by David Ward
In the last six or seven years a decreasing optimism about my own future has steadily exacerbated this tendency to aggression and only with difficulty have I kept my hands off my persecutors. . . . Exposed for five years to sadistic, cursing guards; petty, illegal, arbitrary repressive rules; continual, unnecessary slamming of steel doors; with no possibility for relaxation, solitude and the humanizing tendencies of interesting work, constructive companions, friendly visitors and soft music I have begun to feel the sadistic impulses . . . the desire to inflict harm, to retaliate for my own misery and sense of frustration. This is an almost complete reversal of my earlier habits—in five years Society has succeeded in pushing me 50,000 years backward to the traits of my savage ancestors. This is called justice.
In another part of this letter, Phillips emphasized his determination not to give in to the prison authorities:
I have no feeling of penitence or guilt or anything except exasperation over my carelessness which has been used by my persecutors as an excuse to vent their sadistic, jungle impulses upon one of their fellow men. . . . [I am] psychically unable, and by habit unwilling, to adopt the expected attitude of cringing obeisance before my plutocratic “herren-folk.”62
Remarkably, Johnston—the recipient of Phillips’s violent assault—had Phillips’s lengthy letter typed and forwarded it to Bennett. Johnston even accompanied the manuscript with a note stating that Phillips had asked that his “theory of disintegrating atoms with subsequent release of energy under almost perfect control” be referred to Dr. Paul R. Heyl, a well-known physicist at the U.S. Bureau of Standards. After reading the letter and Johnston’s note, Bennett contacted Heyl, who agreed to review Phillips’s theory. Heyl responded by saying that the theory was limited by the prisoner’s limited access to recent scientific literature, and that review of this literature would cause him to modify his theory. Bennett asked Johnston to convey Heyl’s remarks to Phillips and to remind him that “The fact that a distinguished scientist has read his paper and commented on the extent of his knowledge should encourage him to continue with his studies.”63
Phillips was encouraged by this response and wrote to Johnston a few days later asking permission to send the design for a new type of vacuum pump to Thomas McFarland, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California. This request was also approved and Professor McFarland, surprised to receive such a request from one of Warden Johnston’s “wards,” sent back a detailed technical reply. In the meantime Bennett instructed his headquarters staff to locate in the Library of Congress some technical books requested by Phillips. Over the next several years, dozens of books on electromagnetism and applied and theoretical physics were sent to Alcatraz and returned to the Washington office.
This level of attentiveness to a prisoner’s interests—a prisoner who was being held in disciplinary segregation for slugging a warden—would not occur in any of the penitentiaries that succeeded Alcatraz. The personal interest of the director of the federal prison system in the welfare of a single prisoner in disciplinary segregation and the forgiving nature of a warden who was the victim of an assault would be out of the question in contemporary prisons, where staff–inmate relations are almost completely depersonalized and confrontational.
In addition to his involvement in scientific subjects unfamiliar to most of the rest of the convict population, Phillips’s years at Alcatraz featured frequent correspondence with, and monthly visits from, his mother, who moved to San Francisco to be close to her son. Mrs. Phillips was allowed to meet several times with Warden Johnston to discuss her son’s situation. Phillips’s justification for his attack on Johnston, as suggested in his letter to Bennett, appeared in a memorandum prepared by the chief medical officer. According to Dr. Ritchey, “Phillips felt that in no other way could he gain the attention which he deserved in securing certain educational privileges to which he thought he was entitled. He is quick to resent any effort in what he calls the ‘breaking of his spirit’ ”64 Ritchey recommended that Phillips and seventeen other convicts, including Harmon Waley, Jack Hensley, and Dale Stamphill, be considered for transfer to the Springfield Medical Center since they had been “clearly defined as Constitutional Psychopathic inferiority.”
