by David Ward
Legislation formally creating the Federal Bureau of Prisons was approved by Congress and signed by President Hoover on May 14, 1930. The bill transferred to BOP jurisdiction a U.S. Public Health Service hospital located at Springfield, Missouri, to house federal prisoners needing medical or mental health treatment and authorized the construction of a new penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, several regional jails and minimum-security camps, and a facility for treating drug addicts. A women’s prison and several youth reformatories were also incorporated into the new Bureau.
In 1930 the federal prison system consisted of three penitentiaries established in 1891 by the Three Prisons Act: two were big, walled, maximum-security penitentiaries that held several thousand inmates each—in Atlanta, Georgia, and Leavenworth, Kansas—while the smaller former territorial prison located on McNeil Island in Washington state housed medium-security inmates from the territories of Alaska and Hawaii and federal law violators from the western states. The wardens were appointed according to their connections to political patrons, particularly United States senators. Guards received relatively low pay, no uniform training program existed, and promotion was based on currying favor with higher-ups.
As a result of having only three regional prisons and no system in place for classifying inmates, the populations in each penitentiary included first offenders and career criminals, compliant prisoners and men whose bizarre conduct would in later years call for confinement in mental wards or—beginning in the mid-1930s—in the special federal prison hospital at Springfield. New federal criminal laws related to drug trafficking, interstate automobile thefts, and Prohibition violations, passed between 1910 and 1920, had produced serious overcrowding. But most problems in the three prisons reflected the presence of untrained, incompetent, corrupt, and poorly supervised personnel. The challenge for the new superintendent was to establish strong central control over these prisons and professionalize their staffs.
During the Hoover administration, penal policies and their underlying philosophies were fair game for reexamination, but various countervailing forces pushed in different directions. In general, there was a strong tendency to shape penal policy to better reflect the emerging literature in the social sciences that emphasized the importance of both rehabilitating offenders and deterring criminal behavior by “instilling respect and fear in the minds of those who have not the intelligence and moral instinct to obey the law as a matter of conscience.” Bates was committed to the rehabilitation side of the equation, while others in the administration, sensitive to the public outcry over rampant crime, focused on deterrence and advocated a tougher stance. Anticipating the reasoning that would characterize penal policy in the next administration, President Hoover recognized that it might be necessary to “segregate degenerate minds where they can do no further harm.”7
In a meeting with the president, Sanford Bates was asked which was more important: deterring members of the general population from engaging in crime, or reforming prisoners. His judicious reply was
Why not do both, Mr. President? Why not so contrive the punishment of the 90,000 that it will be both deterrent and constructive? A prison need not be dirty, or lax in its discipline; or managed by grafting officials, or overrun with idle men, to exercise a deterrent effect. Men can be punished, and at the same time their bodies can be rid of disease and their minds cleansed of delusions. They can be kept busy at productive tasks, and they can be given opportunities for education and betterment without weakening the sanctions of the law.8
As the reorganization and expansion of Bureau facilities proceeded during the early 1930s, however, philosophy took a back seat to immediate, on-the-ground reform. The problems described in the previous chapter—escapes and incidents involving staff corruption and incompetence—embarrassed Bates and his associates and made it clear that better selection, training, and supervision of new employees were urgently needed. Poorly run federal prisons were inconsistent with the president’s plan for the federal government to provide the states with a model of an efficient and professional prison system. The escapes in particular underscored the need for a prison to house the government’s most disruptive prisoners and sophisticated offenders—a prison that would be more secure than any existing federal penitentiary.
THE DECISION TO ESTABLISH A “SUPER PRISON”
In early 1933, as Franklin Roosevelt began his first term as president, most Americans believed that in spite of all that President Hoover had done to fight crime and strengthen and reform the federal criminal justice system, the country was still under siege by organized criminal gangs. Violence, graft, and corruption plagued many urban areas, and bank robbery rates were at historic highs. But the problem was also perceptual. In the grip of the Depression, Americans had a psychological need to focus blame for their misery and anxiety on something they could visualize and understand, and that something was increasingly the “public enemy.”
The despair felt across the country that gangsters and thugs were free to prey on the public, was recognized in Washington, D.C.:
Oppressed by a sense that prohibition and the depression were draining American society of discipline and order, popular culture sought to explain the national plight as the work of a new breed of criminal. Once the image of the public enemy had been pieced together from the careers of the most famous criminals of the day, the myth took on a life of its own, persuading Americans that the authorities had neither the brains nor the courage to cope with what seemed to be a calculated rebellion against society.9
With the exploits of the gangsters and outlaws described in the previous chapters as real-life fodder, the press, Hollywood, and pulp-fiction authors constructed an image of a new breed of sophisticated criminal who preyed on law-abiding citizens. Because it undermined Americans’ faith in the ability of the federal authorities to maintain order and protect them, the public-enemy myth (and its underlying reality) posed a serious problem for President Roosevelt, his new attorney general, Homer Cummings, and Director Bates. Americans increasingly saw the government as impotent, lacking the intelligence, courage, resolve, or competence to maintain the rule of law. Incidents such as the June 1933 Union Station massacre in Kansas City, in which three police officers and an FBI agent were killed and two agents were wounded, only solidified the sense of government weakness.
