Alcatraz (6 page)

One of the more recent of the Alcatraz films,
Murder in the First
, is also one of the most inaccurate. Released in 1995, it purports to tell the true story of Henry Young, an Alcatraz prisoner put on trial for the murder of another prisoner. According to the
New York Times
review:

Murder in the First
is the semi-true story of Henry Young, who in March 1938 was placed in solitary confinement in an underground vault at Alcatraz and remained thus cruelly confined for more than three years. Released into the prison population and suffering the mind-altering effects of his ordeal, he killed a man he thought had wronged him. Was Henry Young responsible for his own actions after suffering such duress? Was he a murderer or a victim?
⁵

This review followed a news story about the making of the film, which had appeared in the
Times
ten months earlier. In that article, the director related how the brutal treatment of Young “set off a chain of events that helped lead to the closing of the ‘Rock,’” and actor Kevin Bacon reported: “To be honest, I almost went nuts playing this part . . . there’s no light. It’s wet. You’re in shackles. You’re naked. It’s horribly cold. There
are rats and bugs. It was a nightmare and I was in a controlled situation. I can’t imagine living it.”
⁶

What
Times
readers and viewers of the film did not know is that the conditions described by Mr. Bacon were created for the movie and did not apply to Henry Young; Young was never confined in an underground vault; there were no rats in the cells at Alcatraz; and prisoners were not shackled, even in disciplinary segregation cells. Nor was Young tortured by “a sadistic warden” wielding a straight razor. A multitude of other events and claims in the film—including Young’s suicide two years after the trial—were also false. This film, however, continued the standard media portrayal of Alcatraz prisoners and their keepers. That the film could claim it was based on a true story, and the most prestigious newspaper in the country could call it “semi-true,” are indications of how deeply the Alcatraz myth has been ingrained in American culture.

More than a dozen movies have been made about Alcatraz since it opened and along with countless documentaries on cable television, the image of Alcatraz as “Hellcatraz” and “America’s Devil’s Island” has been sustained.
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Not only has the prison retained its highly negative reputation, it has even become a symbol of harsh and inhumane punishment in other parts of the world. High-ranking American pilots in the Vietnam era who became prisoners of war, for example, used the label “Alcatraz” to describe a prison where “die-hard resisters” were subjected to particularly brutal conditions.
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More recently, the
New York Times
reported that prisoners confined “at a notorious jail in Smrekovnica north of Kosovo’s capital Pristina . . . were beaten, stripped of their identification cards and given little to eat. A sign there read: ‘Welcome to Alcatraz.’”
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Behind the myths created and spread during its service as a federal prison and a tourist attraction is another Alcatraz. It is a place where prisoners deprived of the ability to make decisions about the most basic aspects of their lives nevertheless coped, adapted, and struggled to retain their sense of self; where men followed an ethical code, steadfastly refused to inform on their fellow inmates, and presented a common front against the government’s attempts to exert maximum control over their behavior. It is also a place where a hard-nosed warden who survived a vicious attack in the mess hall made an exception to the rules to allow his attacker to receive the materials the man needed to continue his education in prison. In the real Alcatraz, inmate-on-inmate violence was relatively rare, especially
compared to modern prisons, and guards did not employ corporal punishment. Although the inmates confronted an extraordinarily severe regimen, they were not pressed into chain gangs or subjected to the inhumane living conditions and physical abuse suffered by many of their counterparts in some state prisons of the time, and they had more freedom to move about and more congregate activities than those locked up in today’s supermax prisons.

The main purpose of this book is to tell its story—or rather, the many stories that make up an authentic history of Alcatraz—as accurately and completely as possible. In relating this history based on hard facts and primary sources, the book tries to answer the most basic questions about America’s most notorious prison and its effects on the men imprisoned there: How did the prisoners adapt to the isolation, deprivations, and restrictions they had to endure? Did they succumb psychologically or did they emerge with their minds and spirits intact? Did the isolation and time alone prompt them to review their lives, consider the costs and benefits of their criminal careers, and decide to lead more law-abiding lives, or did the strict controls and punitive conditions leave them bitter and more determined that ever to thwart government authority?

Many other books have been written about Alcatraz, some succeeding in accurately relating parts of the prison’s history (see the bibliographic essay). This book differs from all others in several important respects. No other book draws on so many firsthand experiences—interviews with one hundred inmates and guards, almost all of whom are now deceased—or on the results of a federally funded sociological study that took many years to complete. No other author has been given such unrestricted access to the records of federal criminal justice agencies or received the assistance of federal probation offices—circumstances that combine to make this the only book about Alcatraz to document the long-term careers of Alcatraz inmates, from their criminal activities before confinement on the Rock to many years after their release.