Even after he had spent eight years in disciplinary segregation and was characterized as being “very opinionated and paranoid in his interpretations of daily events,” Phillips was acknowledged to have “superior intelligence.”65 Finally, in June 1946 Phillips was returned to general population. He continued his correspondence course study of physics, math, and engineering through the University of California and received good reports for his work in the laundry.
He sent an explanation of his attack on Johnston to a friend of his mother’s, an official of the Internal Revenue Service, who asked Phillips about his “attitude toward the Warden.” Phillips replied as follows:
My attitude toward the Warden is somewhat better than neutral—no resentment for past actions; no ill will or desire for future trouble; a certain amount of admiration and respect because he has been big enough to have made no attempt to avenge himself for my trouble with him in the past.
Phillips explained that the warden was only the symbol of the forces that said to him, “You are an outcast, we have no tasks for you to perform, no use for your brains and ability, no intention of helping you develop your skill. . . . You are serving a life sentence in an institution from which no one is ever to be paroled and the only thing left for you is to die.”
He expressed his gratitude to the warden for being allowed to carry on his studies and concluded: “I have seen enough of prisons to realize that I cannot wear them out and I have no further desire to do so.”66
Phillips’s record of good conduct (after eighteen misconduct reports) and work continued. A report five years later noted, “He never complains or enters into any alliances with anyone. He tends strictly to his own business. . . . This inmate has made a complete reversal of form and is doing very well.”67
In November 1950 Phillips was transferred from Alcatraz. At Leavenworth his continued “good attitude” led to his release on parole on January 12, 1952. When he came out of prison, he began working as a welder’s helper in a blacksmith shop for $4 a day plus room and board—a job his mother had arranged for him. Several months later he took on a job in a print shop and six months after release he had saved enough money to buy the shop and go into business for himself. In the meantime, Phillips and his mother invested in oil wells—his father had been in the oil lease business—and they soon began receiving royalties.
In 1957 Phillips sold the print shop and became a full-time oil lease operator, a job at which he became very successful. By 1963 he was reporting monthly income in excess of $6,000. Phillips did not marry, maintained a rather solitary existence, and rigorously conformed to the conditions of parole. He had close and friendly relationships with his parole officers, but a report by one parole officer characterized him as “mad at society” and said that he was “very bitter toward the institution at Alcatraz and all of the persons and things connected with it . . . especially . . . certain wardens and Mr. Bennett in particular.”68 (When a copy of this report reached the Bureau of Prisons, James Bennett wrote to the parole officer expressing his surprise that Phillips continued “to bear animosity toward me because I, as much as anybody else, was responsible for his eventual parole, having, among other things, transferred him to Leavenworth despite his unprovoked attack on Warden Johnston.”)69
In July 1965 another letter to the parole board described the importance of Phillips’s relationship with his parole supervisors:
Mr. Phillips and I have excellent rapport. He reports that I am the only one with whom he can sit down and discuss any of his problems not of a business nature. He confided that he certainly forgets his predicament when he is involved in the everyday struggle of business and earning a living, but he cannot forget the years that he spent at Alcatraz. He reports that he does not discuss these
indignities with anyone else . . . and that it relieves him a good deal when he can discuss some of his activities within the society at Alcatraz.70
Phillips’s reporting requirements were reduced over the years from monthly to one report a year, and on July 15, 1976, at age sixty-four, his parole was terminated. He served his years at Alcatraz and, after his return to the free world by himself, did not associate with other ex-convicts, even to talk about the Rock, and he never had another arrest. But Burton Phillips never got over his anger and frustration at BOP and Alcatraz officials, including those who took extraordinary steps to help him, and his years on the island left memories and psychological scars that never healed.
Urbaytis, Hensley, and Butler
Three more inmates—Joe Urbaytis, Jack Hensley, and Howard Butler—deserve mention here because of their records of persistent individual resistance. In all three cases, their behavior improved over time, as the possibility of release became more real.