Roosevelt recognized this perception as a threat to the government’s effort to restore the trust of citizens. According to historian Richard Powers, the president and Attorney General Cummings crafted a kind of public relations campaign with the explicit goal of promoting “a ‘new psychology of confidence’ in the law and in society’s ability to defend itself.” As part of the campaign, Cummings wove into each big criminal case “a continuing Justice Department saga, an adventure cycle that demonstrated the solidarity of society, the strength of the law, and the potency of the government.” While other federal agencies waged their battles against the Depression, the Justice Department under Homer Cummings “was giving the country a war against an even more dramatic villain, the public enemy.”10 With Cummings’s encouragement, the media used martial metaphors when reporting on all the big cases, portraying each as a battle in an ongoing confrontation that the federal authorities, under the leadership of Attorney General Cummings, would ultimately win. One popular magazine explained the situation as understood by the typical citizen: “This is war time. The Roosevelt administration is fighting against fear, against depression, against moral decay. It is fighting against the octopus of crime.”11
When the Urschel kidnappers were apprehended and put on trial, Cummings could claim a major victory in the federal war on crime. Cummings’s assistant Joseph Keenan made certain that the jury in the Urschel case knew what was at stake in realizing this victory:
We are here to find an answer to the question of whether we shall have a government of law and order or abdicate in favor of machine gun gangsters. If this government cannot protect its citizens, then we had frankly be
tter turn it over to the Kellys, the Bates, and the Baileys . . . and the others of the underworld and pay tribute to them through taxes.12
While Cummings and J. Edgar Hoover could convincingly claim they were doing their part, they were skeptical about the ability of the other arm of the Justice Department—the Bureau of Prisons—to contain and control gangsters and hoodlums once they were apprehended and prosecuted. By early 1933, senior policy makers in the Roosevelt administration and FBI Director Hoover—but not Sanford Bates and his associates in the Bureau of Prisons—were convinced that the federal prison system needed a new type of penitentiary. According to Richard Powers, an
idea that Cummings appropriated from popular culture was the “super prison” for the super criminals his “super police” were catching. Spectacular escapes like Frank Nash’s from Leavenworth made a new maximum-security federal prison a sensible idea, but the proposal’s chief attraction to Cummings was its publicity value. The public wanted proof that the government was getting tough, so adopting the popular notion of an American Devil’s Island was a made-to-order way of giving the country what it wanted.13
CHOOSING ALCATRAZ ISLAND
In its search for a site for the new prison, the Department of Justice had to consider the public-relations impact of the location in addition to practical concerns. Islands were a focus at the very beginning because they dramatized isolation and conjured up a powerful image of real punishment in the minds of citizens. Testifying before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, New York’s former police commissioner reflected the widespread sentiment that isolation on an island was indeed a good idea for the most dangerous felons:
Exile the hardened criminal, isolate them. They could raise products for their keep: work outdoors in excellent climate—and they would not swim thousands of miles in an effort to escape. If prisons can be conducted humanely so could an exile base be conducted.14
The press was also supportive of an island prison. The same magazine writer who deplored the grip of the “crime octopus” called for
a new form of punishment that will terrify all potential wrong-doers and take out of circulation those individuals who by the repeated perpetration of crime, have proved that they deserve no place in normal society. . . . America needs an isolated penal colony if it is ever to shake off the tentacles of the crime octopus.15
If an island site appealed to the citizenry, it also provided the federal government with ready solutions to the problems of secure incarceration. Cummings suggested to Assistant Attorney General Keenan that a special prison for racketeers, kidnappers, and gangsters be located “in a remote place—on an island, or in Alaska so that the persons incarcerated would not be in constant communication with friends outside.”16
The government’s quest was solved when the War Department offered the Department of Justice its prison on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. Since the Civil War, this military prison had been a depository for assorted misfits and societal problems, including military offenders and deserters, “secessionists” and supporters of the Confederacy, Indians who made trouble for the government either in the Indian wars or on reservations, foreign stowaways found on American ships, and conscientious objectors during World War I. For a short time in April 1906, prisoners from San Francisco’s Broadway Street jail had been removed to the island when the great earthquake struck the city but did not damage the Rock.17
Initially, Bates rejected the military prison as too small and too far from Southern California, from where he expected most of the commitments for a West Coast federal penitentiary to come. In addition, the island had no source of fresh water. But despite these drawbacks, Alcatraz offered several advantages. Since it was already being used as a prison, it could be retrofitted and opened relatively quickly. Its proximity to major cities and ports facilitated transport of prisoners. And it was an island, separated from San Francisco by 1.4 miles of cold, choppy water. Bates was forced to admit that it was a viable choice for the new federal prison, and on October 13, 1933, the secretary of war approved a permit for the Department of Justice “to occupy Alcatraz Island as a maximum security institution for hardened offenders, including racketeers and incorrigible recidivists.”18