Most important, no other book takes as its starting point the crucial fact revealed in the research and unknown to other authors: that a significant number of Alcatraz’s habitual and incorrigible convicts proved the experts wrong and stayed out of prison after they were released. During the era of the “public enemies,” Alcatraz confined the most desperate, dangerous, troublesome, and highly publicized inmates in the federal prison system—all of them shipped there precisely because no one held any hope of their being rehabilitated or reformed—and provided them absolutely nothing in the way of psychological counseling or remedial
programs. Yet two-thirds of these men emerged from the experience to lead constructive, law-abiding lives. Explaining this unexpected, counterintuitive result is the key challenge that lies at the heart of this book.

Finally, this book does more than chronicle lives, describe events, and explain the culture of a famous prison—it raises questions relevant to the ongoing debate about the value and role of maximum-custody, minimum-privilege prisons. Alcatraz was this country’s first supermax penitentiary, and since its closure it has become the prototype for similar prisons established over the past two decades in thirty-six states, and for the indefinite administrative segregation regimes established at its federal successors at Marion, Illinois, and Florence, Colorado. Like Alcatraz, these prisons have attracted controversy. The question today, as it was with Alcatraz, is whether a penal regime that attempts to control inmate behavior as completely as can be allowed under the prohibition in the U.S. Constitution against “cruel and unusual punishment” is justified and necessary, or whether it is too harsh even for the nation’s most dangerous felons and most prolific prison hell-raisers. That doing time at Alcatraz did not cause significant, long-lasting mental health effects for most of its inmates or preclude their successful adjustment in other prisons and later in the free world, adds a new dimension to the debate: that a penal environment designed specifically for punishment, incapacitation, and deterrence does not negate the possibility of reform or rehabilitation even when the government does not expect or plan for that outcome.

Shortly after the First World War many Americans came to believe that rampant crime was a defining element of their society. Attention soon centered on the gangster, the paragon of modern criminality and eventually the subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, scores of novels and plays, and more than a hundred Hollywood movies. The media gangster was an invention, much less an accurate reflection of reality than a projection created from various Americans’ beliefs, concerns and ideas about what would sell. . . .

The rhetoric of crime gained a resonant new term in April 1930 when the Chicago Crime Commission released a list of the city’s twenty-eight most dangerous “public enemies.” Journalists across the country published the list, adopted the term, and dubbed the notorious Al Capone “Public Enemy Number One.”
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On April 27, 1926, Illinois Assistant State’s Attorney William H. McSwiggin was in a Cicero saloon drinking beer with five other men—a former police officer and four gangsters, one of them a man he had unsuccessfully prosecuted for murder a few months earlier. As McSwiggin and the others walked out of the bar, Al Capone and his men opened up with machine guns. Several members of the group jumped to safety behind an automobile but three men, including McSwiggin, were hit. As Capone and his henchmen roared away, the survivors placed the wounded men in an automobile and drove off; later in the evening, McSwiggin’s body was dumped along a road outside of town.
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The murder and the suspicious associations of the assistant state’s attorney created a sensation in the press. While state attorney Robert Crowe and other officials promised a relentless search for the killers, the
Chicago Tribune
concluded that the perpetrators of McSwiggin’s murder would never be identified, citing a “conspiracy of silence among gangsters and
intimidation of other witnesses after a murder has been committed.” Concerning the latter factor, the paper claimed, “anyone who does aid the public officials by giving facts is very likely to be ‘taken for a ride.’”
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In response to the
Tribune
story, Crowe announced that his office had established that Al Capone was not only responsible for the slaying of McSwiggin but had been behind the machine gun used in the assault. Capone and the survivors of the incident had disappeared, but Crowe ordered raids on Capone’s speakeasies, clubs, and brothels. Gambling equipment and large quantities of liquor were destroyed, some prostitutes were arrested, and several ledgers were confiscated. Capone was charged with the murder, but when he appeared in court, an assistant state’s attorney withdrew the charge due to lack of evidence. The judge then dismissed the case and Capone strolled out of the courtroom. Despite the impaneling of six grand juries, no other arrests were ever made and the case focused public attention on the inefficacy of local and state government.
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Chicago in 1926 was in the midst of what has been called “the lawless decade.” The great national experiment, Prohibition, had given rise to the bootlegging business, creating an environment in which organized crime could thrive. Rival gangs ran prostitution, gambling, and extortion rackets along with their illegal liquor sales. These enterprises generated vast sums of money, and the gangs battled for control of distribution networks and territory.

At the same time, local government and law enforcement agencies were rife with corruption. Criminal entrepreneurs, emboldened by the presence of police officers, judges, and politicians on their payrolls, made little attempt to hide their activities, and violence spilled over into the streets for all to see. Gangs would abduct victims on the street and take them “for a ride” or drive past targets in their homes or businesses or while they were walking on the street, guns blazing from several cars.

Gang warfare in Chicago had been heightened by the arrival of Capone, a New York thug who took over the leadership of the Johnny Torrio organization and worked to expand its influence. Between 1922 and the end of 1925, gangsters killed 215 other gangsters in Chicago, and police killed 160. In the first ten months of 1926, 96 gangsters died in gang conflicts in and around Chicago, and police killed 60 more. Between 1927 and 1930 more gangsters died, “many of them on city streets.”
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