Alcatraz

by David Ward

  The relatively small number of assaults among inmates included James Lucas’s stabbing of Al Capone with a pair of scissors in the barbershop and a handful of attacks in which the weapons were knives, a workshop scraper, a two-pound horseshoe, and a baseball bat (the latter two in the recreation yard). In another incident two prisoners attacked a third in the shower room. But four conflicts had lethal results. One of these—the murder of Rufus McCain by Henry Young in December 1940—has already been recounted because of the importance of the resulting trial. In the next section we briefly describe the three other homicides.

  DEATH AT THE HANDS OF FELLOW INMATES

  Snow vs. Herring

  On the morning of July 15, 1942, Cecil Snow and Maurice Herring began fighting in the shower room. According to Snow and the one inmate witness, Herring, the more powerful of the two, attacked Snow, knocked him to the floor and, while straddling him, kept hitting him in the head. Snow struck back with a knife he had begun carrying in response to threats from Herring, hitting Herring in the chest and the thigh. The stab to the thigh turned out to be the fatal blow because it severed an artery. Herring rose and staggered away until he collapsed due to loss of blood; thirty minutes later he was pronounced dead in the prison hospital.14

  Snow was tried in federal court for murder and pleaded self-defense. Several inmates testified that Herring was aggressive and hot-tempered, and that Herring had been heard calling out from his cell telling Snow that he intended to kill him the next morning. Snow was acquitted.

  The jury may have excused Snow’s conduct, but the custodial staff made its own judgment and assigned its own penalty. A good time forfeiture hearing was held, Snow lost 1,700 days (more than four years) and was locked up in disciplinary segregation for nearly three years. During that time he filed a series of writs claiming “cruel and inhuman treatment” to no avail. Snow accumulated thirty misconduct reports on the Rock and was conditionally released directly from the island. Due to the loss of good time he had served fourteen years of his fifteen-year sentence.15

  Greene vs. Branch

  Another killing occurred on November 14, 1945. On the previous evening Claude Branch and Ralph Greene, both District of Columbia prisoners, had a “verbal altercation” during which Greene “called Branch a ‘rat.’”16 The next day the two were admitted to an area in the barbershop next to the shower room under the main cell house to practice musical instruments. Branch was carrying a putty knife blade in anticipation of trouble but did not have an opportunity to use it before Greene grabbed a metal stand used to hold barber’s clippers and struck Branch in the head. Greene ran up the stairs to the cell house door, where the officer allowed him to exit; he walked over to stand at the door to D block, knowing that was his next destination.

  Branch was taken to the prison hospital, where he appeared to respond to treatment but two days later his condition deteriorated, and he died during the evening of November 16. During his periods of consciousness he refused to talk about the fight.17

  Alcatraz officials supported the prosecution of Greene on a charge of murder. Several prisoners testified as defense witnesses that the deceased (Branch) had threatened the defendant and “had a bad reputation.” According to Jim Quillen, this murder was a result of homosexual pressure:

  Branch was a notorious homo and he was always trying to turn somebody out. He tried to turn Greene out; Greene was a real nice little kid. He had been after Greene for quite a while and Greene kept telling him, “Get off my back or I’m going to hurt you.” Branch came down one day when Greene was working in the barbershop—either working in the barbershop or waiting for a haircut—and it started again. They used to have something like a tripod that they used to hang the clipper between the two chairs and Greene picked that thing up and just whaled Branch across side the head and he died. I didn’t witness it, but I knew what had gone down before and I testified to what Branch did. Branch was a guy that hit on everybody. People used to tell him, “Someday somebody’s going to kill you.” Finally Ralph did.18

  Greene claimed self-defense and once again a jury found an Alcatraz defendant “not guilty.” Greene was locked up in D block and three days later he was taken before a good time forfeiture board. He protested that his action in defending himself had been found to be “justified” in federal court and thus he should not be punished and if he was, it was because he was “colored.” Deputy Warden Miller responded that Greene was being charged with assault, not the murder of another prisoner. The prison court then took away 240 days of good time Greene had accumulated and sent him back to disciplinary segregation, where he remained for four and one-half years.19

  Grove vs. McMiller

  In the late afternoon of March 20, 1946, “several colored men were heard quarreling in the first galley in the cell house.” James Grove was said to have been angered over the attempt of two other prisoners to place a floor polisher in a cell where he stored the supplies he was using to paint sections of the cell house. Grove and another prisoner were having “hot words” when Ben McMiller stepped in front of the other inmate. Grove stabbed McMiller in the abdomen with a seven-inch kitchen knife.20

  An officer arrived on the scene and escorted McMiller to the hospital. Despite the captain’s effort to get a statement about the altercation, McMiller, holding to the maxim during the gangster era that you never help the government, refused to name his own killer; he said only that he “just fell and hurt himself.” His wound did not appear serious at first, but when he went into shock two doctors from the Marine Hospital were called to the island. Anticipating surgery, they brought blood and blood plasma, but McMiller died shortly after the surgery was completed.

