gun cage officer’s line of sight.

• Remind guards of the need to vary their routines and to remember that their primary obligation is to the government, not covering up for fellow officers who had been derelict in their duties.

• Complete an inventory of all tools and materials on the island.

• Acquire improved outside lighting, police dogs to aid in searches, and flare guns to light up the island and the nearby waters in an emergency.

• Institute a policy of frequent cell changes for the most escape-prone inmates.

• Fingerprint all persons admitted onto the island, including workmen, friends, and relatives of the officers who live on the island, employees of the lighthouse, “and anyone else.”

• Immediately prepare plans for constructing new segregation/ isolation cells with tool-proof steel bars.
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Several of these suggestions, including the remodeling of D block, were promptly accepted, but police dogs and flare guns were never acquired, and the task of routinely processing fingerprints and undertaking criminal
record checks for everyone who came over to the island met resistance from both the FBI and employees.

The repercussions of the 1939 escape attempt, however, went far beyond matters internal to the Bureau of Prisons. Even though the Bureau could point to some positive elements in the response to the escape—the breakout was discovered within twenty-five minutes, and the escapees caught before they could get away from the island—the fact remained that the inmates had succeeded in breaking out from cells inside the most secure penitentiary in the federal prison system. For this reason, the FBI saw the attempted escape as evidence of defective security arrangements and poor management.

Always looking for incompetence, inefficiency, and evidence of corruption in lesser agencies, FBI Director Hoover made sure that the attorney general knew of the failure of the BOP to measure up to FBI standards and ordered an investigation into the escape. The investigation, conducted by the San Francisco field office, began on January 14, two days after the breakout attempt. By the end of the day, FBI agents had collected enough information to make a telephoned report to Director Hoover, who condensed it into a memo he sent to the attorney general.

This initial report was harshly critical of the management of Alcatraz. It identified a long list of defects in the security arrangements in place on the island, reported that some men in the kitchen crew were also planning an escape that involved taking wives and children of the staff as hostages, described the many knives and other forbidden objects discovered in inmates’ cells, and noted hostile attitudes toward Warden Johnston on the part of inmates. The report recommended a number of rather obvious changes, including obtaining new and better metal detection devices, removing potential raft or flotation materials from the prison grounds, and, most important, overhauling the prison’s security, calling for

an inspection of the windows, bars, and cells on Alcatraz at frequent intervals. In this case it is to be noted that these bars had been sawed and the bar at the window loosened and were in this condition for over a month, but were not at any time ascertained by any of the prison guards.

Some change should be made in the supervision and guarding of the isolation ward. In this case, it is to be noted that these five prisoners, in five separate cells at various times of the day and night sawed the bars from their cell doors and then crossed the hallway at least sixteen feet from the cells to a window from which they loosened a bar and then cut the framework of the window. The work that accomplished these results
had extended over a period of many weeks, and yet no one noted these activities.
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On the same day, Hoover sent a supplemental memorandum to the attorney general based on interviews that his agents held with two guards. The guards identified several blind spots in D block, including the obstruction created by the concrete solitary cells, which had prevented the gun cage officer from seeing the doors of the five cells in which the escapees were housed. The memo outlined administrative problems that might be regarded as outside the range of an escape investigation but about which Hoover decided the attorney general should be informed; no copy of this report was sent to Bureau of Prisons Director Bennett.

Two days later, the San Francisco FBI office sent a fourteen-page “personal and confidential” report to Hoover titled, “Conditions at Alcatraz.” This document conveyed information and impressions gained from interviews with rank-and-file guards who agreed to talk to the FBI investigators about general conditions apart from the escape. These officers “felt that there was a breakdown in the system at Alcatraz to such an extent that it would probably affect the entire system of the Bureau of Prisons,” and “they just had to tell somebody of these situations.”
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The agents noted that these guards and other line staff had given up reporting defects they observed in the security system because their comments or suggestions were regarded by Deputy Warden Miller as personal criticism of his ability, and Miller, in turn, was not about to make any suggestions to Warden Johnston. The officers complained of poor communication from supervisors to the line staff and cited instances in which their supervisors withheld information that the officers felt they needed to know in order to anticipate or control trouble in the cell blocks. They also resented the policy that prohibited line staff from reading the files kept on the prisoners whom they were supervising.

