Alcatraz (5 page)

In the middle of San Francisco Bay there rises an island that looks like a battleship . . . and when it has not been armed as such, first by the Spaniards and then by the United States Army, it has been a prison of one kind or another. First it was a so-called disciplinary barracks for renegade Indian scouts. Then for captured Filipinos. And always for army traitors. The Spanish lieutenant who discovered it in 1775 might well have called it the Alcazar if he had not been struck by clouds of pelicans that floated around it. So he called it after the bird itself—Alcatraz.

This genial christening has long been forgotten; and since 1934, when it became a federal prison, Alcatraz—the mere name of the place—has sent a shiver through the tourists who come to peer at it from the shore. For the mile or more of intervening water separates them from the most atrocious murderers, the stoniest rapists, the subtlest jail breakers now extant in the United States. It is not, as the popular gossip has it, a prison for lifers. It is, the warden insists, a “corrective” prison for men who know how to organize sit-down strikes in state prisons; for incorrigibles; for the bred-in-the-bone mischief makers of the Republic; for the men who employ a life sentence as a lifelong challenge to discover how, with a twisted hairpin or a stolen razor blade, to break away from any prison they are put in.

A removal to Alcatraz is thus considered in the underworld as a kind of general’s baton, the reward of distinguished field service that cannot be overlooked. And the guides on the steamers that ply through the riptides close to the island never fail to call off the roster of the incurable desperadoes who have battled the state prisons and landed here: “Limpy” Cleaver, Machine-Gun Kelly, Gene Colson, and Al Capone.

Alistair Cooke
, radio broadcast, December 10, 1959
¹

Few periods in U.S. history have been without infamous criminals—those murderers, assassins, traitors, robbers, or outlaws whose unlawful acts, real or alleged, have inspired some combination of fear and outrage among Americans. While these lawbreakers often had sensational and well-publicized
captures, trials, and executions, if they landed in prison they served their time along with more ordinary inmates in ordinary prisons—that is, until Alcatraz. When this federal penitentiary began operations in the summer of 1934 on a rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, it opened a new chapter in American penal history as a prison explicitly designed to hold and punish the nation’s criminal elite.

To federal criminal justice officials at the time, Alcatraz was needed to help the nation survive a crisis. In the half-decade or so preceding the opening of Alcatraz, a wave of sensational ransom kidnappings and daring train and bank robberies gripped the nation, and organized crime activity in large cities dramatically increased. These gangsters and outlaws—driving fast cars, armed with machine guns, and often able to elude capture for long periods of time—were branded “public enemies” because their exploits terrorized the citizenry and greatly eroded confidence in local and state law enforcement agencies. By 1933, with the arrest and successful prosecution of many of the most notorious lawbreakers, federal officials had achieved major victories in their campaign to show that they could deal with “the gangster element,” but they faced a serious obstacle in winning back the public’s confidence. The federal prisons then in existence were not prepared to hold such dangerous and important criminals. Corrupt and poorly managed, they were widely perceived as coddling influential felons by permitting special privileges and allowing them to continue involvement in criminal enterprises from behind bars, while flaws in their security systems offered them opportunities for escape.

Alcatraz was created to solve this problem. Surrounded by cold ocean currents, it was intended to hold the nation’s “public enemies” to an iron regimen, reduce them to mere numbers, cut them off from the outside world, and keep them locked up securely for decades. With Alcatraz in business, the country would finally be safe from Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Dock Barker, Alvin Karpis, and their gangster cronies, and these notorious felons would finally get the punishment they deserved. Alcatraz was to became a monument to federal authority.

The extraordinary measures taken at this particular prison to control the behavior of its prisoners and to project the appropriate image of harsh punishment to the public made it starkly different from other American prisons, including other federal penitentiaries. For more than half a century, national leaders in penology had been moving away from the model of prisons as institutions designed mainly to punish and deter criminal behavior and toward a model that included the goal of reforming or “rehabilitating” prisoners. By the 1930s the Federal Bureau of Prisons had
fully embraced the concept of imprisonment encapsulated in the term “corrections.” When it opened, Alcatraz thus became a conspicuous anomaly in the progressive evolution of American penology.

