by David Ward
57. Misconduct report, January 29, 1942.
58. Volney Davis refused further interviews with agents at Alcatraz, he said, because such interviews might “have caused me to lose my life out there . . . [refusing to be interviewed] is the only reason I am here to write this letter.” He went on to describe a serious assault by two inmates that could have cost him his life if a civilian employee had not entered the area; he was taken to the hospital for stitches in his jaw, but this incident was noted in Alcatraz records as an “accident.” Volney Davis Alcatraz file.
59. J. Edgar Hoover note on memo from A. Rosen regarding the Bremer kidnapping, July 28, 1959.
60. Volney Davis to Edward G. Bremer, July 26, 1956.
61. George E. MacKinnon, U.S. Attorney, to Scovel Richardson, Chairman, Board of Parole, July 27, 1956; July 31, 1956.
62. James V. Bennett to Volney Davis, July 21, 1964.
63. Albert Wahl to Reed Cozart, Pardon Attorney, U.S. Dept. of Justice, September 16, 1964. Other federal probation officers who had supervised Davis were William Meyer and William Adams.
64. This was one of two interviews of former Alcatraz prisoners not conducted by the author or another member of the project staff. Number 1600 responded to our list of questions by speaking into a tape recorder and sending the tapes to the author, August 14, 1983. The other involved the assistance of Federal probation officer Richard G. Sullivan, who read our questions, without comment, to the interviewee, speaking into a tape recorder in Birmingham, Alabama, June 3, 1981.
65. He also wrote to U.S. Senator William Langer stating, “I am being tortured mentally and most certainly abused physically and I cannot take this any longer without a crack-up somewhere.” Letters to sister and Senator Langer, 1947.
66. This passage was taken from a letter no.1600 sent to family members who were interested in the life he had lived and years later offered it to the author.
67. Special progress report, Springfield Medical Center, March 9, 1948.
68. Robert B. Neu, Senior Assistant Surgeon, addendum to the psychiatric report, January 18, 1949.
69. Special progress report, November 22, 1949.
70. Admission summary, Reception and Guidance Unit, Washington State Penitentiary (Walla Walla), April 21, 1955.
71. Progress report, Walla Walla, December 1966.
72. Progress report, Walla Walla, November 25, 1968.
73. G. W. Stouder, Food Administrator, Leavenworth, to Warden David M. Heritage, Atlanta, May 18, 1961, Parole Board file.
74. Rufus Franklin, Parole Board, Special Review, Atlanta Penitentiary, April 29, 1974.
75. Rufus Franklin, no. 48531, Atlanta, to the U.S. Board of Parole, Washington, D.C., April 12, 1960, Parole Board file.
76. William T. Peek, U.S. Probation Officer, presentence report, U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington at Seattle, September 11, 1974, pp. 3–4.
77. Philip M. Spears, Senior Case Manager, Federal Correctional Institution, Lexington, Kentucky, March 1, 1979.
78. James Audett, Rap Sheet: My Life Story (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1954); James Audett, “My Forty Years Outside the Law,” True: The Man’s Magazine 35, no. 218 (July 1955); Jay Robert Nash wrote Crime Chronology: A World Wide Report 1900–1983 (1984), and Almanac of World Crime (1981). In his interview for this project, conducted by Philip Bush at McNeil Island, August 29, 1977, Audett noted that some of the events he described in Rap Sheet were true and claimed that he had written another book, I Dodged 10,000 Bullets, which we were not able to locate.
79. Audett, “My Forty Years,” 103.
80. Admission summary, Atlanta, April 17, 1940, Gerard Peabody Atlanta file.
81. Special progress report, October 25, 1944, ibid.
82. Special progress report, March 23, 1961, Peabody Alcatraz file.
83. Special progress report, July 2, 1965, Peabody McNeil Island file.
84. Special progress reports, March 1968 and April 1971, ibid. His rap partner in the 1956 bank robbery was paroled from Leavenworth in 1970.
