Escape from Alcatraz

by J. Campbell Bruce

  When the inmate culinary workers—waiters and kitchen crew—walked off the job, Swope manned the pots and pans with administrative personnel, supervised by stewards flown in from other prisons. He put guards to waiting on table. This was a severe blow to morale, as the guards felt that waiting on the convicts at meals put them in a menial position and thereby diminished the inmates’ respect.

  “For years,” says a former guard, “the officers’ morale at Alcatraz has been low and the turnover so high that we called it the West Point of the California penal system—a man took a job at Alcatraz and after a few months of training ‘graduated’ into a job at a California prison. Alcatraz guards get the same salary as those at Seagoville, the minimum-security institution in Texas that, compared to Alcatraz, is a gentlemen’s home; or the same pay as those at some nice camp. At Alcatraz the guard puts in more time—he has to take the boat home, and if he misses one he’s lost an hour. The climate’s terrible. In and out of that fog and wind, he’s sick oftener, and the fog presents a constant risk. The nights are eerie, inside or out. The wind starts up at 1 P.M. and blows continuously till 2 A.M., so strong it shakes the lights that stick out, like lights over billboards, around the edge of the roof to floodlight the prison walls.”

  Low morale may account in part for the behavior of individual guards. Some years earlier a veteran guard was showing a recruit on the night shift how to shake down the coveralls worn by the inmates at the shops. He found papers in one garment and, muttering “Contraband!” started to tear them up.

  “Wait!” said the recruit. “That fellow put a lot of sweat into those papers.”

  “Sure did. Takes sweat to plot a break.”

  “Plot? They’re exam papers—math.”

  “ ’Rithmetic? You’re nuts. Look: x’s and y’s. A code!” He ripped the papers to shreds. “That’ll learn the bastard not to leave codes around.”

  The onetime recruit, recalling the incident, said: “The convict apparently took the papers to study during the rest periods. If the guard actually thought the algebra was a code, he should have turned the papers in for deciphering.”

  Guards, like other people, can be subject to human emotions. This was demonstrated the very same year, the year of the Battle of Alcatraz, that Warden Johnston set up his special course to make war-veteran rookies aware of the adverse roles of guard and inmate, and the need for unremitting vigilance. Along came the holiday season and Guard Oscar Eastin, washed by a wave of yuletide compassion for those in solitary on sauceless spaghetti while the world gathered round the wassail bowl to sing carols, played Santa Claus to the convicts in the dark cells of D Block. On Christmas Eve he clandestinely distributed gifts of sweets and tobacco, verboten at any time in isolation. To Jimmy Groves, a black, perhaps because as a military prisoner he had once been in the service himself, the guard was bountiful beyond the wackiest dreams of any Dark Hole tenant: a pack of cigarettes, two tins of snuff, a box of chocolates, and a half pint of whisky, bonded. Pity again engulfed the guard on New Year’s Eve, a time to celebrate, and behind the solid steel door of his dark cell Jimmy Groves could fittingly ring in the new year: packs of cigarettes and gum, a plug of chewing tobacco, another half pint of bonded whisky.

  There was some question as to just what led to the exposure of the guard’s holiday largesse. Groves, a known snitcher, was reported to have squealed on his fairy godfather. Others say that the officer on the graveyard shift in those first hours of 1947 was startled to hear a quavering “Auld Lang Syne” issue from Groves’s cell. Opening the vision panel, he was assailed by an aroma more common to a saloon than solitary. He found Groves reeling with the blind staggers, for once not attributable to the pitch blackness.

  Eastin, a former Colorado hard-rock miner who had served with the Seabees during the war, seemed astonished at the fuss kicked up. He told newsmen upon his arrest: “I just did it out of the goodness of my heart. I wasn’t the only guard who slipped stuff in to the cons. I didn’t know it was against the law—just against prison regulations.”

  Queried about this, Warden Johnston said an investigation had not turned up any other smuggling.

  Eastin pleaded guilty that fall and drew six months in the county jail for being, as he put it, “a big-hearted boob.” After passing the light sentence, the federal judge remarked to reporters that Eastin was not the only one after all who had engaged in the practice. Queried again, Warden Johnston admitted that several other guards had been caught smuggling and that one had been dismissed.

