by David Ward
THE RATIONALE FOR THE PRISON-TO-BE
When top Department of Justice officials decided to open a new, high-security federal prison they had an explicit penological rationale in mind. They reasoned that if the small number of convicts in the federal prison system who could not be controlled by “ordinary discipline” were segregated in a special institution, the inmate population at large would benefit. The presence of these troublesome convicts at Leavenworth, Atlanta, and McNeil Island forced wardens to operate these prisons as though every inmate was trying to escape, operate a strong-arm gang, or engage in illegal activities. It followed that removing these inmates to a separate prison would
permit the Federal Prison System to enter a period of rapid penological progress, unimpeded by the presence of inmates who would have forced its programs to remain geared to the lowest common denominator in terms of custody, privileges and regimentation.26
The Bureau of Prisons put forth this characterization of Alcatraz in its official communications, and the press accepted it readily. The Saturday Evening Post, for example, in a December 1933 editorial used all of the Bureau of Prison’s arguments to praise the establishment of the new island prison:
Unfortunately, in many prisons the treatment and discipline of [the] majority must be geared down to the small but worst element of stick-up men and killers. It is this element, rather than the majority of prisoners, which seeks to escape and which commits so many violent crimes after escaping. . . . To classify, segregate and isolate them not only narrows down the problem of preventing escapes, it makes more feasible the task of reformation of a great mass of potentially useful human material.27
This logic resonated with the public and criminal justice officials alike. It became so fixed as a commonsense principle that it would later be the leading justification for Alcatraz’s supermax successors at Marion, Illinois, and Florence, Colorado.
The rationale for the establishment of Alcatraz in large part predetermined the prison’s character. Since Alcatraz would hold America’s most dangerous and prominent felons, biggest escape risks, and worst prison troublemakers, security and control had to be the highest priorities. Because the problems presented by these convicts arose in part from their reputation and influence in the underworld, they would have to be effectively isolated from the outside world and from other inmates. And perhaps most important, because the men to be incarcerated on Alcatraz were officially labeled “habitual and incorrigible,” resources and staff time would not be wasted trying to rehabilitate them. Designed for “irreclaimable,” “recidivistic,” “irredeemable” offenders, the new prison would exist solely to punish, incapacitate, and deter others.
The deterrence aspect of Alcatraz was important to Department of Justice officials. The idea was that inmates at other federal prisons would look at the harsh, punitive regime on the island and think twice about landing there themselves by assaulting or threatening staff, attempting to escape, participating in strikes and protests, or refusing to follow rules and obey orders. Similarly, it was hoped that the general public would see in Alcatraz a lesson about the harsh consequences of engaging in criminal conduct. This reaction, the essence of deterrence theory, is what comparative literature scholar John Bender calls “imaginative sympathy” for the unfortunate souls in prison. Bender cites the eighteenth-century philosopher and economist Adam Smith to explain the deterrent effect of imprisonment:
By the imagination we place ourselves in [the prisoner’s] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him. . . . He must be made to repent and be sorry for this very action, that others, through fear of the like punishment, may be terrified from being guilty of the like offense. The natural gratification of this passion tends, of its own accord, to produce all the political ends of punishment; the correction of the criminal, and the example to the public.28
If the designers of Alcatraz considered “deterrence theory” open to question, these doubts were not evident in the regime they constructed for the new prison. With other federal penitentiaries seen by many as too lax, they were determined to make Alcatraz project an image of punishment that was certain, prolonged, and unpleasant.
Therefore, while the BOP worked to quell local opposition and moved ahead with plans to transform the former military disciplinary barracks into a facility suitable for its new mission, Bates and his assistants had to reconcile themselves to the fact that the prison envisioned by Homer Cummings and J. Edgar Hoover would be at odds with their progressive vision of penology.
This philosophy—based on the idea that criminal activity was rooted in social ills and that all criminals were redeemable—had deep roots. The first penitentiaries in the United States, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and Auburn Prison in upstate New York, were created to improve on the existing congregate jails, in which all types of offenders were thrown together, and where disease and a wide range of illicit activities, including prostitution and alcohol consumption, proliferated.29 The new penitentiaries isolated offenders from the idleness, drunkenness, and violence of their home communities as well as from other lawbreakers so that they could face the failure of their former lives, undergo remorse, learn self-discipline and good work habits, and in this way achieve a psychological rebirth that allowed them to emerge from years of solitary confinement industrious, sober, and compliant.30
In 1871 the landmark National Congress of Corrections moved further in this direction when it codified an emerging model of penal practice based on a conception of criminals as persons lacking certain social, educational, and work skills. These deficiencies, it was argued, should be remedied through education and remedial programs. An offender sentenced to prison for “correctional treatment” was to be subject to periodic assessments to determine when he was suitable for release. Education and application of the “medical model” of diagnosis, treatment, and cure made rehabilitation, rather than punishment and deterrence, the central purpose of imprisonment.