The inconsistency between Alcatraz and other efforts by the Bureau of Prisons was noted by two prominent academic criminologists of the era, Harry Elmer Barnes and Negley K. Teeters, who wrote in the early 1940s:

During the period between 1935 and the present we have witnessed amazing paradoxes in this area of the new penology—now referred to as corrections. We have seen the expansion of the efficient Federal Bureau of Prisons and the development of modern concepts of corrections in several of the states. But in the first instance we have witnessed the sorry career of that nullification of progressive penal treatment—Alcatraz, the super-maximum-security prison in San Francisco Bay, maintained by the same progressive Federal Bureau of Prisons.
²

While officials in the Department of Justice believed that a maximum-custody, minimum-privilege regime at Alcatraz was necessary for practical reasons of security and to convince Americans that the “public enemies” were receiving their just deserts, they also recognized that the prison’s deviation from the ideals of progressive penology could be controversial. In an effort to limit criticism of the prison, its methods and management—and because isolation of the prisoners from the outside world was a key part of the regime—they instituted a policy of secrecy, a deliberate effort to “create an air of mystery” surrounding the island.

Throughout Alcatraz’s thirty-year service as a federal prison, news reporters were prohibited from interviewing inmates and staff other than the warden. Even after a bloody escape attempt by six convicts in 1946, reporters from the wire services and San Francisco newspapers were allowed only a brief and restricted tour of the damaged cell house conducted by the warden. They were not permitted to interview any prisoner or guard, including those who were injured or taken hostage.

For three decades, employees at Alcatraz followed the strict order laid down by four successive wardens: do not talk to reporters when you are on the mainland, and do not discuss events or personalities at the prison with family members or friends. The blood relatives and wives of prisoners given permission to visit the island for one hour a month could only look at their husbands, sons, brothers, or fathers through thick bulletproof glass and talk through a guard-monitored telephone. Visitors and the men behind the glass were warned that any conversation related
to crime, prison life, or other prisoners would result in immediate termination of the visit. Written communications between inmates and their families and their lawyers were severely limited, censored, and retyped by guards to eliminate the possibility of secret messages being conveyed into or out of the prison.

The occasional official statements released over the years by Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington, D.C., and by Alcatraz wardens never satisfied the interest of the outside world in what was happening to Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly, to Ma Barker’s son Dock, to Alvin Karpis, Public Enemy no. 1, to kidnapper Thomas Robinson, to Floyd Hamilton, confederate of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, to the Fleisch brothers of Detroit’s “Purple Gang,” and to other prominent gangsters of the 1930s and 1940s, including Basil “The Owl” Banghart, John Paul Chase, partner of Baby Face Nelson, and confederates of John Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and the Barker-Karpis mob. Bay Area reporters also wanted to hear about the well-known local bandit from Napa Valley, Roy Gardner, one of the country’s last train robbers.

With only scant information about what was happening on the island, and able to observe directly only the occasional signs of trouble—escape sirens, sounds of gunfire, searchlight beams piercing the dark waters around the island, armed men on boats, stretchers being carried from the prison launch to waiting ambulances and to hearses—reporters relied on speculation and their imaginations in putting together the stories they knew the public craved. In addition to local newspaper accounts, articles about Alcatraz appeared in nearly every national magazine, from
Life
and the
Saturday Evening Post
to men’s magazines such as
True
and
Saga
. These were predictably sensationalized and wholly or partially fictitious. Anthony Turano’s 1938 article “America’s Torture Chamber,” for example, articulated a common theme—that punishment on the Rock, even for what the Bureau would call “the worst of the worst,” had gone too far:

