by David Ward
The Washington Post published a commentary entitled “The Rock, a Monument to Society’s Failure,” which cited the crime wave of the early 1930s as the source of the “public hysteria, or vindictiveness” that produced the prison. Alcatraz was, in the writer’s view, “a place of horror and blood . . . the logical pinnacle of the ‘eye for an eye’ penal system . . . last week the blood and horror found their way to the front pages again.”45
The Philadelphia Bulletin asked, “What About Alcatraz? Is It America’s Shameful Devil’s Island?” Two prominent academic criminologists, Negley K. Teeters and Harry Elmer Barnes, added their voices to the tide of criticism. They reminded Bulletin readers that they had long been critical of the “lock psychosis” that they contended would negatively impact the prisoners. In Barnes’s view, “sending a man to the island has the effect of building up his prestige in his own mind, and to his cronies. He believes he has to become a real desperado to live up to his reputation.” According to Teeters, “Alcatraz represents sterile penology, it smacks of the 19th century.” He was “chagrined that no humanitarian in this country has come out against the glorification of the Rock and studied brutality toward the convicts there. Guards and prisoners live in a vicious twilight state of mutual hate.” The two penologists also criticized the cost of keeping a prisoner at Alcatraz—$3,127, compared to $500–700 a year at other federal prisons. They concluded, “Progressive prison men deplore the existence of Alcatraz. It persists, a horrible contrast to the otherwise humane and scientific philosophy that permeates the federal system.”46
The title of an editorial in the Milwaukee Journal posed a similar question—“Is Alcatraz a Relic of Medievalism?”—and then indicated its view in its subhead: “The Island Rock, Where Worst of the Bad Men Are Confined for Punishment, Not Reform, Has Been Severely Criticized as Modern Torture Chamber.” The jurors’ call for an investigation following the Henry Young trial in 1941 was cited as evidence of harsh treatment, along with the claim that confinement in the dungeons on a diet of bread and water, shared with rats, was the punishment for rules violations.47 To its critics, Alcatraz appeared to stand in opposition to the arguments for humane custody and the rehabilitative aims of a profession now calling itself “corrections.”
As always, there was a contrary perspective advanced mainly by editors of newspapers in smaller cities and towns. The Reno Gazette claimed that “The Alcatraz affair—instead of showing the unsuitability of that prison—has effectively demonstrated that the institution is ideally located and well-equipped as a ‘cage’ for incorrigibles.” Articles memorializing the deaths of officers Miller and Stites appeared in many newspapers, and one asserted that “just as surely as though they had worn GI uniforms, they died like soldiers in the defense of their country . . . the nation’s enemies are both within and without.”48
New Hampshire’s Manchester Union warned that “the silly and dangerous chatter about coddling prisoners” should not lead to laxity in prison discipline for “men who regard reform as an evidence of weakness.” According to the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, the guards and marines responding to the escape “had but one duty—to take the prisoners alive or dead at whatever cost; to kill them, if necessary, like rats in a cage.” One big city paper, the Detroit Free Press, also took a hard line, editorially commenting: “It can only be hoped that when the escape attempt is finally subdued the score shows a large number of dead among the prisoners, for no man locked up at Alcatraz has any business being alive in the first place.”49
In San Francisco, the battle rekindled objections to using the island for the nation’s most notorious penitentiary. The San Francisco Examiner sent a telegram to U.S. Senator William F. Knowland urging “the elimination of Alcatraz . . . as [a] menace to [the] population in [the] light of recent riots.”50 The Civic League of Improvement Clubs and Associations wrote to its congressional representative, asking that the prison, “inhabited by the most desperate criminals in the United States, many of whom are murderers who should have been executed instead of being supported by the tax-paying community,” be removed from the metropolitan area. The league further expressed concern that due to the prison’s proximity to the mainland, a mass escape with consequent danger to the citizens was a distinct possibility. An editorial in the Examiner agreed.