85. Special progress report, May 2, 1979, Springfield Medical Center file. Thomas E. Gaddis, Unknown Men of Alcatraz (Portland, OR: NewGate, 1977) included a chapter on Audett and Peabody that asked why at their advanced ages they resorted one last time to robbing banks.
Outside [prison] they were one jump from hated welfare, charity handouts or a county nursing home. They carried a heavy identity—because once, for better or worse, they had mattered! So they took the gamble they knew best, the one that spreads the cost by taking from insured institutions. It was a great risk to the robber; but the money was there in one place. Their old man options were these: if they shoot you, you’ve lived too long anyhow. If you make it, you live high awhile, like in the old days. If you’re nailed, you get a hard roof overhead, three squares, medical attention, and you’re back in the news.
And no deals, no copouts. You’re not guilty. Make ’em prove it. Jury trial. You’ve been thieves for longer than most men live, and never killed anybody. . . . But if you’re caught and sentenced, then you’re back in as members of the only club you ever knew. In prison, you’re esteemed elders, telling cons and guards How It Was. (Unknown Men, 121; original emphasis)
86. James A. Johnston to James V. Bennett, January 13, 1942, Ted Walters Alcatraz file.
87. Chaplain Ray with Walter Wagner, God’s Prison Gang (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1977), 77–78.
88. Leavenworth recommendation for transfer to Alcatraz noted in special progress report, Alcatraz, December 12, 1941.
89. Special progress report, Leavenworth, November 19, 1945.
90. As cited in Michael and Judy Ann Newton, The FBI Most Wanted: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 2.
91. Stamphill was involved in an escape from an Oklahoma reformatory during which a guard was killed; while at large he was arrested for kidnapping, received a life sentence, and was sent to Leavenworth. He was transferred to Alcatraz in January 1938 because he showed no remorse over the guard’s death and was considered “a detriment.” Frank Loveland, Supervisor of Classification, memorandum to J. V. Bennett, January 3, 1938.
92. Stamphill federal probation file.
93. Statement to U.S. Probation Officers Richard H. Johnson and Edward B. Murray, ibid.
94. Stamphill’s probation officer’s closing memo described the parolee he had come to know: “The subject has been one of the most pleasant people to supervise that the writer has ever known. This was [my] third request to have his supervision terminated. The reason that the parole commission showed any reluctance . . . was the grave seriousness of his offenses that occurred over 30 years ago. The writer is confident that [Stamphill] will never violate the law again.” January 1980, ibid.
CHAPTER 14
1. It should be noted that the rule violation rate for the three phases of imprisonment can reflect the lesser amount of time at prisons before and after Alcatraz. The low rate of misconduct after Alcatraz can reasonably be explained by the proximity to parole, and the rate before Alcatraz may reflect the limited tolerance for troublemaking at transferring prisons, especially if that misconduct involved escape plots or threats to staff or prison order. Leavenworth, Atlanta, and McNeil Island wardens had the convenient option of shipping their “management problems” off to Alcatraz.
2. Although these differences were not statistically significant, the direction of this finding is a departure from the expectations of both staff and inmates themselves. A statistical analysis exploring the relation between six factors identified age at release and number of months served (meaning more prison experience) as most significantly related to postrelease success; these and other results for the entire inmate population will be included in a second book, The End of the Rock: Alcatraz, 1949–1963.
3. See Lynne Goodstein, Doris Layton MacKenzie, and R. Lance Shotland, “Personal Control and Inmate Adjustment to Prison,” Criminology 22, no. 2 (August 1984): 343–69.
5. Other studies, based on standard prison populations, have reached the same conclusion—they show that there is either no relation or a negative relation between prison misconduct and parole performance. See for example, V. O’Leary and D. Glaser, “The Assessment of Risk in Parole Decision Making,” in The Future of Parole, ed. D. West (New York: International Publications Service, 1972); Carroll et al., “Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prediction in Parole Decision Making,” Law and Society Review 17 (1982): 199–228; and James Scott, “The Use of Discretion in Determining the Severity of Punishment for Incarcerated Offenders,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 65 (1974): 214–24.
