by David Ward
But Alcatraz had punitive measures of its own, and the escapees received all of them. Young and McCain were immediately locked up in isolation and when Martin’s bruises healed, he was also taken to D block. Stamphill’s injuries required him to be put in traction for eight weeks and then in a cast for two more weeks. On the day the cast on his leg was removed, he was able to limp from his hospital bed to the shower; the following morning he was escorted to D block isolation, where he remained for seventeen months.
The Bureau of Prisons then exercised its option to take away all the good time that the escapees had accumulated. Later in January at his good time forfeiture hearing, conducted by the deputy warden, the captain, and the chief medical officer, Henry Young could have given information that might have reduced his punishment; instead—in an indication of the power of the prohibition against incriminating fellow prisoners that prevailed in inmate society at the time—he stonewalled:
Deputy Warden Miller: You are charged with conspiracy and plotting to escape in company with William Martin AZ-370, Rufus R. McCain AZ-267, Dale Stamphill AZ-435, and Arthur Barker AZ-268, cutting the bars of cell number 529 “D” Block, cutting and breaking bar of window guard, escaping from the prison building no. 68, making way to the shoreline and attempting to escape from the Island, January 13, 1939. Is that correct?
Young:
AZ, what’s AZ?
Miller:
That means Alcatraz.
Young:
All right. No, not guilty.
Miller:
You were captured on the beach by two officers, and did not escape from the prison? You did not escape from your cell?
Young:
No.
Miller:
Your plea is “not guilty” to attempt to escape?
Young:
Yes, sir.36
Young ended up forfeiting 2,400 days, about six and a half years, of good time.
At his hearing, Rufe McCain admitted that he was trying to escape but refused to make any further statement. When Deputy Warden Miller recommended that he lose 11,880 days—almost thirty-three years—McCain laughed and retorted, “I couldn’t even do that much time.” (The maximum sentence McCain could have received for escape in federal court was five years.)
William Martin lost 3,000 days, or more than eight years. He also paid a high price for a statement he had given to Deputy Warden Miller after being captured and brought up to the prison hospital. The other inmates, as often happened, learned that he had given up information. Some sixteen months later Martin, still in isolation, went on a hunger strike. For several weeks he refused to explain why he would not eat, but one day he told Miller that the other inmates were “hissing him,” calling him a rat, and threatening him; Martin thought that if he stopped eating the inmates might stop calling him names. He asked to be moved out of D block but Miller said that he knew of no place in the prison where Martin could get away from the other escapees, even though they were themselves in isolation cells. Several months later Martin’s mental health problems resulted in a diagnosis of “paranoid” and he was recommended for transfer to Springfield Medical Center. The transfer was not effected, however, and Martin assaulted several officers and got into fights with other inmates while he was confined in disciplinary segregation. Finally, in May 1942, suffering from hallucinations and “bizarre delusions,” he was transferred to Springfield. By that time, he had been in D block for three years and three months and had paid the usual price for being a rat.
Dale Stamphill settled down to do his time; he had a life sentence and thus could not accrue any good time for the deputy warden to take away. The friendship between Henry Young and Rufe McCain deteriorated as they accused each other of cowardice for surrendering on the night of the escape.
