Escape from Alcatraz (3 page)

Relics of that proud fortress remain. Ballast granite from China that buttressed the citadel’s portal graces the entrance to the warden’s office. The blue sandstone facing of the blockhouse that guarded the wharf forms part of a warehouse with the cornerstone inscription, “Alcatraces 1857.” Some of the powder magazine, supply vaults, and 50,000-gallon cisterns bored in the solid rock serve as storage space for the prison.

No foe ever challenged Fort Alcatraz, and in less than a decade it was obsolete. The Civil War, as wars invariably do, produced radical changes in weaponry. The Army Engineers demolished the citadel, whose frowning parapets were now derided as “pretentious bastions,” and built a new fortification with walls twelve feet thick and quarters underground for the garrison officers.

Even before this swift fate the majestic fortress, for want of a martial mission, had begun to assume a less noble aspect. In its very first year—a year of grandeur that had spectators gazing in wonder from the hills of San Francisco—Fort Alcatraz quartered a few prisoners from mainland posts, in a wooden shack in the shadow of the citadel. At that time Alcatraz, if not escape-proof, was awesome enough to discourage an attempt.

Civil War prisoners began to dribble in after 1861, and in the fall of 1867 a brick building replaced the shack. A year later the War Department, doubtful that the guns of Fort Alcatraz would ever bark in anger, designated the island as a prison for long-term military offenders and incorrigibles. And The Rock officially began its long career as a bastille.

That career was as checkered as that of any of the men confined there. In the 1870s Alcatraz took the “orneriness” out of intractable Indian chiefs from the Territories of Arizona and Alaska. During the Spanish–American War, The Rock assumed the added role of a health resort: soldiers returning from the Philippines with tropical diseases were taken there to convalesce, along with soldiers who had crossed the Pacific on the same boat, in the brig. The influx of culprits from that conflict so overtaxed Alcatraz that presidential pardons were handed down by the fistful to reduce the congestion. When San Francisco lost its jail in the 1906 catastrophe, the 176 inmates were removed, temporarily, to Alcatraz. (The earthquake broke the cable to the island but did no damage to The Rock itself.) During World War I still a new class of tenants arrived—enemy aliens and espionage agents.

In 1909 the prison building in use today was erected on the site of the old citadel, resting on the solid masonry of the cisterns, the supply vaults, and garrison quarters carved in the rock—a foundation that did double duty as the foundation for the legend of the Spanish dungeons. It was built by the prisoners, at a cost of $250,000, plus the cost of their labor, $191,498.20.

By an Act of Congress in 1907 Alcatraz became the Pacific Branch of the United States Military Prison. That impressive status, along with the disturbing effect of the huge new cellhouse, kindled agitation to remove this penal stronghold from San Francisco’s aquatic front yard, an agitation that erupts perennially, always for the same reasons: economic and esthetic. Congress, fretting over its high cost, in 1914 debated turning Alcatraz into a West Coast Ellis Island on the assumption that the opening of the Panama Canal would bring “a large stream of European immigrants” direct to San Francisco.

San Francisco, espousing the esthetic view, once found a surprising ally in the Army’s Judge Advocate General, whose concern however was based on a military, rather than civic, pride. In a report to Congress in 1913 he deplored the infamous nature of Alcatraz as a tourist attraction: “It’s more the subject of inquiry than any other object in the harbor. The answer they receive, that it is a prison for confinement of our military offenders, gives an impression of the character of our enlisted personnel and of the discipline of our army, which is unfair and unjust to the service.”

Congress, impressed, pondered the matter for several years, then denatured Alcatraz by converting it into the Pacific Branch, United States Disciplinary Barracks. This was more than a mere euphemism. With serious offenders packed off to a federal penitentiary, the milder species of malefactor left on The Rock joined disciplinary companies, doing the work of soldiers, not convicts. The aim: reformation. If a commanding officer felt a man wanted to make good, he was restored to Army duty. While civilian prisons were racked by riots, The Rock hummed with industry. As an example of their efficiency, the soldier-prisoners in the late twenties built a Class-A, concrete, three-story structure—in use until recently as the Model Shop Building—at a cost of $150,000. An astonishing record was achieved: 89 percent of the men returned to active service made good, a credit to their regiment. The key was the certainty of discipline, without malice or favoritism. Penologists the world over came to the island, went away singing encomiums. Alcatraz was enjoying the finest reputation of its penal history.

