Alcatraz (62 page)

The last obstacle to Neumer’s conditional release came when he reimbursed the government for the destruction of fixtures in his D block cell from his earnings in the prison industries. He left Alcatraz on April 19, 1951, with $218; he was met in San Francisco by his sister and brother-in-law, who drove him to stay in their home in Los Angeles. Through the efforts of a cousin he got a job at a brewery loading beer cases on trucks—a job that had been approved by his probation officer. Later he worked as a carpenter and a cabinetmaker. He never came back to prison.
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Richard Neumer’s case is a classic example of a “surly and defiant” prisoner who was a management problem for many years and then made what staff called a “marked transformation.” As was true for many other Alcatraz prisoners, Neumer’s “transformation” was in part recognition
that his days in prison were coming to an end. Having a parole or conditional release date gave Neumer and other prisoners like him a realistic goal toward which to work.

As recounted in
chapter 4
, Burton Phillips committed one of the most serious transgressions of prison rules when on September 24, 1937, he slugged James Johnston in the head and then kicked the unconscious warden in the face while he lay on the dining hall floor. Phillips himself was rendered unconscious by a blow to his head from a lieutenant wielding a metal billy club. Phillips was taken to the prison hospital, where he remained for two weeks. He was then placed in a solitary confinement cell until October 26, when he was moved to a segregation cell. He did not leave the disciplinary segregation unit until June 24, 1946—almost nine years later. Phillips had never participated in any of the organized strikes or protests; his was the action of a solitary prisoner protesting the failure of the warden to respond to his demands.

During his first months in D block, Phillips was limited to one full meal each day supplemented by bread and water at other meal times. When he refused to eat the full meal, claiming that the absence of vegetables or milk caused him to get “bloated with gas” and would make his teeth “fall out,” he was forcibly fed through a tube down his throat.
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Over the nine years he spent in D block, Phillips was written up for “agitating,” creating disturbances, calling guards “God damn rotten cock suckers,” singing loudly, destroying government property (tore a strip from a sheet to make shoe laces), being insolent (“called Mr. Kaufman ‘a goddamn kike’ ”), and throwing an urn of hot coffee at inmate James Grove (after Grove threw coffee at him). Each of these infractions resulted in Phillips being locked up in a solitary confinement cell.

Phillips was allowed out of his cell twice each week for yard recreation and was permitted to take correspondence courses in physics, math, and chemistry. His devotion to the study of physics was given surprising support. It all began in October 1939, when James Bennett walked through the disciplinary segregation unit, stopped to talk with Phillips through the cell bars, and suggested that Phillips write to him and describe “how he felt about things.”

Phillips’s response covered sixty-six pages. He began the letter by advancing his theory that the horsepower of any internal combustion motor could be increased by 10 to 20 percent without an increase in the
weight of the motor. Citing his experience in “souping-up” automobile engines, he asked Bennett to refer his letter to the National Inventors Council to which he could provide the reasoning behind his theory and obtain a patent. Phillips then began an account of his early years:

Born in Kansas . . . of a fanatically Baptist mother and an aloof, agnostic father, I early acquired the habit of questioning theological beliefs. These pious bumpkins were . . . on the side of the angels and against the missing links of Darwin whose Theory of Evolution seemed to me to be the obvious truth.

Phillips went on to describe a happy childhood and, at age fourteen, reading books on biology, history, war and the works of H. G. Wells. He purchased a series,
The Boy Mechanic
, and decided to become an electrical engineer. After he graduated from high school, however, his parents’ divorce cost him the opportunity to study engineering at the University of Michigan. He took a job as a dishwasher, delivered newspapers, and worked in a large bakery, all the while resenting society’s failure to provide him with the means to pursue a university education and a career in engineering. In his long letter to Bennett, Phillips cited the work of Wells, H. L. Mencken, Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell. He wrote approvingly of the Nazi effort to create a super race through selective breeding. Returning to his life story, he wrote that when withdrawal from difficulties became impossible only one course was left to him—aggression:

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.”
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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.”
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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’ ”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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(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.”)
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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.
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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.

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.