  Other elements besides a soft heart lead to smuggling. A guard who in an unwary moment does the slightest favor for a convict lets himself open to pressure. Says a former guard on that score: “A con is always watching for a chance to get a grip on you. That’s why we had to be careful never to offer a con a cigarette, not even a light. In talking to a con you worried when something was said that brought a smile or a laugh. When that happened, I’d look around to see if some other guard saw it: he might figure there was wheeling and dealing gong on. If a con got the slightest hold on you, you were under his thumb. That’s what turned McCandless from a guard into a convict.”

  Lee McCandless, forty-one, an Alcatraz guard, was picked off The Rock one April day in 1951, indicted for smuggling inmates’ letters out and money in, and sentenced to five years. He was sent to San Quentin to serve the term rather than a federal penitentiary on the theory that he might, unwittingly, tip off custodial secrets to prisoners who might be candidates for The Rock.

  The first hint of the guard’s smuggling operations came when a surprise, minute shakedown of the prison turned up a dollar bill stuffed into an electrical conduit in the basement. This led to a quiet investigation because inmates at Alcatraz, where there are no commissary privileges, are not permitted to have any money, and the dollar bill obviously had been stashed there by a convict. A beneficiary of McCandless’s illicit operation eventually snitched, and McCandless admitted he had smuggled in as much as $130 at one time.

  Why would a convict want the money if he couldn’t spend it? “To hoard, in case he managed to escape,” says the ex-guard. “Then he wouldn’t have to pull a robbery.” Convicts, he revealed, had more ingenious hiding places than conduits. They could conceal bills of large denomination in the tubular shoelaces issued them; or with infinite patience they would remove the tobacco from a cigarette, slip in a bill, repack tobacco in the ends, then keep that cigarette well back in the pack. Guards could not possibly take the time to inspect regularly every shoelace or every cigarette in every pack.

  When McCandless was caught, Warden Swope frankly told the press: “We couldn’t understand why money was being smuggled in, unless it was to bribe somebody. If money is brought in, other things could be brought in too—a gun, or narcotics.”

  The ex-guard, at Alcatraz then, says McCandless was paying tribute. He owed his job to a convict, and for a curious reason. It points up the risk of indebtedness for a favor. McCandless, taking his physical, was given a vial for a urine specimen. He went into the men’s room. A convict was mopping up. After desperate, doubtful moments, McCandless blurted: “I got to urinate in this and I can’t—I mean, I’ll flunk out. They’ll find sugar in it.” The convict volunteered. “He was hooked,” says the ex-guard, “before he put on a uniform.”

  A rookie guard usually pulls a night job outside, on patrol or in a tower, to keep him out of the reach of crafty convicts until he gains experience. Even there he is not safe from insinuating gestures. “Guards on evening posts work a straight shift, and the culinary crew packs their lunches,” says a former officer. “I used to check their lunch boxes as they moved out to their posts—to make sure some new guard wasn’t getting an extra piece of pie, or maybe a steak sandwich when the others got bologna.”

  Warden Swope retired at the start of 1955 and Paul Madigan took over. Madigan, among the stalwarts who opened The Rock, found his career by chance: “I needed a job during the Depression and became a guard at Leavenworth. I had
no idea I would like it.” A stout, bald, ruddy-cheeked, genial man with glasses, Madigan chewed gum silently when not smoking a pipe. A devout Catholic, he joined the convicts at Sunday Mass in the chapel. Walking through the cellhouse or the shops, he stopped to hear out any inmate, chewing gum behind a closed mouth as he bent an ear. He became known among the convicts as “Promising Paul,” but it was an amiable sobriquet; his willingness to listen, the promise to look into a matter, counted. He weighed circumstances, as an anecdote of his earlier days illustrates.