During the Progressive Era, various measures and reforms were instituted, all with the intention of substituting rehabilitation for punishment as the purpose of imprisonment. These included probation, parole, the classification of prisons and prisoners, the establishment of courts and penal institutions specifically designed for juvenile offenders, and efforts to reduce brutal treatment by guards and various forms of corporal punishment.31
Although none of these reforms and innovations had fully achieved its intended effect, support for the correctional treatment model was strong among federal prison administrators and academic criminologists during the 1930s. When the Department of Justice proposed a prison that would completely forsake the essential progressive idea of rehabilitation in favor of punishment and control, Sanford Bates believed that this concept was a step backward. In January 1933 he wrote to the attorney general, arguing that the goal of rehabilitation should not be abandoned at Alcatraz:
Fundamentally I would object to putting too much emphasis upon the irreclaimability of the men who are to be sent to this institution. We should, of course, welcome an additional institution because of the opportunity for further classification that it gives us but our prison system is built upon the hope that every man has the germ of reform somewhere in him. . . . I confess, however, that I do look with misgivings upon the effect which the establishment of this institution, which is becoming notorious, will have upon our whole prison system. After all, there are but very few of the prisoners of the type of “Machine Gun” Kelly. Most of them are more of the reformable type and our work should really be judged by what we can do for these men and not have as its apex a penitentiary which is admittedly reserved for those whom we announce as hopeless and irreclaimable. I cannot predict what the effect would be upon the group of convicts who are sent there under this designation. It seems to me that we are unduly magnifying the difficulty and responsibility of the Warden every time we emphasize
the danger of the men who are to be sent there. While we do have a group of desperate men, so does every State penitentiary and while I approve separation into institutions of maximum security for these men I cannot help recording my belief that this small number of men should not be brought into such prominence in the public imagination that the fear of them should blind people to the importance of the Federal prison work as an opportunity for rehabilitation.32
The following summer Bates inspected Alcatraz, assessing it as “a local prison to be used generally by prisoners on the Pacific coast.” Bates told the attorney general that he had not carefully examined the prison for “its ultimate suitability for desperadoes alone.” He allowed that the prison “gave the impression of strength. The fact that every prisoner is in a cell alone and that the whole institution is compact and easily guarded was noted.”33
Having raised his objections, Bates reluctantly accepted the reality that the attorney general and J. Edgar Hoover were determined to establish the island prison as a place whose purpose was to punish and incapacitate a special population of inmates. In a book he wrote after leaving his post as Bureau director in 1937, Bates seemed to agree with the official justification for Alcatraz—accepting the idea that segregating “irredeemable” inmates in a maximum-security prison improved the likelihood of reform for inmates at other federal prisons:
There were in the existing penitentiaries a small but dangerous group of prisoners, all guilty of serious crimes, who would not accommodate themselves to the ordinary discipline, and who made it difficult to apply the routine measures of education, rehabilitation, etc., to the larger proportion of inmates. Some prisoners just cannot get over the temptation to escape, and continually plot to accomplish this end. Others are known as agitators, “Big shots” and disturbers, and still others by an incurable disposition to disobey the rules and make frequent trips to the solitary. The Bureau of Prisons had for a long time felt the need of an institution with maximum security defenses where this group could be safely quartered.
To Attorney General Cummings goes the credit which has been so freely accorded by press and public for the conception and establishment of the new federal Penitentiary on Alcatraz.34
If he had been less diplomatic, Bates might have used the word “blame” instead of “credit” in assigning to Attorney General Cummings the responsibility for Alcatraz. But this statement identified two generally separate groups of prisoners for whom Alcatraz was intended—a small number of notorious gangsters and offenders from the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and a large number of troublemakers and escape risks not known to the public.
Although the purpose of the prison-to-be on Alcatraz was set down by the attorney general, aided and abetted by J. Edgar Hoover, Bureau of Prisons’ officials had the authority to determine how that purpose would be realized. In shaping the general outlines of how the prison would operate, Bates and the assistant director, Austin MacCormick, had available to them the negative examples of existing federal penitentiaries and major state prisons. Acutely aware of the overcrowding, poor management, and inhumane treatment that characterized these institutions, they were careful to avoid replicating these problems at Alcatraz.
Bates and MacCormick were familiar with the state of the nation’s prisons not only because they ran the federal prison system, but because they had both been members of the Wickersham commission that President Hoover established in 1929 to examine and then recommend improvements in penal policy and practice.
The commission’s reports, submitted in 1931, had listed a wide range of problems with the penitentiaries of the day, beginning with the aging, often decrepit physical structures in which inmates were housed. Exacerbating the conditions of confinement were poor sanitation, lighting, and air circulation, extremes in temperature, and overcrowded living space. Large numbers of prisoners were housed in giant cell blocks comprised of cells as small as seven feet long, three feet three inches wide, and six feet seven inches high; most cells had solid doors that limited ventilation and outside light and did not contain sinks with running water or toilets. In many prisons inmates were doubled or even tripled up in cells intended for one man, with slop buckets containing human waste emptied only once every twenty-four hours. Many cells were drafty, encouraging physical ailments such as rheumatism. The practice of changing underclothing and sheets only once each week and allowing only one shower in the same period was widespread. Medical services and hospital facilities for prisoners who became ill or were injured were generally inadequate.