  These three cases did not assume the dramatic proportions of the Young case because the combatants were not prominent figures in the convict population who had been involved in a highly visible relationship and their trials did not involve efforts to try the regime.

  No interracial elements complicated these confrontations, since all three murders involved victims and killers of the same race. In two of these cases, however, there were convict allegations of jealousy, deteriorating homosexual relationships, or violent resistance to a homosexual advance. These cases should not be construed as evidence that homosexuality was common at Alcatraz. Especially when compared to contemporary prisons, overt homosexual behavior, both consensual and forced, was very rare. Among the 508 inmate files reviewed for this project, only nine references to homosexual conduct during the years 1934 to 1948 were discovered—this despite the fact that explicit sexual activity was a violation of prison rules and that homosexuality, whether admitted, observed, rumored, or inferred, was always recorded in inmates’ files. In addition, no Alcatraz or Bureau of Prisons document or any of the more than one hundred former prisoners and staff members interviewed for this project reported knowledge of a single incident of forcible homosexual rape.

  It is not surprising that so few men were observed or reported for engaging in homosexual behavior, given the separation of prisoners in single cells, the limited time and number of places that allowed for congregate activity, and the high level of surveillance. But the most important factor was that homosexuality was regarded as weakness and “perversion” in the convict culture, and even a suggestion of homosexuality evoked contempt from most prisoners and all guards.

  The four incidents of assaults on staff recorded during the prison’s first fifteen years was an extraordinarily low number, given the characteristics of the inmate population and the tension that existed between prisoners and guards. In 1935, convict James Walsh stabbed Officer Clarence Preshaw with a pair of scissors in the nose, the cheek, the abdomen, and the chest while two other prisoners held Preshaw’s arms from behind. Walsh said that he was upset because Preshaw was “picking on him.”21 As described earlier, Burton Phillips attacked Warden Johnston in the dining room in 1937.

  The only other assaults involved one officer who was attacked on two separate occasions by two dif
ferent prisoners. In a March 1939 incident, guards King and Amende were collecting library books from prisoners in D block when Rufus Franklin—locked up for the 1937 escape attempt in which Officer Cline was killed—challenged the officers to come into his cell to get his books. As they opened the cell door, Franklin struck Amende in the left eye, causing “a slight bruise.” In response, “Officer Amende took a hold of Franklin . . . and then Officer King hit Franklin with his billy, rendering him unconscious.”22 In the other incident in November 1940, Officer Milton Amende was attacked, again, this time by William Martin, receiving multiple contusions to his face.

  The explanation for such a low incidence of violence in a prison for violent offenders lies in part in the limited time inmates had to interact with others outside their cells combined with the constant surveillance of a large custodial staff. But this factor alone cannot explain the relative lack of violence between prisoners and between prisoners and staff. Compared to other prisons both then and now, the direct causes of the conflicts that typically lead to violent confrontations were largely absent at Alcatraz. At other prisons, gambling and “wheeling and dealing” in contraband were widespread, due to the existence of commissaries and the relative ease of smuggling contraband into and out of prison introduced goods and items not made available to all prisoners. Engaging in activities related to these items created an inmate economy and produced disputes over indebtedness and the theft or robbery of goods. At Alcatraz, the various high-security measures, the fact that no inmate was allowed to receive money from the outside, the absence of a commissary, strict rules about and frequent shakedowns of cells, and the provision of unlimited amounts of tobacco and food combined to eliminate gambling and economic activity and the arguments and fights they produced.

  With convicts unable to accuse others of cheating, stealing, or failing to pay gambling debts, there were fewer reasons to get into fights. When arguments that precipitated violent confrontations did erupt, their causes were more likely to seem trivial: arguments over baseball or handball games, making too much noise in the evening, and not quieting down when asked. Some assaults occurred for reasons unknown to other prisoners, and several involved attacks by men regarded by both prisoners and staff as mentally ill; in one of these incidents inmates helped officers subdue Joe Bowers, who was acting “crazy.” There were also occasional minor fist fights that reflected anger and resentment over the past actions of rap partners, former friends, or cellmates in other prisons.

  Another important but subtle factor that contributed to the low level of violence was that after a few years on the Rock, most prisoners tended to “settle down.” Convicts recognized that they were at the end of the line of penitentiaries and would be at Alcatraz for an unknown number of years. Their psychological and physical distance from life in the free world prompted them to live in the here and now and focus on earning or retaining the few privileges that allowed them to enjoy some of the positive aspects of prison life such as a good cell location, a good job, and yard activities.

  We now turn to a form of resistance that took up a disproportionate amount of the prison staff’s time, resources, and patience—actions by a small proportion of inmates who lived by their own code of conduct.