Chapter 3

I
N THE EARLY THIRTIES
shock waves of panic swept the country. The gangster era, spawn of Prohibition, was in full blaze. No one minded much when a beer baron sieved a rival and dumped him coffined in cement into a river. It helped to decimate the underworld and made good newspaper copy.

But the evil spread beyond the bootleg traffic and the rackets. A new hoodlum element strapped on guns and strode forth. The Dillingers, the Baby Face Nelsons, and the Machine Gun Kellys. Rock-hard, ruthless. Outlaws of the Old West incarnate. Their stock in trade: bank holdups, kidnapings. Their tommyguns beat a rat-tat-tat of slaughter that echoed in big black type, and their outsized egos gorged on the scare banner lines.

They barged into homes and packed off adults, reaping fortunes in ransom. They made hit-run forays: an Illinois bank in the morning, an Indiana bank in the afternoon. Local authorities were helpless; the FBI, lacking jurisdiction, was stymied. Terror seized the people: where would a gang strike next?… in what town?… what home? Citizens of one Midwest community organized a vigilante group, loaded their hunting rifles, manned a concrete blockhouse across the street from the bank.

Congress acted. And on the scene came the now legendary G-men. Many fell in pitched battles, but in a remarkably short time they brought the gangster to his knees. Everyone rejoiced, except wardens. The gangster, an animal caged, proved too tough for his keeper to handle. The FBI had shifted the problem from the helpless constable to the helpless jailer.

A superbastille seemed the only solution; a special lockup to quarantine these mad dogs, as they were branded; something along the line of a Devil’s Island. This would permit wardens elsewhere to pursue their work of rehabilitating the redeemable, unhampered by these disturbers and the long-termers bent on escape. The Justice Department began searching for a site. Penologists voiced misgivings, but their warnings were whispers in a canyon: unheard, or unheeded.

The hunt for a perfect site for a super-lockup ended when the War Department announced in 1933 it was abandoning its Disciplinary Barracks on Alcatraz. The Justice Department took over, and Attorney General Homer S. Cummings asked James A. Johnston of San Francisco to set it up and take charge. Johnston seemed an odd choice as ruler of The Rock. Gentle-voiced and mild of manner, bespectacled, white-haired, he had more the look of a Latin professor, emeritus. This scholarly air contrasted incongruously the self-assurance he expressed: “I believe I know precisely what the Federal Government expects of me and that I can live up to the government’s expectations.” He was a banker and civic leader, twice president of the Commonwealth Club of California, but he had an earlier background to support his confidence. As a young department store clerk, he had studied law at night, entered politics, and won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. He was catapulted into the field of penology in 1912 when the governor picked him to clean up Folsom, the state’s prison for hardened criminals and scene of reported barbaric practices. Johnston’s work in pulling Folsom out of the Middle Ages earned him a reputation as a humanitarian. The next year he became warden of San Quentin, retiring in 1925 to practice law and banking in San Francisco.

The Rock became largely Johnston’s creation. He replaced the soft iron bars on most of the cells and the cellhouse windows with toolproof steel. He installed automatic locking devices and tear-gas outlets, gun galleries at either end of the cellhouse, and an outside gunwalk along the south windows of the mess hall. He put steel doors on the utility alleys between the banks of each cell block and sealed off the tops of the blocks to the convicts. He erected gun towers, set other towers on roofs, and gun boxes on the yard wall, and connected them with catwalks. He set gates with electric locks, controlled by tower guards, in the roads to the shops. He enclosed the entire prison area with a cyclone fence topped by barbed wire. He put bars on the sewers. And he established a 200-yard keep-out zone around The Rock, marked by orange-hued tank buoys. It all added up, beyond doubt, to an escapeproof, super-maximum-security prison. It was he who scattered metal detectors about so that a convict would have to pass through them at least eight times a day. And it was he who devised the Armorer system of control over the interior of the prison.