6. “Note Says 3 Driven Insane at Alcatraz: Brutality and Torture Charged in Letter Smuggled From ‘Devil’s Isle.’ Ridiculous says Warden. Prisoner Declares Inmates Beaten, Shot with Gas Guns, Starved,” San Francisco News, September 20, 1935.
7. Doris Layton MacKenzie and Lynne Goodstein, “Long-Term Incarceration Impacts and Characteristics of Long-Term Offenders,” in Long-Term Imprisonment: Policy, Science and Correctional Practice, ed. Timothy J. Flanagan (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 66.
8. Number 1800, Alcatraz file. Except for a letter in his Springfield file—Frank L. Loveland to Mr. Bay, August 17, 1948—subsequent quotes and references to reports on AZ-1800 are taken from this source.
9. See K. J. Heskin, N. Bottom, F. V. Smith, and P. A. Banister, “Psychological Correlates of Long-Term Imprisonment: III, Attitudinal Variables,” British Journal of Criminology 14 (1974):150–57; H. Toch, Men in Crisis: Human Breakdowns in Prison (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1975); and W. Sluga, “Treatment of Long-Term Prisoners Considered from the Medical and Psychiatric Points of View,” in Treatment of Long-Term Prisoners (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1977), 35–42. Few studies of the mental health of inmates in high-security prisons in this country have been reported following the dramatic increase in prison violence that began in the mid-1960s and continues to this day.
10. MacKenzie and Goodstein, “Long-Term,” 64.
11. John K. Irwin, “Sociological Studies of the Impact of Long-Term Confinement,” in Confinement in Maximum Custody, ed. David A. Ward and Kenneth F. Schoen (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books / D. C. Heath, 1981), 49. See also Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor, Psychological Survival: The Experience of Long-Term Imprisonment (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1982).
12. Donald R. Cressey, “Adult Felons in Prison,” in Prisoners in America, ed. Lloyd E. Ohlin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 117–18.
13. For an effort to determine the extent of serious mental health problems among inmates at the federal government’s high-security penitentiaries at Marion, Illinois, and Florence, Colorado, see David A. Ward and Thomas G. Werlich, “Alcatraz and Marion: Evaluating Super-Maximum Custody,” Punishment and Society 5 (2003): 53–75.
EPILOGUE
1. BOP to E. B. Swope [Warden, Alcatraz], re monthly classification reports, November 4, 1948.
2. To Director [James V. Bennett], monthly report of parole classification activities, Frank G. Austin, Jr., Correctional Office, (Acting) Parole-Classification Officer, July 1951.
3. Director, memorandum for Mr. Loveland, May 3, 1950.
4. In October 1984, before the Alcatraz project was completed, the murder of two officers in a single day at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, resulted in a decision to terminate all programs and congregate activities. Establishing an “indefinite administrative segregation” regime produced controversy, which led the Judiciary Committee in the United States House of Representatives to authorize an investigation of what was called the lockdown. I was asked to conduct this investigation with Allen Breed of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. This assignment, which involved gathering data and interviewing prisoners and staff at the Rock’s successor evolved into an opportunity for me to expand the study of the effects of long-term confinement under conditions of supermaximum custody—in other words, a chance to replicate several key findings of the Alcatraz study for its successor. For a report of basic findings from this investigation, see David A. Ward and Thomas G. Werlich, “Alcatraz and Marion: Evaluating Super-Maximum Custody,” Punishment and Society 5 (2003): 53–75.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC COMMENTARY
After operations ceased at Alcatraz in March 1963, two books were published that provided descriptions of notable prisoners and events during the prison’s three decades as a federal penitentiary. The authors, both journalists, were at a severe disadvantage in that they did not have access to inmates, staff, or records from Alcatraz or the Bureau of Prisons. As a result these books contain numerous inaccuracies. The dust jacket of John Godwin’s Alcatraz: 1868–1963 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963) claimed, for example, that “the average con spent a great deal of his time hunting for homosexual companionship.” Interviews with any of the men who worked, or served time, on the island, particularly from 1934–1948, would have corrected that contention. J. Campbell Bruce wrote Escape from Alcatraz: A Farewell to the Rock (London: Hammond, Hammond, 1963) without the assistance of the Bureau of Prisons. In a meeting with James V. Bennett, he said the director told him, “I can’t let you talk with guards and take up their time and waste taxpayers’ money.” Bruce was also unsuccessful in obtaining any information from the warden or from the U.S. attorney in San Francisco; he concluded that “the veil of secrecy [around Alcatraz] hid nothing mysterious, only incompetence” (see 243–45).