  11

  OUTLAWS AMONG OUTLAWS

  INDIVIDUAL RESISTERS

  An inmate at Alcatraz who acted alone, on his own initiative, to disobey rules or defy authority was an individual resister. While many inmates engaged in individual resistance at a low level to derive its psychological advantages without accruing the disciplinary costs, only a relative few resisted regardless of the costs. Still fewer practiced this kind of resistance over long periods of time. Here the focus is on these persistent individual resisters, a small group of men who carried on prolonged battles with the staff and against the regime. These prisoners accumulated twenty, thirty, forty, or more misconduct reports each and spent not weeks or months but years in disciplinary segregation and solitary confinement cells. They paid for their determination not to go along with the program with years added to their stay on the island because of lost good time and significant postponements, or any serious consideration, of parole or conditional release.

  Their resistance took many forms—refusing to work and obey orders, fighting with other prisoners and with staff, and going on hunger strikes that if prolonged led to forced feeding. Many of these men drafted myriads of protest letters to federal judges, elected officials, and the U.S. attorney in San Francisco; they also filed writs to protest their convictions, their sentences, and the conditions of their confinement. For some of the most prominent convicts in this group, writing itself was a form of resistance that resulted in numerous articles, short stories, books, even poetry about life in prison and life in general.1

  The names of the island’s most famous gangsters are not among the persistent individual resisters. Al Capone, George Kelly, Harvey Bailey, John Paul Chase, Basil Banghart, and Floyd Hamilton did their time quietly, only participating in a strike or some short-lived protest to show solidarity with their fellow convicts.

  Resisting individually was very different from participating in organized resistance in which organizers and key participants collaborated and encouraged each other. Joint planning helped counter the fear and trepidation that accompanied death-defying actions like escape. Organized resistance won the respect of most of the convict population because it showed both courage and solidarity and risked receiving the most severe punitive measures available. Individual resistance, in contrast, was a lonely path. Not only did most individual resisters lack support and encouragement, their actions often cost them the respect of other prisoners. Without collective statements that explained the motives for such conduct, their actions often remained a mystery to their fellow convicts as well as to the staff. Their conduct appeared to bring a lot of grief on themselves and made doing time much harder. Their lack of friends and the absence of goals such as changing the regime to benefit all prisoners led most of these men to be labeled “crazy” by fellow prisoners and “psychopaths” by the staff. They were, however, not looking to be liked, admired, or understood; they had their own agendas.

  It is important to know what these men did, what they said about their actions, how they were treated in response, and how their behaviors changed during their time on the island in order to shed light on their motives and on the relation between the prison’s policies and inmate behavior. The prison careers of individual resisters are relevant for another reason as well: looking at their lives after they were released provides an empirical test of theories about the relation between prison conduct and postrelease behavior. Such theories then, as now, were the basis of policies regarding transfers between different security levels and the criteria governing parole and conditional release.

  Except for a few brief summaries, this chapter is not concerned with how individual resisters fared on their return to the free world. Chapter 13 will examine the postrelease lives of these men and the other inmates of the gangster years. But by looking at the prison careers of individual resisters, this chapter provides the foundation for understanding the significance of the findings examined in part 3.

  James Grove

  James Grove’s sad but noteworthy life started out badly. Raised by foster parents until he ran away from home at age twelve, he was convicted of burglary two years later and was sentenced to three years in the Missouri State Reformatory. After his release he worked briefly as a dishwasher in a dining car, but at the age of nineteen he was convicted of robbery and sent to the Utah State Prison. He escaped from that institution, was apprehended, and then released after two years. Soon after his release he was picked up on another burglary conviction, for which he was sent to the state prison at Walla Walla, Washington.

  Paroled after one year, he was allowed to join the army despite his three prison sentences. But he soon was in trouble; five months after his induction he was charged with attempting to rape the ten-year-old daug
hter of an army major. The girl reported that, finding her alone at home, Grove had forced her upstairs into her room; when she resisted and cried out as he tried to place her on the bed, he almost choked her and then fled. For the rest of his life, Grove denied he had attempted to rape the girl, but he was found guilty and sent to the Fort Leavenworth disciplinary barracks with a twenty-year sentence.

  Four years later, he stabbed another black prisoner, which earned him a twenty-year term to follow his original sentence—and a transfer to the federal prison system. At Leavenworth he got into three fights with other prisoners and made several attempts at suicide, one by cutting his wrist, and another by trying to hang himself in his cell. A Leavenworth surgeon/ psychiatrist estimated his mental age at twelve years and four months and made the following assessment: “This classifies him as a case of borderline intelligence (I.Q. 77). . . . In view of this man’s history and his psychopathic instability . . . he should remain under observation in the mental ward.”2

  Despite this diagnosis, James Grove was placed on the first train bringing transfers to Alcatraz on September 4, 1934; his first disciplinary report came four days later. Within a year he had been written up seven times for offenses ranging from “loud talking in cell” to yelling at a guard on the wall, “Go ahead and shoot.” Meanwhile, his mental health became a more serious issue. In the hospital ward he managed to cut the veins in both arms with a safety razor blade. When this attempt at suicide, his third, was reported to Bureau headquarters, Director Stanford Bates wrote to Warden Johnston expressing concern: “In the light of recent publicity it would be extremely unfortunate if the attempt at suicide of one of our inmates should prove to be successful.”3