What can be more conducive to hatching an escape plot in the mind of an embittered felon, serving out virtually his life than the location of Alcatraz? He sees the city’s skyline before him, continually. It is so near—the Freedom, Life, and Lights. Days, months, he lives with it. It looms up, a constant mirage before him. . . . A prison’s chief purpose is to change criminals into useful men. But Alcatraz, with its history of bloody revolts, appears only to aggravate criminality into hopeless vengeful savagery. . . . The Alcatraz penal institution is a blot on the bay. By now federal authorities should realize this—and transfer it elsewhere.51
Four members of California’s congressional delegation met with U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark to appeal for the removal of the penitentiary. They characterized the May uprising as evidence that the prison constituted “a constant menace to Bay Area citizens.”52
Despite the storm of criticism following the battle, the Bureau of Prisons did not seriously consider the possibility of closing Alcatraz (that would not happen until 1963). But the battle did produce one major change—the ending of the Johnston era. James Johnston had weathered many controversies at Alcatraz, but this time he could not evade responsibility. Most Alcatraz employees placed the blame for the decline in security at the prison, and for the confused handling of the attempted breakout, at Johnston’s feet—and Bureau of Prisons headquarters shared this view.
Johnston resisted the assertion that there were problems at the prison. Trying to look on the bright side, he pointed out that the breakout had failed; that the inmates had been able to obtain only one rifle, one pistol, and seventy-one rounds of ammunition; and that Coy and Cretzer had been unable to release Whitey Franklin, the man they most wanted with them. Even while the break was in progress, Johnston resisted the idea that he or any of his staff was responsible:
My preliminary investigation . . . indicates that there was not the slightest dereliction of duty, negligence, or lack of courage on the part of any officers . . . the capture of guns was one of those incomprehensible and diabolically clever plots that no one believes could possibly have been anticipated.53
Despite the warden’s claims, Bureau of Prisons officials were unhappy with his management style. On the anniversary of the revolt, Director James Bennett wrote to Johnston, citing a report by a Bureau jail inspector that listed “organizational and personnel weaknesses” at Alcatraz:
1. When the Inspector, who was unknown to Alcatraz personnel, arrived on the island, no effort was made to establish his identity or examine his credentials.
2. Cells were full of “junk” such as guitar strings, medicines, and even a “pet mouse sleeping in a pencil box in a nest of cotton . . . bread and water had been provided and a home made run-around wheel.”
3. Officers were “appeasing the inmates” by not reporting rules violations. Officers that did report prisoners found their laundry “not properly done or torn.”
4. Officers were allowing inmates to go into the employees’ residential area to do maintenance, plumbing, and electrical work—jobs that should only be undertaken by members of the staff.
5. No annual systematic reports on inmate progress or lack thereof were made. The absence of such basic information would leave no record for future administrators to use in making decisions such as transfers or to measure the effectiveness of certain policies. The same point applied to personnel records.54
A few days later, Bennett received a lengthy report from C. J. Shuttleworth, who had been deputy warden when Alcatraz opened and, after working at other federal prisons, had returned to the island in October 1946 to serve as acting deputy warden in relief of the injured E. J. Miller. Shuttleworth informed Be
nnett that Alcatraz had become “quite loose.” All but one copy of the original sheet of rules for inmates written in 1934 had disappeared; no new rule book had been developed. There were no written orders for the various officers’ posts. There was no daily report of admissions to or releases from either solitary confinement or disciplinary segregation, no record of prisoners admitted to or released from the hospital, no reports by officers leaving their watch of “anything unusual” happening to alert those coming on duty.
Shuttleworth noted that the prison had been unable to fill twenty-three guard positions, which negatively affected operations. Officers were spending too much time on one post, such as the officer who had had the same assignment for more than nine years. At roundtable meetings with the warden, officers had stopped speaking up or making suggestions, “because there was too much of an effort on the part of administrators to talk them down and not correct the situations.”