Joe Urbaytis accumulated a series of minor rules violations: for passing an article (a book of matches) between cells, wasting food (“left a large portion of dessert on his plate”), loafing, insolence, and speaking with profanity to an officer. When the January 1936 strike began, Urbaytis was one of the first men to walk off his job and was quickly identified as a ringleader, promoting the strike to other inmates. For these actions he was placed in solitary confinement and then sent to an isolation block cell, where he remained for the next seven months. When he was finally returned to the general population, Urbaytis continued to resist the regime with a series of infractions ranging from disobedience, refusing to work, insubordination, and insolence to participating in a strike, fighting with an inmate, and creating a disturbance. Each time he was placed in solitary confinement on a restricted diet and forfeited all privileges.71
Urbaytis’s conduct changed for the better after these violations—not as a consequence of months in the hole but as a result of a significant change in the length of his sentence. In October 1941 his fifty-year sentence was ruled invalid and his time was cut in half. With fifty years ahead of him when he arrived at Alcatraz, Urbaytis had little incentive to conform to the rules, but when his sentence was suddenly halved and he calculated the good time he could accumulate and deducted it from the new parole eligibility date for his remaining twenty-five-year term, a return to the free world suddenly appeared on the horizon and provided a powerful incentive for improved conduct. As Urbaytis’s experience illustrates, staff at Alcatraz used good time earned or yet to be earned in amounts that could add or detract years from a convict’s sentence as a powerful punitive sanction for infractions and equally powerful incentive for good behavior. Two months after his sentence was cut in half, a portion of the good time he had forfeited was returned because his conduct improved; the remainder of the good time he had lost was restored a year later, which advanced his release date to February 13, 1943. At the end of February he was transferred to Leavenworth to spend a year in a standard prison environment before his release.
In 1946, following his release from Leavenworth, Joe Urbaytis was gunned down at an unlicensed after-hours supper club he operated. A newspaper account of this incident, titled “Joe Urbaytis, Gangland Desperado, Is Murdered,” ended with the statement “There were no witnesses to the shooting and Urbaytis died within a short time of wounds in the shoulder and chest, stubbornly refusing to name his slayer.”72
Jack Hensley arrived at Alcatraz from Atlanta on October 5, 1935, for the usual reasons—“the nature of the crime, duration of sentence, former prison record, and conduct of inmate in institution.”73 He had served previous sentences in the Tennessee State Penitentiary and at Tucker Prison Farm in Arkansas. With a confederate he had escaped from Tucker and kidnapped a taxi driver, who drove them to a town where they forced the postmaster and her husband to open the post office safe. Hensley and his associate took $27.89, bound and gagged the couple, and escaped in their car. Hensley lived off the proceeds of highway robberies for a year until he was apprehended, tried, and sentenced to twenty-five years for the post office robbery and assault. A psychiatric examination pronounced Hensley “correctly orientated in all spheres” but concluded that with an IQ of 77 he had “border-line efficiency . . . without psychosis.”74 After Hensley attacked another prisoner in the dining room and then “defaced” his isolation cell while continuing to “sing, whistle, and talk,” he made his way onto the list of prisoners who were being designated to populate the new prison at Alcatraz.