A year after the escape attempt, James Bennett sent a second letter to Warden Johnston raising additional questions that came out of a review in Bureau headquarters of the institution’s escape plan. The embarrassment caused by the near escape of such a prominent “public enemy” as Dock Barker was keenly felt by Bureau administrators, particularly in the light of the report sent to the attorney general by J. Edgar Hoover. The suggestions contained in Bennett’s letter seem rather elementary for a warden of Johnston’s experience and for a prison at the apex of the Bureau’s security system. Bureau headquarters wanted to know, for example, what plans had been made for awakening officers in the houses and dormitories on the island in the event an escape occurred at night, why all officers reported to the armory when the emergency alarm sounded instead of having small groups of officers report to predesignated posts, whether new officers had received training in the escape procedures, and whether any escape drill had been conducted “recently.”37
Several weeks later Johnston responded to the Bureau’s suggestions. Concerning the proposal that prearranged locations be identified around the island to which officers would report when the escape signal sounded, Johnston demurred, arguing that flexibility was preferable to wasting manpower in locations away from the site of the escape. In regard to escape drills, the warden contended that having drills would put the administration “in the position of the boy in the fable who cried ‘wolf.’” The warden allowed that “some” of the Bureau’s suggestions were helpful but his response clearly indicated that he felt he knew best how to run Alcatraz.38
The escapes that occurred in 1937, 1938, and 1939 posed serious problems for Warden Johnston and Director Bennett—beyond the exposure of defects in the security system of an “escape-proof” prison—problems that came from having FBI agents and their suspicious and self-centered director, not to mention Alcatraz convicts and their defense attorneys, talk to the press and the public (or “confidentially,” on the part of the FBI to the attorney general) about conditions and operations on the island, problems that put the Bureau of Prisons in a defensive posture. Bennett and Johnston did not suspect that the situation would only get worse.
7
ALCATRAZ ON TRIAL
ALCATRAZ AS “UNCLE SAM’S ‘DEVIL’S ISLAND’ ”
Held out as the answer to one of the nation’s major social problems, Alcatraz had quickly compiled a profoundly negative image. By the end of 1937 most Americans had read accounts of life on the Rock—“Uncle Sam’s ‘Devil’s Island’”—from ex-prisoners Harry Johnson and Al “Sailor” Loomis, heard rumors about inmates being locked up in a dark dungeon, and seen stories about the desperate acts of Joe Bowers and Rufe Persful. On November 29 the Philadelphia Inquirer began a three-part series about Alcatraz that further reinforced the notion that the prison was psychologically brutalizing its inmates. Based on interviews with a local resident who had been transferred out of Alcatraz and then released, the serialized piece appeared under these headlines:
Alcatraz Horrors Doom Men, Ex-Convict Says
Alcatraz Silence “Breaks” Toughest Gangsters: Machine Gun Kelly Through Bragging; Karpis Is Cracking, Human Beings Can’t Endure “the Rock”
Riots and Bloodshed Are Forecast at Alcatraz; Convicts Can’t Win But Silence Is Worse than Machine Guns; The Rock a Barrel of Dynamite with Tough Warden Sitting on Lid1
In an editorial that accompanied the series, the Inquirer likened Alcatraz to “some dark chapter out of medieval lore [where] . . . the most hardened and desperate criminals in the country [are confined] under the most rigid system of discipline ever enforced in America.” The question to be asked, said the Inquirer, “is whether the Alcatraz system serves a useful sound purpose, or whether it defeats its own end and turns the men who come within its clutch into even more hardened, more reckless and more desperate criminals.” The Inquirer’s readers demonstrated their ambivalence about penal policy when several days later the paper reported that its articles on the prison produced “one of the most violent controversies Philadelphia has ever known” with “scores of letters . . . written at white heat” directed to the newspaper; the conclusion of the Inquirer after reviewing the response of readers
was “Alcatraz Horrors Held Best System for Desperados: Majority of Readers Agree Criminals Deserve Rigors.”2 The paper had elevated the discussion to the conclusion that the Alcatraz regime was indeed brutal, but perhaps necessarily so.
A few weeks later, in January 1938, Roy Gardner met newspaper reporters after he was transferred from Alcatraz to Leavenworth and then released. Several other former Alcatraz convicts had made headlines with their accounts of life on the island, but reporters had been really waiting for the release of one of the big-name convicts. Their wish was fulfilled in the person of Gardner, who was widely known in California not only as the “Phantom Train Robber,” but for his escapes from U.S. marshals.