The attorney general saw in Alcatraz the potential for a dramatic and visible symbol of federal authority. Press releases and speeches issued from Cummings’s office emphasized the extraordinary security measures that would be necessary to hold the nation’s worst desperadoes, and how Alcatraz would fit the bill. According to Powers,
the country was demanding that criminals be given new and more impressive punishments for their crimes. Setting up Alcatraz satisfied this demand, and gave American popular culture a new symbol of the ultimate penalty short of death.19
The choice of a small, rocky island for a new high-security prison was invested with powerful cultural connotations. In late 1933, the concept of an isolated island prison conjured up the image of France’s infamous Devil’s Island. One of several islands in the penal colony of French Guiana devoted to punishment, Devil’s Island had become well known during the Dreyfus affair, in which it came to light in the mid-1890s that French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongfully convicted of treason and imprisoned on the island. It had become even more notorious in the United States in 1928, when American author Blair Niles published Condemned to Devil’s Island, a novel based on a manuscript by an actual penal colony convict, René Belbenoit, who related its horrors—forced labor, starvation, dysentery, hookworm, malaria, “blistering sun, deluges of rain,” and, for those who attempted to escape it, months of solitary confinement. The entry of Devil’s Island into American popular culture was then assured when a “talkie” movie version of the novel, written by screenwriter Sidney Howard, appeared in November 1929 as Condemned.20
When the federal government announced the establishment of a special escape-proof prison for the country’s worst felons on an island—a prison to be devoted only to punishment and incapacitation—the press and the public were quick to seize on the analogy to Devil’s Island.21 This harsh image had diverse implications. On the one hand, it dovetailed nicely with the Justice Department’s effort to restore faith in the government’s ability to protect its citizens and provide appropriate punishment for the country’s worst lawbreakers. On the other hand, the connection planted itself so deeply in the popular consciousness that Alcatraz became enduringly associated with deprivation, severe punishment, strict discipline, and psychological torture. As a result, the Bureau of Prisons for decades would have to counter the popular view that its new penitentiary was an American version of Devil’s Island.
While the country at large welcomed this new form of punishment, the same was not true of the prison’s future neighbors. Attorney General Cummings’s rhetoric produced cries of outrage in the city of San Francisco. Led by Police Chief William J. Quinn, dozens of civic groups and organizations protested the location of this new home for the “the criminal element” in San Francisco. They argued that the new Golden Gate Bridge, then under construction, would add thousands of citizens and visitors to those entering and leaving the Port of San Francisco. Those living on the hills surrounding the bay complained that the prison would dominate their views. To these segments of public opinion, this highly negative and frightening symbol of the Justice Department’s determination to win the war against the gangsters was an unwelcome intrusion. (It is hard today to imagine how the little island of Alcatraz could “dominate” views of the bay, so it is likely that citizen concern was not about personal safety, but about real estate values and civic image.)
Chief Quinn claimed that federal inmates, unlike military prisoners, would be serving longer sentences and would thus have a greater incentive to escape. He noted that a seventeen-year-old girl had been able to swim from Alcatraz to the shore in forty-seven minutes, “arriving with long easy strokes, not even panting.”22 Quinn also speculated that confederates in small boats could pick up inmates who got off the island
into the bay, that the island was too small for any industry, and that “there would be nothing for the prisoners to do but wander around in the sunlight in rather pleasant surroundings.” Bay Area citizens, said Quinn, were of the view that “these gangster criminals do not give up their operations even though incarcerated. . . . They continue to keep in contact with their associates . . . who congregate in surrounding territories . . . and create a police problem.”23
The San Francisco Chronicle printed editorials opposing the prison, pointing out that twenty-three military prisoners had escaped from Alcatraz over the years, many by stealing boats or swimming. In January 1934 the Chronicle suggested in an editorial that instead of a prison, a peace statue be erected on the island.24
To assuage the concerns of the citizens of San Francisco, a statement was issued assuring them that Alcatraz would “not be a Devil’s Island” in their beautiful bay. It would be an integral part of the federal prison system, operated “in conformity with advanced ideas of penology.” The prison, it promised, would “house but a mere handful of men,” and would employ “all modern scientific devices . . . to insure the restraint of the inmates.” It concluded that the establishment of the new federal prison would offer “a splendid opportunity for the citizens of San Francisco to cooperate in a patriotic and public-spirited manner in the Government’s campaign against the criminal.”25 Despite these assurances, the citizens of San Francisco were not prepared to cooperate in the federal government’s campaign, and they would complain about the prison until it closed thirty years later.