The commission had been even more critical of disciplinary measures. Along with an extensive set of rules that proscribed and prescribed inmates’ behaviors to an excruciating degree were various policies and practices used to encourage or enforce compliance with these rules. When these inducements failed to produce obedience and maintain order, the rule breakers were disciplined, often in ways that, in the eyes of the commission, crossed the line from mere punishment into brutality. All prisons used some sort of solitary confinement to punish and isolate troublemakers, but this often meant locking them in a cramped, dark, unfurnished cell for indefinite periods on a diet of bread and water with no more than a pail for sanitation. In addition to this disciplinary segregation, many prisons employed other harsh, punitive measures. Some inmates were forced into a standing position for the work day, handcuffed to their cell bars, or locked standing in cages in which they could not move. In more extreme cases, chained or cuffed inmates were sprayed with streams of cold water, beaten with fists, clubs, or rubber hoses, or whipped with straps. These practices were often against official policies but tacitly condoned by prison management; the commission suspected that their extent and frequency were higher than what was acknowledged by wardens. A 1929 survey by the National Society on Penal Information—on which the commission relied heavily in its study—noted “the existence of barbarous methods of discipline that were unknown or denied.”35
In addition, there were the management problems cited earlier. Many wardens and their chief assistants were political appointees, not trained to manage prisons or prisoners. Guards were often poorly trained and incompetent, and lax supervision allowed widespread corruption that included the sale of favors, smuggling, and black-marketing. In some state prisons, the general inmate population was largely managed by proxy: across the bay from Alcatraz, convict bosses at San Quentin ran the shops, offices, and cell blocks, keeping their fellow convicts subdued in exchange for special privileges such as single cells, tailored denims, meals from the guards’ kitchen, and freedom from much of the usual prison routine.36
The Wickersham commission had concluded that penal confinement was for the most part transforming lawbreakers into hardened criminals rather than law-abiding citizens. If the mission of America’s prisons was to protect society by reducing criminal behavior through reformation, the prisons were failing—and the harsh punishment so prevalent in the criminal justice system bore much of the blame.37
As members of the commission, Bates and MacCormick had supported this conclusion, and in their capacities as heads of the federal prison system they put their beliefs into practice. Both disapproved of inhumane and brutal physical punishment, and they demanded that it be eliminated where they encountered it. In the federal prison system generally they sought to phase out or limit traditional punitive measures such as solitary confinement, bread and water diets, and the practice of handcuffing prisoners to the bars of a cell in a standing position.
In the case of Alcatraz, Bates’s and MacCormick’s views prevailed in their effort to eliminate forms of corporal punishment they believed to be inhumane. The planners for the new federal prison agreed that physical abuse would not be part of the regime. Punishment at Alcatraz would not involve the gag, the powerful spray from cold-water hoses, the lash, the rubber hose, or beatings by club-wielding guards. No convict would be allowed to boss other inmates in return for favors from the staff. Nor would heating, sanitation, food, and medical care be withheld o
r manipulated as punitive measures. Instead, Bates and his associates sought to create a sophisticated regime that would punish the wills and the spirits, but not the bodies, of the prison’s residents. The complaints of inmates who came to the new penitentiary over the next thirty years emphasized the psychological pains of imprisonment.38
ESTABLISHING A MAXIMUM-SECURITY,
MINIMUM-PRIVILEGE REGIME
The directives from the Department of Justice were clear and unambiguous. Alcatraz was to have an unprecedented level of security, isolate its inmates from the outside world, and greatly restrict their opportunities for interaction even within the prison. All prisoners were to be treated the same, regardless of their notoriety or prestige among the inmate population. The Justice Department’s requirements for Alcatraz were ambitious:
• Escape must be virtually impossible. Convicts who had tried to escape other prisons using force or violence, along with those who had contrived escapes using ingenuity and subterfuge, must find opportunities for escape completely eliminated.
• Inmates must be deprived of opportunities to foment riots, organize resistance to the regime, or perpetrate violence against other inmates or staff.
• The power and influence of big shot racketeers and gangsters must be eliminated, not just reduced. The message has to be clear—no inmate could be allowed to conduct business from prison or enjoy any special privilege while confined.
• The flow of information into and out of the prison must be strictly controlled to inhibit rumors and to deny not only to the inmates but also to the press any basis for stories that would further glamorize “the criminal element.”
• The regime must represent real punishment. Inmates whose criminal activities earned them the “menace to society” label must finally be held accountable for their actions.
The Bureau of Prisons set down a variety of policies to accomplish these ends and create what it announced would be a “maximum-security, minimum-privilege” institution, a regime to be described in detail in the following chapter. Director Bates and his assistant directors realized that controlling personnel was vital in the control of prisoners. Thus, an important component of the Alcatraz regime would be the requirement that all administrative personnel live on the island: the warden, deputy warden, captain, lieutenants, the chief medical officer, the chief steward, industry supervisors, important maintenance staff such as plumbers and electricians, and most of the guard force. In spite of the social isolation that this policy entailed, the BOP expected no recruitment problems because federal employment in the early 1930s offered more security than most other jobs. In addition, working at Alcatraz would include inexpensive living quarters with great views of the bay.