The Armorer, in his vault sealed on the inner side, accessible only from outside the prison, enjoys virtual omniscience about what is going on in the cell blocks. Microphones hidden about the prison relay sounds to him day and night. If a phone is off a hook for more than fifteen seconds a bulb lights on his board, and he dispatches an officer to investigate. He receives for the record twelve official counts a day of the inmate population (there are some thirty additional, special counts), and if a count reveals a prisoner missing he radios the Coast Guard and the San Francisco police. In the event of a riot or break, he hits the siren button to summon off-duty personnel and distributes weapons from an arsenal in his vault—rifles, pistols, submachine guns, gas grenades, ammunition.

The complicated array of gadgets through which a turnkey leads a new convict into the prison are even more complicated in the procedure of getting out.

In the reverse steps, the turnkey leads the way through the barred gate and the solid steel door into the middle chamber. Then he must buzz the Armorer, who scans the situation through his mirrors. If he sees a lone prisoner—or a prisoner standing suspiciously behind the officer—the Armorer lets the shield remain over the keyhole and throws a switch that clangs shut an emergency door of solid steel. The chamber becomes a trap.

To keep Alcatraz escapeproof, and to keep its desperate charges in line, called for exceptional custodial personnel. Guards were hand-picked from the staffs at other federal penitentiaries—men selected for efficiency, intelligence, incorruptibility. Crack shots, they were trained in a military style to combat readiness; trained in the art of judo, then further trained in ways to cope with unruly troublemakers, to match wits with plotters. The Rock required one guard to every three inmates, compared to a one-to-ten ratio in other prisons. Johnston, pleased with the custodial force he gathered together, used what was purported to be an anonymous convict’s censored letter to indicate the quality of the officers—a strange letter that, if typical, seemed further to indicate that Alcatraz was not the dread Devil’s Island it was reputed to be, and that its inmates were well above the level of mad dogs: “Another thing of which I approve highly is that the guards and the prisoners are not allowed to fraternize together. This does away with having to meet one another socially … and does away with a great deal of friction with which most other prisons must contend. The guards, too, have affected me favorably. I expected to meet a group of martinets that cracked the whip instead of using their brains. So far they have been extremely polite and have used patience and instructions instead of the orders and growls one would expect.”
¹

The Rock’s scheme of discipline conceived by Johnston, with its emphasis on certainty, rather than severity, of punishment without favoritism, was reminiscent of the predecessor Disciplinary Barracks, but the similarity ended there. Alcatraz held to the principle of punishment, not reformation, with nothing to be gained by obedience to rules, everything to lose by their violation. The rules fixed perhaps the most relentlessly rigid routine of any American prison in this century. Most talked about the rule of silence. No one could speak, unless absolutely necessary: to request a tool in the shop, or the salt at a meal. Chitchat meant the dungeon.

The food was good, and any man might heap his plate to match a Gargantuan appetite, but woe unto him who left so much as a sizable crumb. First offense, he skipped the next meal; a repeat offense, ten days in the dungeon on bread and water.

Even the garb had a punitive quality: coveralls, apparel the men resented almost as much as the silence. There was no commissary, no candy bars; the one concession here was a sack of tobacco once a week, except in solitary where smoking was forbidden, but not as a safety measure. There were no trusties, no bonaroo jobs as elsewhere. There was no honor system as an incentive to good conduct, no inmate council to consult with the administration on such matters as library purchases or educational activities. The men were confined in single cells, to enforce silence and discourage homosexuality. In the evening they could read censored literature, write letters, or study University of California Extension courses, in the eerie quiet of a school for deaf mutes. During a recreation period in the yard on Sunday afternoon, closely supervised to prevent fraternizing, the men could sit on concrete steps, or stand, or walk, or play softball, a game also closely watched to stifle competitive instincts as part of the overall design to deflate the criminal ego. If a convict could afford an instrument, and preferred the solace of music to the outdoors, he could spend his weekly recreation period practicing harmony, or discord, in a basement room.