  This was the era of The Rock when a convict would be slapped in the dungeon for leaving a scrap on his plate. An officer then on the staff relates the incident: “A prisoner left half a baked potato on his plate. I didn’t blame him: it was burnt so bad I wouldn’t have eaten it either. But rules were rules, especially in those days, and I told the prisoner I would have to report him. I took him to Lieutenant Madigan’s desk, just outside the mess hall. I told Madigan he had left half a potato but explained why. Madigan said hi-ya to somebody passing by. I thought he hadn’t heard and repeated the report, and he waved and nodded to somebody else. I finally got the pitch, led the prisoner away and told him to high-tail it on to his cell.”

  It was Madigan, a captain, who talked four desperate prisoners—Cretzer, Shockley, Kyle, and Barkdoll—out of a break attempt in 1941, when they had trussed up him and three other officers. Cretzer was later killed in the Battle of Alcatraz, and Shockley executed for his role in that mutiny.

  Madigan’s years at Alcatraz led him to believe in its necessity as a segregation facility. As warden, he told an interviewer: “Our primary function is to house men who have proven difficult to handle in other federal prisons—the hostile, the assaultive, the troublemakers. The men who come here have less prospect for rehabilitation than the men in the rest of our prison system.”

  The economics of Alcatraz seemed to bear him out; at least, insofar as any effort at rehabilitation there went. The major share of every dollar went into custodial care: 80 percent. Of the total cost per prisoner, only four cents went into education, chiefly for University of California Extension courses and books for the library.

  Even so, the iron-bound regimen of the old days had been softened a little, and any prisoner who earned enough in the shops to afford it could help rehabilitate himself by the purchase of a musical instrument or art supplies. This easing-up process began in the latter years of Johnston’s wardenship, continued through Swope, was expanded by Madigan.

  Art first came to The Rock in the middle forties when John Paul Chase and several other convicts, encouraged by Warden Johnston, bought paints and began daubing at canvases. It received a boost in the fall of 1946 when George Harris, a San Francisco muralist, volunteered to teach a Saturday afternoon class. Three years later eleven Harris pupils had become proficient enough to enter thirty-four works—oils, watercolors, gouaches, drawings—in San Francisco’s annual Open Air Art Show in Union Square. The city’s Art Commission, sponsor of the festival, had strict orders not to identify the artists, but the grim Rock and all its crushing discipline could not stifle the pride of creation: each offering bore a signature, self-effacing initials or the full dignity of a name. The Alcatraz exhibit drew the biggest crowd, and on the opening day nine pictures brought the convict artists a total of $200. A bank president bought an oil by a bank robber. Alfred Frankenstein, distinguished art critic, saw no budding Rembrandts: “All one can say about the best of these artists is that he has another 192 years to spend on The Rock.” But he did commend this double-century termer whose paintings, signed O.L.D., depicted mountains, valleys, and hunting scenes “in a highly eloquent if primitive style.” He also cited another Harris student as particularly capable, a William Grump, who caught the somber pattern of wire as seen from the inside looking out, on a canvas entitled “How Far to the Bridge? Five Years.” The work that most astonished the patrons was a portrait of Leopold Stokowski, the conductor, copied from a photograph with, as one critic put it, “all the meticulous skill that had landed the artist, a counterfeiter, in jail.” Seven Rock artists, among them Chase, later offered their work at a Cancer Society benefit sale in San Francisco. Again nostalgia—a landscape bore the inscription “Sunset on the Farm”—was the dominant theme.

  Harris, understandably pleased with his eager pupils, commented: “A couple, at least, would never have gotten mixed up with crime if they’d taken up art. Some will never have any trouble making a living as commercial illustrators, if they get a chance. One or two could even become fine artists if they wished.” His students’ paintings decorate the large, airy office of the warden.

  Warden Swope in 1950 brought a new diversion to The Rock—movies, every other weekend, in the chapel upstairs over the administration offices, reached by a stairway in the cellhouse. By now the work week had been reduced to five days and the men given an extra recreation period in the yard on Saturday afternoons. On movie weekends—mostly western and musical-comedy films, now and then a war picture, but never a gangster or sexy show—half the general population attended on Saturday, the remainder on Sunday afternoon. Only prisoners in good standing—out of D Block—were granted the privilege.