In more recent years, dozens of books have been written about Alcatraz, and a number of them have particular strengths that make them worthwhile reading. Many are based on the records salvaged and assembled for this study after they were returned to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which then deposited them in the Western Regional Office of the National Archives, in San Bruno, California.
Surviving prisoners, employees, and their relatives, having become aware that each year more than a million visitors pass through the bookstores and souvenir shops on the island, have written personal accounts about their experiences on Alcatraz. These books do not attempt to cover the thirty-year history of the prison nor do they include information about the larger population of prisoners, but many of these authors claim to have had personal relationships with Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, Robert Stroud, and other high-profile prisoners, and to have special knowledge of incidents and escape attempts. That their experiences at Alcatraz induced so many of its former prisoners and employees to publish memoirs is one more indicator of the exceptional nature of this prison.
Several books provide valuable and reliable information related to the gangster era and should be of interest to historians, criminologists, legal scholars, and readers of this book. In Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–1934 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), Bryan Burrough provides detailed, well-documented descriptions of not only the criminal careers of gangsters such as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow, who were killed in altercations with federal agents, but also the criminal activities of those who survived these shootouts and lived to be co
nfined on Alcatraz. Of particular relevance are the bank robberies and ransom kidnappings engineered by George Kelly, Albert Bates, Harvey Bailey, Alvin Karpis, Arthur Barker, and John Paul Chase. The stories and the publicity surrounding the lives of these men continue in Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983). Powers places Alcatraz and the campaign by the FBI to subdue public enemies in the context of popular culture and the style of the mainstream media during the 1920s and 1930s. Also recommended is David E. Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918–1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Ruth explains how gangsters became important cultural figures during the first part of the twentieth century.
The authoritative source for detailed information on the history of Alcatraz as a fort, as a military prison, and after its conversion to a federal penitentiary is Erwin N. Thompson, The Rock: A History of Alcatraz Island, 1847–1972, Historic Resource Study, National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Denver, May 1979. Alcatraz Island historian John A. Martini has also written two valuable books about its years as a fort: Fortress Alcatraz: Guardian of the Golden Gate (Kailua, HI: Pacific Monograph, 1990) and Alcatraz at War (San Francisco: Golden Gate National Parks Association, 2002).
Several books by prisoners who were on the island during the gangster era offer excellent first-person accounts. James Quillen’s thoughtful description of his ten years, Alcatraz from Inside: The Hard Years, 1942–1952, ed. Lynn Cullivan (San Francisco: Golden Gate National Parks Association, 1991), is one of the best. During two lengthy interviews, Jim also gave important information for this book. On the Rock: Twenty-Five Years in Alcatraz by Alvin Karpis, as told to Robert Livesey (New York: Beaufort Books, 1980) covers most of the prison’s history. A book that combines descriptions of both criminal and prison life is Floyd Hamilton, Public Enemy #1, Acclaimed Books (Dallas, TX: International Prison Ministry, 1978). William Radkay’s recollections of his years as lawbreaker and prisoner on the Rock from 1944 to 1952 are the basis for a book by his niece Patty Terry, A Devil Incarnate: From Altar Boy to Alcatraz (Leawood, KS: Leathers Publishing, 2005). Willie provided valuable information to me not only about living conditions in other state and federal prisons where he did time and his life at Alcatraz, but also his relationships with his celebrity convict friends, particularly George Kelly, Harvey Bailey, and John Chase. His ability to recall past events with clarity and detail during our five interviews was remarkable.