In regard to the inmates’ practice of sabotaging the laundry of employees they did not like, Shuttleworth reported that his own laundry had been torn up and nothing had been done to remedy the situation. Sixteen or more prisoners were assigned as cell house orderlies with insufficient work, allowing them to “run loose around the building all day doing as they pleased.” Shuttleworth reduced the number of orderlies to six and they were locked up as soon as they completed their work assignments. He said he found one prisoner who had never been assigned or forced to work during the two years he had been on the island. When the disciplinary committee removed privileges from inmates, Deputy Warden Miller allowed them to go to the yard and attend movies before their period of punishment had expired. The tower next to the powerhouse was of no use, Shuttleworth reported, but Warden Johnston would “not stand for it being vacated.”
Beds in cells were not neatly made up—the blankets were simply pulled up covering many items that should not be in the cells. According to Shuttleworth, the cells contained so many “books, magazines, musical instruments, sheet music, drawing pads, easels, paint brushes and finished paintings and other things for so-called study purposes” that it was “physically impossible for any of the officers to thoroughly search the cells.”
This harshly critical report concluded with a list of dishonest, incompetent, and “burned out” employees who Shuttleworth felt should be removed, including “several employees who are not now nor ever have been fully qualified for such work.” The prison doctor, he said, should be replaced by a psychiatrist. Most notable of the employees who had been at Alcatraz “too long,” he said, was James Johnston:
While Warden Johnston is still in apparent good health, still talks a good game and puts up a good front for a man going on 74 years of age, he is not the man he was in the early years of Alcatraz’s existence. In fact, I know that he does not know by any means everything that is going on. Some effort was even made to keep him from knowing what is going on.55
In his usual polite manner, Johnston asserted that the director must be receiving faulty or incomplete information because the problems cited either did not exist or had been resolved despite the strain on personnel due to the presence of many workmen engaged in making structural changes within the cell house. Given the Bureau’s critical assessment of his administrative ability, it was not surprising to anyone on the island that the Department of Justice found a way to remove Johnston as warden by means of a promotion to the United States Board of Parole. On April 30, 1948, almost two years to the day after the battle of Alcatraz began, James A. Johnston retired.56
In addition to replacing Warden Johnston (and assigning a new deputy warden and a new captain), Bureau headquarters decided it was advisable to modify the policy that had denied journalists access to Alcatraz since its opening. In August 1947 Willard Edwards of the Chicago Daily Tribune was allowed to “lift the steel curtain of secrecy which has concealed America’s ‘Devil Island.’” Claiming that he had been “allowed to mingle freely with the 248 inmates,” and that Warden Johnston “kept nothing back,” Edwards included not a single comment by a prisoner or employee in his series of eight articles published in the Tribune. After reading the articles, James Bennett and his associates must have wondered why they had kept the press away from the island for so many years. Edwards commended “the cool confidence” and “calm supervision” of the warden and he praised Alcatraz officers as “stronger, braver, smarter than the officers at other prisons” while dealing with “the nation’s most vicious and degenerate.” According to Edwards there was “no brutality, no stark existence leading to ‘stir-craziness,’ no cruel or unusual methods of punishment, no deprivation of food or clothing or exercise for those abiding by the rules . . . during long hours of touring the island and it’s structures, the reporter witnessed only the most orderly functioning of a well rounded institution.”57
Following this praise of the work of the Bureau of Prisons in keeping the meanest felons—or “human TNT,” as Edwards described the inmates—away from the public, the Bureau received numerous requests (many stated as demands) that reporters from other news organizations be allowed to visit the island.