Hensley’s trouble on the Rock began two months after his arrival and continued for years. By December 1948, after his conduct finally improved and he was transferred back to Leavenworth, he had accumulated fifty-one misconduct reports, mostly for causing disturbances by talking too loudly or fighting with other prisoners. He was also cited for being a “mean leader and a dangerous agitator” in two strikes, for which he spent eleven days in lower solitary and twenty days in closed-front isolation cells on the third tier in A block. He resided for many months in D block isolation and solitary confinement cells as well as in the isolation cells in A block for insolence, possession of contraband, disobeying orders, refusing to work, creating disturbances, and assorted offenses ranging from smoking violations and wasting food to refusing to clean his cell and entering the cell of another inmate. A 1945 special progress report commented that though Hensley’s misconduct reports were “not serious in nature,” their frequency made him a “great nuisance . . . and reflected his ‘maladjustment.’ ”75
The Alcatraz staff attributed Hensley’s misconduct to a feeling of hopelessness related to a detainer that required he be returned to the Tucker Prison Farm after he had served his federal sentence. Tucker Prison Farm was noted for its brutality and for forcing prisoners to work as indentured slaves for private contractors.76 In addition, a psychiatric assessment by Dr. Ritchey, the chief medical officer, diagnosed Hensley as having a “Constitutional Psychopathic Inferiority, Paranoid Personality.”77 In 1940, when Bureau headquarters was concerned about the possibility that mental health issues were becoming a problem on the island, Dr. Ritchey was asked to produce a list of prisoners suffering from “clearly defined constitutional psychopathic inferiority” to be considered for transfer to the Springfield Medical Center. Jack Hensley’s name appeared on a list of eighteen, but like almost all of the others he was never transferred to Springfield.78
Hensley was also an active litigant. His first action in federal court, on November 21, 1934, shortly after he arrived, challenged the legality of his imprisonment. In October 1941 he filed a writ of habeas corpus arguing that his convictions and sentences should be voided because he did not have the assistance of legal counsel, that he did not voluntarily waive the right to the assistance of counsel, and that the U.S. attorney denied him assistance of counsel. He also contended that he was deceived and coerced into pleading guilty by the U.S. attorney, who threatened him with a sentence of thirty-five years and told Hensley that if he pleaded guilty he would get a term of only ten years—which was not the sentence he was awarded. In October 1943 he applied for executive clemency; he wrote letters to Congress and continued to file appeals and writs until 1946.
In September 1948, with his conditional release scheduled for June 1950, Hensley was transferred first to Leavenworth and then to Atlanta. He maintained clear conduct records in both institutions. A new test raised his IQ from 77 to 100 and he was regarded as a reliable worker. In April 1950 Hensley was conditionally released from Atlanta and taken into custody by Arkansas authorities. After serving only a short time in Arkansas, he was conditionally released to Memphis, Tennessee.79
From the beginning of his federal sentence in 1934, Hensley had maintained correspondence with Willie May Tanner, reported in probation documents to have “a good reputation in her community.” Hensley’s release plan called for him to marry Tanner as soon as possible after his release. (She had written to the warden in Atlanta pleading for his release: “he is awful
dear to me and I am living and praying for the day when he can return to me . . . will you please do this for a woman that has loved and waited for 20 years for her one and only love?”)
Hensley married Tanner and remained with her for three years until, as he put it in a letter to James Bennett, “things just drifted from bad to worse and now my wife and I have separated.”80 Hensley moved in with his aged mother and went to work for a company that manufactured furniture for churches. He informed Bennett that he had learned about machinery and woodworking at Alcatraz and had become the supervisor of eighteen men working under him. His postrelease arrest record, during eight years on conditional release, listed one arrest for selling heroin to undercover officers in Washington, D.C. The circumstances of this offense are unclear since no jail or prison time followed and he continued under conditional release supervision to its termination in 1959. Jack Hensley had accumulated more disciplinary reports at Alcatraz—fifty-one—than his fellow prisoners, but that record did not stop him from building a successful life in the free world, or from sending a Christmas card every year to his principal captor, James Bennett.
Howard Butler’s criminal career, like Richard Neumer’s, was unremarkable and would normally have qualified him only for confinement in a standard medium-security prison. He served some jail time for minor offenses and an eight-month sentence in an industrial school. Then Butler and a co-defendant robbed four gas stations in Washington, D.C., taking $35 and a radio in one case, $40 in another, $10.80 in a third, and $47.40 in the fourth. He received what appears to be a rather stiff sentence of twelve to twenty-two years for these robberies, and he was committed to the District of Columbia’s Lorton Reformatory. There, he combined consistent insolence to staff and refusal to obey prison rules with assaultive behavior toward other prisoners.
