Escape from Alcatraz

by J. Campbell Bruce

  Life in a prison of punishment only, such as Alcatraz, was purportedly depicted by an anonymous convict in a prison manual a few years ago:

  “Maybe you have asked yourself how can a man of even ordinary intelligence put up with this kind of life day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year. You might wonder whence do I draw sufficient courage to endure it.

  “To begin with, these words seem written in fire on the walls of my cell, ‘Nothing can be worth this!’ No one knows what it is like to suffer from the intellectual atrophy, the pernicious mental scurvy that comes of long privation of all the things that make life real, because even the analogy of thirst cannot possibly give you an inkling of what it is like to be tortured by the absence of everything that makes life worth living.

  “A prisoner cannot keep from being haunted by a vision of life as it used to be when it was real and lovely. At such times I pay with a sense of overwhelming melancholy my tribute to life as it once was.”

  How did Alcatraz fail? The Rock did tame some of those gangsters who, with felons of lesser criminal stature, launched the place. By the time Warden Madigan left in 1961 for the top post at McNeil, he said: “None of the original prisoners is still here. The old gang is gone.” Some served their time and walked away from the Fort Mason dock free men; others made headway toward self-rehabilitation and were rewarded by a transfer, although there is no reason to doubt that these men, such as Chase with his interest in art, could have done the same at any old prison. Many of the old gang left The Rock in straitjackets, deranged by the “exquisite torture of routine”; others left in the coroner’s basket. Roe and Cole first revealed that Alcatraz was not the escapeproof bastille the Bureau of Prisons had proclaimed it to be; then came the bureau-jolting riots and breaks, each followed by frantic efforts to make it, as Bennett said, “impregnable.” But with all the efforts, and the redoubled efforts after the Battle of Alcatraz, it never did become really impregnable. Morris and his coplotters proved that. And Morris was up against the tightest “impregnability” in the history of The Rock: the toolproof cell and window bars, the Chinese-puzzle security of the main entrance into the cellhouse, the other electronic locking and frisking devices, the mesh screen over the gun galleries, the gun ports for armed guards on the outside catwalks, all foolproof systems that supposedly added up to absolute inescapability.

  How, then, did Alcatraz fail again? Actually, as in most of those earlier, murderous affairs, the culpable factor was the human element. During his six-year regime as warden at Alcatraz, Madigan cracked numerous cellhouse conspiracies in the hatching stage. He once told curious newsmen why: “The search out here is continuous. We check some of the cells every day, as a matter of routine. The men in here keep their heads working every minute, trying to think of something, of some way out.…” Madigan knew the value of alertness: he came up through the ranks, guard to warden.

  Guards who had served under Wardens Johnston and Swope recalled similar vigilance. One described the graveyard shift, midnight to 8 A.M.: “I made the rounds every twenty to forty minutes. You had to stay alert—the lieutenant kept his eye on you. Some prisoners slept head at the front; others, bothered by the cellhouse lights, with their feet at the bars. It was important to know their sleeping habits: you could tell that was Pete in there by the position or the snore. Often I’d make a round and peer in a cell and think, ‘Hmmm, George hasn’t moved.’ I’d look for a sign of breathing, or I’d reach in and tug the blanket to make him stir.”

  “What did you suspect—a dummy?”

  He nodded.

  “Any other security measures?”

  “Weekly checks. Every Saturday, when the prisoners were out in the yard, we’d check the bars on the windows and cells, and shake down the cells.”

  “Then this last escape [of the Morris trio] should not have occurred?”

  He considered a moment, said quietly, “No, never.”

  “Incompetence?”

  He smiled. “They were at it every night for months.”

  What about the suspension of two guards?

  “Scapegoats. The blame goes higher. Dollison, the associate warden, was moved into that spot from an executive post, manager of the industrial shops. Not coming up through the custodial ranks, he lacked the sense of urgency, of constant alertness, you need up there. If the man at the top is relaxed, the men under him become lax, all down the line. It’s only natural.”

  Warden Blackwell and Bennett’s associate, Wilkinson, who flew out from Washington after the Morris-engineered break, had a different, and rather astounding, theory. They invited newsmen over for an official explanation of the escape—why three convicts could dig their way out of impregnable Alcatraz with spoons. (Newsmen were never told of the nailclip attachment, and their request to see the spoons was denied.)

  “Alcatraz is old,” Wilkinson explained. “It’s in a debilitated condition.”

  Blackwell concurred: “The concrete wasn’t crumbling, but there was some erosion in it. It could be ground down with the spoons.” He had an admiring word for the trio’s artistic talents: “The dummies sure looked lifelike. The faces wee painted flesh color.”

  Dollison on the morning of the escape admitted the convicts had been “at it a long time—at least, six months,” and Blackwell, rushing back from vacation, agreed: “With spoons it takes more time than if you had a jackhammer. It could have taken months.” Still, the warden insisted there was no custodial lapse. He said the guards made hourly bed checks through the night and periodic shakedowns of the prison, although he could not recall, offhand, when the escaped convicts’ cells had last been checked.

  Wilkinson said, a bit wistfully: “Morris and the Anglins would not have got out on Monday night if they had been shifted to new cells on Sunday. All that time they had spent in preparation for escape would have been wiped out.”

  Blackwell said: “You must remember, the officer is making the count at night in a very subdued light. It has to be subdued so the inmates can sleep.” (Convicts often read till past midnight by the cellhouse light.)

  As for the ventilator hood clattering to the roof, he said: “The prison is full of noise at night and we investigate every sound. If the wind blows over a bucket and it sounds like a bucket, we still investigate.”

  Newsmen were not allowed in the cellhouse (“There’s a certain amount of unrest in there”) and photographers could shoot, no closer than eight feet, only a cot with a dummy set up in the visitors’ room. The warden distributed color shots of the cells with the escape holes.

  “Any other convicts in on the plot?” asked Charles Raudebaugh, a Chronicle reporter.

  “We’re still checking,” said the warden.

  “Anybody chicken out?”

  “No one chickened out.”

  Back at his office, Raudebaugh studied the color photos. His sharp eye detected a fourth cell with a gaping hole, with a notation on the back of that photo: “Cell of A. C. West.” Raudebaugh phoned the warden. “What’s the first name of Convict West?”

  “Why?”

  “I have a photo of his cell with a hole.”

  “Oh,” said the warden, “I shouldn’t have given that out. I’d prefer you didn’t use it.”

  The Chronicle felt obliged to—the other papers had it. West’s role might never have come to light had it not been for the warden’s blunder and Raudebaugh’s alertness.

  A few days later reporters on the federal beat in San Francisco were invited to the island and given a look at the cells. They inquired about the deterioration, and Blackwell said, “I’ve had structural engineers say that concrete doesn’t deteriorate. All I know is what I see.” A reporter picked at the concrete with his fingers, then remarked on its solidity, that it did not crumble to the touch and that digging through it with a spoon must have taken some doing. Blackwell said, “Spooning out sounds like they worked their way through ice cream. This isn’t ice cream.”

  Before returning to Was
hington, Wilkinson announced that his investigation had disclosed “no indication of willful negligence.” Three days later the guards on duty during the two shifts the night of the escape were quietly suspended for twenty days without pay. Reporters heard about this weeks afterward and queried Blackwell. He said: “The officers were suspended for failing to make an accurate inmate count. Their failure jeopardized the security of the prison.” Who were the guards? “That’s a personnel problem, not a public matter,” he said. “You don’t want to blackball them, do you?”

  Five months after the break, Bennett announced the appointment of Dollison as associate warden of the maximum-security institution at Seagoville, Texas. He commended Dollison, some thought a bit ambiguously: “His performance over the years has been of the highest quality. I am anxious for him to take a new job.”

  By coincidence, the last escape from Alcatraz—on December 16, 1962—occurred exactly 25 years to the day after Roe and Cole effected the first. That is, it will stand as the last escape if the prison command manages somehow to persuade the plotters to hold off a little while, until The Rock can be closed down. After the December break Blackwell commented wryly, “Apparently we weren’t phasing out fast enough.”

  The most significant aspect of that escape, neatly interring forever the Alcatraz myth, was the feat of a convict in reaching the mainland, the first known victory over the tides by a fleeing felon. The affair also produced a full quota of blunders and cover-up attempts that took on the features of a sexless French farce.

  The escapers were two long-term bank robbers: John Paul Scott, thirty-five, of Kentucky, and Darl Lee Parker, thirty-one, of Ohio. December 16 was a Sunday, and they slipped away into the dark, drizzly, foggy night after the five-thirty count. As culinary workers, they had not yet been locked up. They were missed at five-forty-seven, and a half hour later the prison launch found Parker shivering on Little Alcatraz, a rock cluster one hundred yards west. At seven-forty teenagers phoned the military police at the Presidio of San Francisco that they had come upon a “body”—it was Scott—at Fort Point, just inside the Golden Gate, almost three miles from Alcatraz.

  Inexplicably, the prison waited about an hour before alerting the Coast Guard. San Francisco police were notified eight minutes after Scott was found on the mainland. For the next hour squad cars and patrolmen prowled the shoreline for a fugitive already in custody. Reporters finally informed police that Scott had been captured.

  Blackwell, pressed, reluctantly and sparsely sketched the escape: they had cut a window bar in a storage room below the kitchen, had scaled a barbed-wire fence and gone down to the water along the route taken by the Morris trio.

  Scott, semi-conscious, body temperature down to 94°, was soon revived at the Presidio’s Letterman General Hospital and returned to Alcatraz. He had worn an improvised Mae West: inflated surgical gloves stuffed into the sleeves of a jacket tied around his waist. (Said Blackwell the next day: “I thought it would be pretty difficult to get those gloves, but apparently it wasn’t too difficult.”) Before he was silenced at the Presidio, Scott, either as a jest or to confound the prison authorities, said he had severed the toolproof bar with ordinary string, moistened and rubbed with a kitchen cleanser to serve as an abrasive.

  Bennett flew out from Washington, investigated the break, then held a press conference in a seldom-used bankruptcy courtroom in San Francisco, the largest and most clamorous ever experienced on the federal beat. Poised, suavely smiling, he announced at the outset: “I’ve read all of the newspaper accounts of the escape. They are substantially right in all major aspects. Of course, there are certain minor details that you didn’t know about.” He patently intended a brief conference and several times started to rise, but was pinned down by questions. And then he made a slip—a remark about “going over the roof.” The newsmen bored in, pried out the truth, bits at a time, like prying gold flakes out of quartz. Most queries drew a repeated response: “I don’t know; maybe the warden knows.” The warden stood mutely by, chain-smoking cigarettes. The bits pried loose added up to:

  Scott worked alone in the storage room “under constant supervision.” Another convict had started the cutting more than a year earlier, had passed the secret on to Scott when he was transferred elsewhere. Bars throughout the prison are “regularly” checked for soundness. Yet the sawing was never detected? Well, Scott “went when he did” because those bars were due to be checked and, though camouflaged by paint after each sawing stint, he feared his work “would be detected.” (Bennett neglected to explain how Scott could be aware that the bars, so long safe from a guard’s rubber mallet, were now due for a check.)

  Had Scott, as the convict said, actually cut through a 1½-inch-thick steel bar with string and a sink cleanser? Well, some of the sawing may have been done that way “but not all of it.” (Indeed, not. A metal expert says a convict working at it full eight-hour shifts would require about 75 years, give or take a decade; five tons of string, and perhaps 10,000 cans of cleanser to do the job.) Scott presumably used banjo strings and a saw fashioned out of a spatula by notching its edge (found in a drainpipe in the room). He removed both a 14-inch length of bar and a section of horizontal flat bar; and to do the cutting, a few minutes at a time while the guard was out of the room, he had to climb onto a table and on up the cross-bars to his project, 15 feet above the floor. Then he had to cut out a small steel-framed window.

  After crawling out, Scott and Parker went to the north side of the cellhouse, shinnied up a drainpipe, crossed the roof to a blind spot (out of sight of the road tower), then descended. By another pipe? Oh, no, they’d brought along a 50-foot extension cord ripped from a waxing machine, to slide down. This route—not the Morris route—gave them access to an area without a cyclone fence. They hurried right by the gun tower, on down to the shore.

  Reporter Rich Jordan of the San Francisco Examiner wrote of the news conference in the bankruptcy court: “Bennett, after a huddle with Blackwell, girded himself for an explanation to the press. Unfortunately, after almost 90 minutes of backing and filling and half-answered questions, the assembly press went away with the idea that Bennett was not sure exactly what happened, either.…

  “Bennett, who obviously had not been briefed as well as he would have liked, had no explanation for the two-hour delay in notifying police and the Presidio, why a guard tower covering the escape route was unmanned, how presumably closely supervised convicts could saw away at a bar for, by his own admission, a year, or how they could have stolen surgical gloves.”

  Nonetheless, as he had so staunchly done after every escape and riot over the years, Bennett voiced “great confidence” in the warden and custodial staff. And, as he had announced after each escape over the years, he announced that the security setup would be tightened to make Alcatraz, uh, escapeproof. He remained unshaken in his belief that, though Alcatraz as an island prison had outlived its usefulness because of its “crumbling condition,” Alcatraz as a penal concept was “the greatest deterrent against crime.”

  Several months after the Morris-plotted break, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy came to San Francisco, and he too held a huge news conference. A reporter broached a subject that had long nettled newsmen, although no editor had ever thought to seek a remedy: “Sir, the Department of Justice apparently has competent people out here but why, when anything happens at Alcatraz, are they voiceless? At such times, why is it necessary for newspapers to go to the trouble and expense day after day of calling Washington to check out tips or other information? Have you, Sir, any proposals for correcting this problem?”

  The young attorney general grinned. “Call collect.”

  Alcatraz, as a scientific stir secure against escape, had clearly failed. And as a place of punishment, not reformation? Again, failure. Joe Cretzer’s second escape try, for an example, had a cold-blooded brutality that his first lacked, five years earlier, when he docilely submitted to the advice of a trussed-up captain. As a fearsome threat to keep others in
line? John K. Giles voiced a thought on this principle when the judge lengthened his term by three years for his escape attempt. The judge expressed a hope the added years would act as a deterrent to others, and Giles politely dissented: “I speak as an expert, Your Honor, and I know if you gave me a life term it wouldn’t deter any escapers.” He qualified as an expert: he had spent thirty of his fifty years behind bars, was a fugitive when picked up on a federal rap.

  This experiment in penology, as Warden Johnston phrased it, also carried a high price tag. The cost as of June 1962, Bennett told Wallace Tower of The New York Times, was running $13.79 a day to keep a prisoner on Alcatraz, compared to a daily average of $5.37 in other federal prisons. Estimates on the upkeep of Alcatraz in the past have run even higher. In 1953 Senator William Langer, North Dakota Republican who had long favored abandonment of The Rock, told the Senate that Alcatraz convicts could be boarded cheaper at the Waldorf-Astoria. He said the island prison was then costing approximately $5,000,000 a year to operate and “on my last inspection trip, it had only 150 inmates.” This would average $33,333.33 a year per prisoner, or slightly more than $91 a day.

  Why did Alcatraz fail? Despite certain shortcomings, the men who ran it were for the most part conscientious. Former guards and convicts alike attest to Warden Madigan’s decent instincts. Warden Johnston, who set up this penal lab, was known as a humanitarian for his work in ridding Folsom Prison of its medieval barbarities. Yet his own creation soon took on the aspect of medieval cruelty, refined in the mental torment of routine, raw in the physical brutality of the dungeon. Patently, it was the system itself that was its own undermining agent.