As the date of his transfer to Leavenworth approached, Gardner finished the draft of a book on Alcatraz and its inmates and sent the manuscript to Director James Bennett for his review and approval. Gardner assured Bennett that he would delete anything found to be objectionable and would incorporate any suggestions from Bennett; he intended, he said, to dedicate the book to Warden Johnston. Asking the director of the Bureau of Prisons for editorial assistance was an unprecedented request but Gardner went even further, asking that he be sent copies of photographs and the case histories of Alcatraz’s most notorious prisoners, an unheard-of request from a confined federal prisoner. Gardner also hoped Bennett would help him secure employment as an electrician at the Singer Sewing Machine Company in the Bay Area and thanked the director for becoming his friend.3 On June 17, 1938, after almost seventeen years in prison, Roy Gardner walked out the front gate at Leavenworth Penitentiary and was transported to Kansas City, where he was greeted by a crowd of reporters. Reaching down to pat a puppy, Gardner remarked, “Boys, you miss dogs in prison.”4
Gardner’s comments to reporters focused on the “mental torture” experienced by Alcatraz inmates. While the stories that came from this interview made headlines, the book that Gardner published after his release entitled Hellcatraz: The Rock of Despair made a greater impact. Although Alcatraz inmates were absolutely prohibited from writing anything about the prison and other inmates, Gardner’s story apparently carried out a theme that Bureau officials regarded as consistent with the image of Alcatraz they wished to project—a prison that could subdue the nation’s toughest gangsters and most rebellious convicts. The book was not given an official Bureau of Prisons seal of approval, but Gardner was permitted to carry the manuscript from Alcatraz to Leavenworth and out to the free world.
In a brief earlier draft of Hellcatraz titled “The Rock of Remorse,” Gardner’s flight of rhetoric about Alcatraz as “the mausoleum of the living dead” exceeded even the dramatic imagery in the earlier descriptions of Loomis and Johnson:
The easiest way to get a clear essential picture of Alcatraz is to imagine a large tomb situated on a small island and inhabited by corpses who still have the ability to walk and talk. In other words, a mausoleum holding the living dead. . . . The system on Alcatraz changes desperate public enemies into listless, lifeless automatons, walking around apparently waiting for death to release them and not caring how soon it comes. The breaking of desperate men on that rock is all mental. There is no brutality or physical violence practiced or permitted by the prison officials; however, the mental torture is much worse than any phyisical [sic] torture could possibly be. . . . The daylight hours on Alcatraz are not so bad because the prisoners have something to do to occupy their minds, but the hours between 5:00 P.M. and 7:00 A.M. are the hours that sear men’s souls and break their spirits. 75% of the prisoners there know they will never again experience the rapture of a woman’s kiss. They will never again shake the hand of a true friend. Never again enjoy an hour of freedom. During the first year of imprisonment they spend many sleepless hours looking at the ceiling and wonder who is kissing her now. Some of them go raving mad and awaken the entire cellblock with their insane screams. Others suffer in silence. . . . The fact that there is no escape leaves death as the only alternative for most of the inmates. Some of them realize that fact and go the suicide route. . . . Watching these hopeless men walking around and existing from day to day is a pitiful sight. Of course they are a menace to society and have to be restrained; however, it seems that that restraint could be made more endurable without losing any of its effectiveness. An indescribable something prevails on Alcatraz that is not felt in any other prison. It seems to be a mixture of hopelessness, hatred, self-pity and cowardice. Most of the long timers lose hope after about a year and begin feeling sorry for themselves. The next step is to become suspicious of his fellow prisoners, and then hatred develops. . . . There are plenty of prisoners at Alcatraz today who talk to themselves only. That condition does not readily develop in other prisons because they can see a ray of hope, maybe parole, maybe escape, but still a ray of hope. On Alcatraz that ray of hope does not exist, and the lack of it actually kills men’s souls. Of course the men confined there can expect no sympathy from society because 95% of them are habitual criminals, and probably 50% are murderers. That type of prisoner has forfeited all claims to consideration by society, and theoretically dug his own grave. He would have been much better off had he committed suicide, and let others dig his grave.5
Gardner described Alcatraz as “the toughest, hardest place in the world.” Hellcatraz was published after his release, and there were, as usual, no disclaimers or denials from Alcatraz or Bureau of Prisons officials.6
Back in San Francisco Gardner found employment on a tour boat. As the boat cruised around Alcatraz, Gardner told stories about “the lifeless automatons” on the “rock of despair.” (At the San Francisco exposition in 1939 he operated a booth at which he reiterated this same theme.)