In June 1948 another journalist, Albert Deutsch, gained access to the prison but his articles were somewhat less charitable to the federal prison system. He was not allowed to talk with any inmate or employee, other than brief conversations with several senior administrators, including the new warden, Edwin Swope, who had been on the island for only a month. Like Edwards, Deutsch employed dramatic rhetoric to describe “the Dreaded Isle of Dead-Enders in Crime,” but he brought a perspective different from that of the Chicago Tribune reporter. He contended that spending $6 per day for each prisoner (much higher than the average for other federal prisons) to run a prison with as many staff members as inmates (106 guards and 148 additional staff to supervise a population of 245) was putting too much money into the “wrong end” of the criminal justice system:
The Rock, rising like a ghostly fortress out of the fog of San Francisco Bay, is a grim monument to our perverse genius for concentrating science at the wrong end of the criminal road. One is overwhelmed by the bewildering array of scientific gadgets—including the latest in electronic devices—mobilized for the single purpose of keeping some 245 human beings caged on a five acre island. . . . As you pass through the intricate maze of steel gates and cell blocks you can’t help thinking how much more sense it would make if we expended as much time, money and brains in preventing delinquency as we do providing cages for the dead-end debris of adult crime. If we did that there would be no need of an Alcatraz to remind us of our social failures.
Deutsch also claimed that “years of highly restricted movement” at Alcatraz, and being “out of contact with the normal world,” had reduced many convicts to “a peculiar condition resembling feeble-mindedness” that could be compared to “a sort of living death.” He claimed that the chief medical officer, Dr. Richard Yokum, supported this conclusion and added that Dr. Yokum estimated that “about one out of every four Alcatraz inmates is suffering from psychoneurosis.”
Based on his one-day visit, Deutsch accepted the warden’s statement that the inmates were treated humanely: there were no “sadistic, brutalizing individual beatings and tortures found in many penal institutions.” Although Deutsch reported that the prison provided a “splendid industrial program” and good food, he concluded, “Personally, I’d rather be dead than a longtime Alcatraz inmate.”58
At that point in the prison’s history, neither the Bureau of Prisons nor Alcatraz’s wardens could respond with any evidence to counter claims about the effects Alcatraz was having on the prisoners’ mental health—or address the related question of how inmates fared after they were transferred to other prisons or when they returned to the communities they left. Part 3 of this book deals with these matters, based on data that Alcatraz employees and inmates and federal officials never had. But first, part 2 examines more closely the daily lives of inmates, the ways in which they resisted and coped with the restricti
ons placed on them, and the details of the lives of inmates who were notable either for their celebrity or for their extraordinary responses to confinement on the island.
PART II
LIFE ON THE ROCK FOR RESISTERS
AND PUBLIC ENEMIES
10
RESISTANCE AND ADAPTATION
The daily existence of Alcatraz inmates as it was designed for them by the Bureau of Prisons, and as it was managed and enforced by the prison administration and custodial staff was discussed in earlier chapters. Here we turn to the related topic of how inmates reacted to and coped with the regime that was intended to regulate every aspect of their lives. Given the actions of Alcatraz convicts in chapters 4 through 9, it is easy to come away with the impression that some of these men were desperate and violent, and a few, mentally unbalanced. But in fact most prisoners stolidly did their time. They held strong beliefs about right and wrong, and had the same needs for social interaction and faith in the future as law-abiding people on the outside. Although the purpose of the Alcatraz regime per se was not to deny these elements of humanity to the inmates, the control exercised over them did in large part have this effect.
As indicated by the title of this chapter, inmates’ responses fell into two main categories—resistance and adaptation. Resistance involved denying or seeking to minimize compliance with the order imposed by the prison or trying to reduce the influence of the regime on daily conduct. Active resistance reflected some level of conscious conflict. Adaptation meant seeking to utilize or assimilate elements of the imposed order to a form acceptable to the self and converting resources available to make life there more comfortable. Active adaptation involved some form of conscious accommodation.
These categories are conceptually distinct but overlapping. Resistance was for many inmates an important part of adapting, or coping. But some forms of resistance had little to do directly with coping, and some modes of coping did not involve resistance. The inmates responded to their circumstances by working the system, resisting the controls, and rearranging their mental lives to find ways to meet their personal needs.