  In 1955, another welcome innovation came. Radio outlets were installed in the cells at the suggestion of Director Bennett. The convicts were permitted to tune in on two approved stations devoted primarily to light music. They could lie on their cots, adjust their headsets and listen until lights out at 9:30—later, for major-league night baseball broadcasts. This inevitably led to wagering, and it was common such nights to hear a bet offered, and taken up, at adjacent cell fronts: “A hundred the Giants beat the Dodgers.” Not a hundred dollars, but pushups; and it became apparent on weekends in the yard who were the losers. Sometimes the bet was a hundred tailor-made cigarettes. They were now issued three packs a week.

  Introduction of radio had little effect on the convicts’ reading habits. They still continued to peruse books—an average of seventy-five to eighty a year—as they listened; usually, light escape literature such as western novels, but volumes on philosophy and other intellectual fare were also well thumbed. Convicts could order books, or censored magazines, from a mimeographed library catalogue. They returned a book, along with a request for a new one, by leaving it on a wheeled table as they entered the mess hall for breakfast. Books and magazines were delivered to the cells during the morning by inmates on temporary library assignment. (The library now has about 15,000 volumes.)

  University of California Extension has had a contract with Alcatraz since the thirties but in the past several years, for reasons unexplained, very few Rock inmates have enrolled, or been permitted to enroll. Some attribute the decline in Extension courses, once quite popular at Alcatraz, to the competition of radio, but the drop in enrollment has been fairly recent. University officials privately wonder about this in view of the great, continued success of their program at San Quentin where inmate students have gone forth, upon parole, to pursue careers that in many cases have won them distinction.

  With the easing of restrictions came a lengthening of visits convicts could enjoy with a relative or now even a close friend—almost two hours a month. (To some, this is still a punitive limitation, as a relative may have to travel thousands of miles.)

  Warden Madigan inspired a new kind of bloodletting at Alcatraz. In April of 1959 fifty inmates each donated a pint of blood to the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in San Francisco, credited to the account of the U.S. Public Health Service, whose medical staff at the Marine Hospital, San Francisco, is on call for emergencies. The blood donors enjoyed an equally rare social hour in the prison hospital, with sandwiches, coffee, lemonade, and cakes.

  For some years the inmates had received a Christmas booty of six candy bars and two pounds of jawbreakers. Madigan added six cigars in 1957, two years later made another concession: any convict with two dollars in his account could buy a two-pound box of chocolates. He also created a new holiday spirit by providing spec
ial menus on Christmas and Thanksgiving, except for those in D Block.

  All this did not mean that Alcatraz had been converted into a super-maximum-security country club, nor that violence had come to an end. In 1953 a score of convicts kicked up a fuss that quickly flared through the blocks. Warden Swope told the press: “It was caused by race prejudice. They demanded the right to be permitted to select their own cells. They challenged the authorities of the institution and created a disturbance,” indicating that, as always, the Department of Justice won. A few whites objected to living in a cell next to, or even opposite a black, and the disturbance they created was perhaps, outside of the Battle of Alcatraz, the worst bedlam that ever shook the cellhouse walls. They shouted curses to the rafters, banged tin cups on bars, beat their iron beds on the concrete, slammed hinged table tops against steel walls. They broke up toilets and washbowls, they set fire to papers and bed sheets, they even flung flaming garments into the corridors. And in the end, the challengers of the authority of the institution, not the Department of Justice, won. Thereafter, the black convicts were segregated in the bank of D Block facing Broadway. The tiers across the way, the inside of C Block, were set aside as a quarantine section for the temporary confinement of new prisoners.

  Blacks were now segregated in the dining room by the simple process of ringing out inside B Block as a group. Racial segregation was even extended to the showers: whites first on Tuesdays, blacks first on Saturdays, the order reversed each week. At the movies, the black prisoners were directed to sit in the back rows.

  Nor had the prison administrators experienced the last of their headaches over court petitions. An unusual incident occurred in February 1954, this time not the suppression of a petition but the denial, by an odd means, of a convict’s right to argue it in court. Prison officials had long maintained that no convict was ever sentenced to Alcatraz, nor ever paroled from there; he was “seasoned” at some other prison, later transferred back to that prison for discharge. This particular convict was booted right off The Rock.