The [prison’s] immured tenants are constantly tantalized by the view of several alluring cities. On clear days they may even see the vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the closer sections of San Francisco. The barbarous effect is the same as chaining a starving man to a wall and spreading a feast beyond his reach. . . . One of the announced purposes of this regime of systematic cruelty was the general terrorization of the entire prison population of the federal government. The inferior convict who became unruly in such purgatories as Fort Leavenworth and Atlanta was threatened with a transfer to the full-fledged inferno of Alcatraz. Thus, the quality of the
rotten eggs in the general basket would be improved by picking out the most putrid ones for individual wrapping. . . . It may not be easy to wax sentimental about the tough hides of such personages as Al Capone and “Machine Gun” Kelly. . . . They must be securely segregated, of course, for the protection of the law-abiding population. [But] it is not easy to perceive the sociological wisdom of transforming convicted scoundrels into raving maniacs. Their summary execution would reflect more humanity and official dignity than the maintenance of a costly suite of torture chambers. . . . Alcatraz stands as a monument to human stupidity and pointless barbarity.
³

With pronouncements such as Turano’s setting the tenor of the public’s response to Alcatraz, prison and Bureau officials found themselves with precisely the public relations problem they had tried to avoid. Ironically, the secrecy policy had allowed the media to create their own versions of the Alcatraz regime. That policy, however, remained in force, and the negative perception of the prison held by many newspaper reporters and citizens only worsened.

Since members of the press were prohibited from receiving any information directly from the staff or inmates, they eagerly sought accounts of life on the island from convicts after they were transferred to other prisons and then released on parole. These former inmates, pleased to have an opportunity to criticize the Bureau of Prisons and Alcatraz, clearly understood that the more sensational they made their accounts, the more attention they would receive. The stories they told of men going mad and suffering under miserable conditions like those on France’s notorious Devil’s Island were reported through the wire services to every part of the country.

One high-profile Alcatraz ex-convict, Roy Gardner, did more than most to add to the harsh image of the prison. In 1939, after he was released from Alcatraz via Leavenworth, he published a book he had written while on the island entitled
Hellcatraz: The Rock of Despair
.
⁴
San Francisco Bay Area reporters, residents, and tourists were finally provided with a dramatic, firsthand account of the struggle of the nation’s “public enemies” to survive in a place Gardner called “the tomb of the living dead.” He found other venues from which to tell his stories as well, appearing as an attraction at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939 on nearby Treasure Island, and then working as a guide on a tour boat that circled the island daily.

By the early 1940s, as a result of the stories written about Alcatraz, the American public had formed in its collective mind a vivid—and highly
distorted—picture of life on the island. This powerful and harsh image lived on through the remainder of the prison’s thirty-year history, fueled by more tell-all accounts from ex-prisoners, speculative journalism, and several real events that appeared to corroborate all the negative claims.

When the prison closed in 1963, the mythical Alcatraz portrayed by journalists did not fade away. Instead, Hollywood ensured that the Alcatraz myth would acquire more credibility. The tack that film producers and writers took in making movies about Alcatraz was to portray the convicts as heroes (or victims) and the guards and wardens as the villains. This was a time-tested formula for making films about prison inmates, reflecting the view in American culture that even though criminals are usually the “bad guys,” we can also admire them for their individualism, cleverness, and courage.

In a string of movies made about real and imagined Alcatraz inmates, Hollywood made Alcatraz cons the protagonists—men who stood up to the inhumane conditions and the sadistic guards and wardens. Burt Lancaster played Robert Stroud, the wise, dignified
Birdman of Alcatraz
in the 1962 movie that followed the 1955 book of the same name; Clint Eastwood was Frank Morris, the cool and clever organizer of the famous 1962 escape in the 1979 film
Escape from Alcatraz;
Sean Connery starred as the imaginary former prisoner who saved San Francisco from a missile attack by right-wing fanatics in the 1996 film
The Rock
.