While Gardner’s Hellcatraz confirmed the prison’s harsh image, events within Alcatraz supported the growing body of journalistic opinion that the federal government was treating prisoners so cruelly that they were ending up in insane wards, on suicide watches, or dying while trying to escape. Following Rufe Persful’s self-mutilation and Roe and Cole’s escape attempt in 1937 came the deadly escape attempted by Lucas, Limerick, and Franklin in May 1938 and ensuing trial for the murder of Officer Cline, the work strike and assault on Warden Johnston in September 1938, and the January 1939 breakout attempt led by Stamphill and Barker, which also had fatal results.
In addition, strikes and protests continued, and the press always seemed to catch wind of them. On February 26, 1939, seven men in disciplinary segregation began a hunger strike. Among the protesters were Henry Young, Rufus McCain, Whitey Franklin (who had killed Officer Cline), and Jack Hensley, the determined leader of the work strikes. According to Deputy Warden E. J. Miller, the inmates were protesting because they wanted to exercise in the yard and smoke and because “they didn’t want an officer to be placed in isolation to watch them all the time.”7 The hunger strike lasted five days. In July, following several nights of protests during which the prisoners yelled, sang, and banged their bunks into the floor, another hunger strike began over the same issues. The leaders, Young, Franklin, Hensley, and Stamphill, were moved from D block to A block isolation cells; four days later all resumed eating.
One year later, on July 15, 1940, another protest began, this time involving more than one hundred inmates; they came into the dining room for meals but took only coffee and bread. This protest was not accompanied by any work stoppage or the usual booing and shouting at non-participants. No particular complaints were presented, except that the protesters wanted transfers to other prisons.
To Warden Johnston, “it was apparent” that the men “were acting in collusion according to an agreed plan.” He explained to Director Bennett what he believed to be behind the prisoners’ behavior:
So far as I can judge at this moment, the men seem to be making their annual bid for attention and perhaps came to the conclusion that striking was not the way to do it but going without food, ala Mahatmi [sic] Gandhi, would be a better sort of protest. But, really I can find no foundation to the complaints about the food; I th
ink it is merely used because they think that is a spot in which the public has interest.8
To support his contention that the quality of food was not the basis for the protest Johnston sent a copy of the week’s menu to Bennett (see p. 186).9
Having learned that no event on the island could escape the attention of San Francisco newspapers, usually through information from civilian employees who worked in industries or maintenance jobs and lived in the city, James Johnston adopted a proactive posture by releasing news himself rather than waiting for rumors to reach the press. The problem with this protest was that like all other news about Alcatraz, it captured front-page attention. Johnston noted ruefully to Bennett, “The Examiner gave as much space to the food protest as was given to President Roosevelt and the Democratic Convention and more attention than [was given] to Hitler, Mussolini and the World War.”10 Bureau headquarters felt it necessary to send a memorandum to the attorney general suggesting that the purpose of the strike was to gain public sympathy for the prisoners’ lot.11
Alcatraz had become a major public relations problem for the Bureau of Prisons. All that the prison was supposed to represent—federal resolve to punish “public enemies,” a means of getting the worst troublemakers out of the other federal prisons, and setting a standard for state high-security prisons—became lost in the welter of denunciations directed at the Bureau for maintaining a penitentiary that seemed to contradict so many aspects of progressive penology.