The practice, approved by Deputy Warden Miller, of allowing inmates to move to cells where and next to whom they wished in exchange for cooperation (namely for not creating disturbances), was also criticized. The placement of the five escapees in adjacent cells was a consequence of this policy, and members of various cliques and gangs gathering in cells close to each other was cited as another example of poor administrative decision making.

The guards complained that the light workload in the shops allowed inmates ample opportunities to fashion weapons and escape paraphernalia,
and to “case” the industries area for escape routes. They also criticized the failure to install tool-proof steel bars in D block, where the prison’s most serious troublemakers were kept.

Another guard provided the FBI agents with a memo he had written on January 9 to Warden Johnston, pointing out the structural defects that made D block the least secure unit in the prison and recommending that “at least two panels of grill screen be placed on and attached to the bars of both gun galleries” in order to protect the officer stationed there and prevent inmates from acquiring gas grenades, gas masks, and night sticks.
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(If this recommendation had been approved and carried out, the serious and deadly breakout attempt that occurred in May 1946 would have been foiled.)

The FBI’s critique of security measures also included a list of materials found in the shakedown of the entire prison after the escape attempt.
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The final section of the report revealed that when the prison siren sounded, employees did not know whether it signified a fire or an escape. On the night of the break, three officers had left their living quarters and run to the fire truck; they were driving up the hill to the cell house when they were flagged down and informed that the alarm was sounded for an escape, not a fire.

The report concluded with a reminder and a caveat: the information obtained in the investigation had not been verified, and some of the officers’ comments “might be prompted by personal prejudices or jealousies or personality.” But the information should be sent to the director “for his interest.”
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On January 19 Hoover sent a copy of this report to the attorney general; five days later, he sent a copy to James V. Bennett. He requested that Bennett handle the information “in a most discreet manner”; it included the identity of employees who had made “confidential” statements to the FBI agents.
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The investigation into the escape from D block thus provided Bureau of Prisons headquarters and Warden Johnston with evidence that FBI agents called to Alcatraz to investigate violations of federal law by prisoners had also reported opinions from employees about management policies and practices. Relations between Hoover and Bennett would continue to be suspicious and tense throughout the history of Alcatraz.

If the FBI’s criticism to the attorney general’s office wasn’t enough, within several months the prison’s security arrangements came under attack from another source: criminal complaints were taken to mainland juries, U.S. attorneys, and federal courts. A coroner’s jury investigating the death of Dock Barker came to the following conclusion:

The said Arthur Barker met his death attempting to escape from Alcatraz Prison from gunshot wounds inflicted by guards unknown. From the evidence at hand, we, the jury, believe this escape was made possible by the failure of the system for guarding prisoners now in use at Alcatraz Prison and we recommend a drastic improvement by those in authority. Further, that a more efficient system be adopted for illumination of shores and waters immediately surrounding the prison; that the citizens of San Francisco unite in an effort to have a more suitable location for imprisonment of the type of desperadoes at present housed at Alcatraz.
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Given the beating Alcatraz was taking in the press, and knowing that the FBI had advised the attorney general of “administrative problems” at the prison, neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the attorney general’s office in Washington encouraged the U.S. attorney in San Francisco to initiate criminal proceedings against the four convicts who survived the escape attempt.

But Alcatraz had punitive measures of its own, and the escapees received all of them. Young and McCain were immediately locked up in isolation and when Martin’s bruises healed, he was also taken to D block. Stamphill’s injuries required him to be put in traction for eight weeks and then in a cast for two more weeks. On the day the cast on his leg was removed, he was able to limp from his hospital bed to the shower; the following morning he was escorted to D block isolation, where he remained for seventeen months.

The Bureau of Prisons then exercised its option to take away all the good time that the escapees had accumulated. Later in January at his good time forfeiture hearing, conducted by the deputy warden, the captain, and the chief medical officer, Henry Young could have given information that might have reduced his punishment; instead—in an indication of the power of the prohibition against incriminating fellow prisoners that prevailed in inmate society at the time—he stonewalled: