Alcatraz

by David Ward

  Unlike Loomis, Johnson highlighted violent incidents, such as an inmate protest against the rule of silence and other restrictions:

  In the kitchen, at a signal, we began dropping pans, shouting and jumping about, beating the tables. The guards opened the doors and rushed in. That’s what the planners of the strike, whoever they were, waited for. A convict named Walsh had a knife; he rushed at the first guard, a guy named Presshure [Officer Clarence Preshaw]. He stabbed him repeatedly, in frenzy, in the face, in the belly. Screaming like a pig, Presshure was a fountain of blood before the guards beat Walsh to the floor. . . . He was unconscious, blood oozing from wounds, trickling from the mouth . . . they put him in “the hole” that way.21

  The themes established by Loomis and Johnson were reiterated and embellished many times in the coming years by newspaper reporters who interviewed Alcatraz releasees. Some stories appeared only in local papers as former Alcatraz inmates returned to their hometowns and answered reporters’ questions, while others had broader circulation. Many releasees, not as articulate and literate as Harry Johnson, had their accounts inflated by reporters seeking to satisfy readers’ demands for more dramatic tales from Devil’s Island.

  PUSHED OVER THE EDGE

  After the January 1936 strike, no other organized protest was mounted for eighteen months. During this period, however, several inmates reacted to the Alcatraz regime in self-destructive ways. Their fellow prisoners—now largely comprised of Leavenworth and Atlanta graduates—saw these incidents as evidence of the negligence and callousness of the staff and of the harmful psychological impact that confinement at Alcatraz was having on some men.

  The first incident occurred in April 1936. Warden Johnston defined it as the first escape attempt from Alcatraz, but the inmate population viewed it differently. Joseph Bowers had run afoul of the law one October day in 1931 when he and an acquaintance, each with a gun, robbed a post office in a small California town, took $16.63, and got away. They were soon apprehended and both drew twenty-five-year terms. After a year at McNeil Island, and another year at Leavenworth during which he was not a disciplinary problem, Bowers was nevertheless transferred to Alcatraz. Officially, he was transferred because he had a long sentence, was considered a “menace to society,” and had a detainer lodged against him. The detainer had in fact been dropped, and the real reason for the transfer seems to have been that Leavenworth staff regarded Bowers’s odd and brooding demeanor as threatening. His transfer was a classic example of a prison warden getting rid of a nuisance.

  Joe Bowers had a difficult time settling down at Alcatraz, accumulating ten disciplinary reports during his first two years on the island. Most of his offenses were minor. Once he shouted, “Put me in the dungeon. I do not want to work,” and the staff obliged. On two occasions, however, Bowers rushed up to guards with whom he had no prior contact or conversation and began “striking them blindly with his fists.” In October 1934 the prison’s consulting psychiatrist examined him and concluded that Bowers was an epileptic, but four months later the psychiatrist made another report:

  During his examination, while recounting the manner in which he has been persecuted and tormented both while in his cell at night and during the day when taking his bath, etc., tears are streaming down his face. There is a strong temptation to believe that this man is truly psychotic, but one must be on one’s guard, as he has something to gain if he can induce us to believe that he is insane.22

  A month later the psychiatrist concluded that Bowers was likely faking mental illness. In March 1935 Bowers tried to kill himself by cutting his throat with a piece of glass broken out of his eyeglasses and the following month he received treatment in the hospital after he repeatedly butted his head against his cell door. Two months later, he was reported again for butting his head, this time against a post and a clothes rack; he also suddenly attacked another inmate and then ran away.

  That Bowers’s conduct was seen as abnormal is evident: no disciplinary report was written regarding these actions, and three inmates helped guards subdue him in order to take him to the hospital area for treatment of wounds to his head. This time the chief medical officer diagnosed Bowers’s condition as “dementia praecox” and he spent the next year in and out of the hospital, the isolation unit, and the main cell house.

  On April 27, 1936, Bowers was assigned to an outside work detail where he could be kept under the surveillance of guards and at the same time be separated from other inmates. His job was to put rubbish into a large incinerator surrounded by a fence located on the cliffs on the Golden Gate side of the island. Officer E. F. Chandler, who was on duty that day in the road tower above the incinerator, reported at approximately 11:00 A.M. that Bowers had climbed to the top of the wire fence:

  [He was] attempting to go over, then I yelled at him several times to get down but he ignored my warning and continued to go over. I fired two shots low and waited a few seconds to see the results. He started down the far side of the fence and I fired one more shot, aiming at his legs. Bowers was hanging on the fence with his hands but his feet were pointing down toward the cement ledge. After my third shot I called the Armory and reported the matter. When I returned from phoning the body dropped into the Bay.23

  Other guards reported that they looked toward the incinerator when they heard shots and saw Bowers on the fence. One reported that Bowers was “going over the fence,” two reported that he was on top of the fence, a fourth said Bowers was on the ground outside the fence, and a fifth reported that he saw Bowers start to climb the fence from the outside,

  apparently trying to get back inside the yard. He succeeded in getting an arm and one leg over the top-most strands of barbed wire when a third shot sounded. His body stiffened and hung there for a few seconds, then he fell backwards out of my sight, over the cliff.24

  Bowers’s death had an ironic twist. Abandoned by his parents at birth somewhere in Europe and deported to the United States before the First World War, Bowers never knew his country of origin. He had always longed to know his true identity. The social services department at Leavenworth had continued an effort to establish Bowers’s background even after his transfer to Alcatraz and, at some point before his death, had been informed by Austrian authorities that he was in fact an Austrian citizen. Alcatraz records do not indicate (and no surviving inmates or officers could recall) whether or not Joe Bowers was ever aware of the successful inquiry. Had he lived three days longer, he might have been released from Alcatraz to join a group of deportees being returned to western European countries.

  Bowers’s file is marked Died While Attempting to Escape, but most Alcatraz convicts regarded his death as murder by a guard who panicked when a mentally disturbed prisoner climbed a fence to retrieve some debris that had been blown outside the incinerator. Other prisoners claimed that Bowers—by attempting to climb over the fence at the edge of a seventy-five-foot cliff at midday under the eyes of the tower guard—had committed suicide. Under either interpretation, Bowers’s death provided evidence to support critics’ claims that the regime was so harsh that some prisoners would not survive their sentences on the Rock.

  The death of inmate John Stadig five months later gave prisoners eager to condemn the prison additional evidence that Alcatraz was pushing emotionally disturbed prisoners over the edge of sanity. Stadig, convicted of counterfeiting, had been sentenced in March 1934 to McNeil Island Penitentiary for a term of six years. A month later Stadig and another convict commandeered a prison truck and ran it through one of the prison gates in an effort to break out. Unable to find a way to cross the waters from McNeil Island to the mainland, Stadig was captured the following day, put into a dark isolation cell, and had two years added to his sentence.

  In August 1934 when McNeil authorities had the opportunity to get rid of problem cases (such as escape risks), Stadig became one of the first prisoners to be sent to Alcatraz. He was well educated compared to most other inmates, having completed two years of college, and his IQ was
measured at 124. After his arrival on the island he filed for a retrial on his original conviction, and in December U.S. marshals escorted him back to the federal court in Portland, Oregon, for a hearing. He did not fare very well in this effort: stemming from his conviction on another charge of counterfeiting, the judge added another seven and a half years—for a total sentence of over fifteen years.

  On his way back to Alcatraz, Stadig was seated in a private compartment on the Cascade Limited, guarded by two U.S. marshals. He was handcuffed throughout the journey, but as the train neared its destination the evening meal was brought to the compartment and Stadig’s handcuffs were removed so that he could feed himself. Before the handcuffs were placed back on his wrists, he was given permission to use the toilet in the compartment. The train had stopped at Richmond. A few minutes later, when it began to move out of the station, Stadig emerged from the lavatory, suddenly bolted forward, and dove headfirst, “like a bullet,” through the double windowpanes of the moving train. He landed near the tracks and disappeared. One week later he was recognized by a police officer in Concord, California, and arrested; a day later he was back at Alcatraz, where he lost 1,800 days of statutory good time.25 During the next eight months he made several trips to disciplinary segregation for refusing to work and refusing to obey orders.

  In September 1935 Stadig wrote a letter to his family—confiscated by the mail censor because it was judged to be “scurrilous, libelous, and defamatory”—that conveys this prisoner’s frustration and sense of despair:

  Dear Mother, Brother and Sister . . . here’s the situation: I will continue to write as long as I can, and then if and when it gets too rocky, I’ll clip the silver thread and try the fourth dimension for a change—and, aye! a rest. All notions that I ever had of doing my time are no more: I’ll do whatever is convenient, and the rest can hang. . . . So don’t worry and don’t blame anyone if I have chosen a hard road. It’s my choice and my life—let ’er ramble.

  —With Love, /s/ John M. Stadig, no. 46

  Four months after this letter was written, Stadig tried to commit suicide by cutting his forearm with a blade from a pencil sharpener. He was hospitalized and, according to a psychiatric evaluation, evidenced symptoms of paranoia. While in the hospital he was visited by Assistant Director Hammack, who noted that Stadig was “very discouraged and says he cannot serve his term. He feels he will die in the hospital.”26

  Two days after this meeting, Stadig attempted suicide again, this time by cutting himself with a fork that had been smuggled into his room. In June 1936 he left a suicide note addressed to his brother and made another attempt to take his own life, cutting his forearm in two places when razors were handed out so that he and other hospital patients could shave. In the operating room Stadig remarked, “I thought I got an artery, but I guess I didn’t cut deep enough. Guess I didn’t have the guts to do it. This proves to me a man can’t be a coward and commit suicide. It takes guts.”27

  Discharged from the hospital but back in the cell house Stadig refused to work or to go to the mess hall for his meals and was placed in solitary confinement. In D block he succeeded in cutting his neck with a piece of copper from the light socket in his cell. Two days later, back in a hospital room, he climbed up the bars of the door, reached a light in the ceiling, broke the bulb, cut his wrist, and lost a pint of blood before an attendant noticed the cut.

  Several weeks later he refused to eat and the consulting psychiatrist noted that he required constant surveillance, was “close to the border line of insanity,” and should probably be sent “at once to Springfield.”28 During a visit to the island, the superintendent of the Springfield Medical Center interviewed Stadig and concluded that his “persistent suicidal tendencies” warranted transfer to his institution. A few days later the chief medical officer at Alcatraz wrote to his supervisor, the surgeon general, recommending Stadig’s transfer to Springfield despite his view that the inmate was not really insane, that his suicide attempts were not “sincere,” and that the patient was simply “an egotistical individual who cannot make up his mind to serve the sentence imposed on him.”29 When Warden Johnston concurred in the recommendation, Bureau of Prisons headquarters approved Stadig’s transfer not to Springfield, but to Leavenworth, “for further mental examination.”

  On September 21 Stadig arrived at Leavenworth, where he was assigned to the mental annex in the prison hospital. A hospital report indicates that he appeared depressed and refused to talk with the ward surgeon, saying, “I want to forget it all and do not care to talk.” Stadig spent the next several days reading magazines and newspapers, for which he was allowed to use his eyeglasses. On September 24, the inmate attendant on duty during the evening discovered that Stadig’s bed had been moved against the door of his room to prohibit entry; the inmate called for the assistance of another inmate attendant and with some difficulty they pushed the door open. Stadig was lying on the bed bleeding heavily from two cuts in his arm and from a two-inch gash in his neck that had severed the jugular vein. He was pronounced dead ten minutes later. It was determined that he had used a broken lens from his eyeglasses to cut his throat—at last able to “clip the silver thread.”30

  Stadig’s mental health represented the classic challenge for prison authorities to distinguish between prisoners with bona fide mental health problems and men the custodial staff regarded as “conniving,” who simulated disturbed behaviors in order to obtain transfers to less restrictive prisons. In the following year another incident convinced many inmates that while they felt that they could manage their time at Alcatraz, some of their fellow prisoners could not—particularly the loners who did not have the friendship and emotional support of other convicts.

  Working on the cleanup crew the afternoon of June 25, 1937, Rufe Persful walked into the garage area to sweep and pick up trash. Without saying a word to his co-worker or to the guard supervising them, Persful moved into a section of the building occupied by the fire truck, removed the ax that was attached to the side of the vehicle, placed his left hand on the engine hood, and chopped off four fingers. When the other inmate gave a shout, the guard ran into the garage and found Persful walking toward him with the ax in his right hand and his left hand bleeding profusely. The guard grabbed the ax, applied a handkerchief as a tourniquet to Persful’s wrist, and then placed his own hand over the stumps of the fingers to try to stop the bleeding. The guard and the other prisoner rushed Persful to the trash truck and drove up the hill to the cell house, where he was taken to the hospital. As the medical staff tried to treat his wounds, Persful had to be forcibly restrained as he struggled to grab the razor that was being used to clean the stumps. When the deputy warden came into the hospital ward Persful told him that he would have cut off his other hand and his feet if he had found a way to do it.31

  In the month after this event, Persful experienced delusions and hallucinations. He insisted that he be moved to get away from an alligator in his room, claimed that the warden had cut his hand off, and tried to make nooses out of sheets, towels, and an electric cord. The chief medical officer reported to Warden Johnston and to Bureau headquarters that an examining board had diagnosed Persful as suffering from “dementia praecox, hebephrenic type” and recommended that he be transferred to the Springfield Medical Center.

  What the doctor did not report was that Rufe Persful had a very serious problem—his fellow convicts wanted him dead. In the course of his long criminal career, Persful had committed acts that made him a pariah in the eyes of other inmates. At the age of eighteen, he had been sentenced to fifteen years in the Arkansas State Penitentiary for killing and robbing an elderly man. Arkansas prisons had no walls, and convicts worked in fields and on farms under the supervision of inmate guards mounted on horseback and armed with high-powered rifles. When Persful arrived at the Tucker Prison Farm he was offered a job as a trusty guard, a “high power.” The high power’s job was to shoot any convict who tried to escape, and his reward for stopping an escape, apar
t from not having to labor in the fields, was that he could earn a quick parole. In the performance of these duties, Persful shot and killed a prisoner who was attempting to escape. His sentence was reduced from fifteen to nine years and he was almost immediately released on parole.

  Some eighteen months later, Persful was indicted for shooting a woman in the back with a shotgun and his parole was revoked, but he was not apprehended for two years. When he was picked up and returned to prison, owing to the “congested condition of the [court] docket at that time,” state authorities never tried him on the charge of attempting to kill the woman. Back at Tucker Prison Farm as a parole violator, Persful resumed his position as a high power, shot and killed another escaping prisoner, and was paroled again. Several months later he was arrested on a charge of robbery with firearms, for which he received a new sentence of five years. He returned to his position as trusty guard and once again halted an escape, killing one prisoner and wounding three other men so gravely that they were left “permanently crippled.”32 As usual, Persful was released on parole, but at the request of a circuit court judge, for reasons unknown, that parole was revoked and he was returned to the prison farm and his old job. In October 1933, for the fourth time, Persful shot and killed another convict attempting to escape, and eight months later received his fourth parole.

  When Persful entered the Atlanta penitentiary in December 1934 to begin a twenty-year term for kidnapping, the initial staff evaluation concluded that he would not pose any unusual disciplinary problems.33 But at the federal penitentiary Persful found himself in a prison world where a vastly different convict code prevailed, one that emphasized the importance of inmates sticking together and helping each other out and certainly not interfering with any man’s attempt to escape. This code also condemned offenses committed against women and children.