Alcatraz (13 page)

Federal officials had tried to reform the existing federal prisons, but the attempts to establish higher standards of employee conduct, hold wardens more accountable, enforce rules uniformly, and restrict press access to certain prisoners had met with only limited success, especially when it came to high-profile prisoners such as Capone, Bailey, and Kelly. In 1933 J. Edgar Hoover and officials in the attorney general’s office came to the conclusion that the only way to effectively control and punish the nation’s “public enemies” would be to establish a new federal prison where influence peddling, special privileges, and opportunities for escape would no longer be possible.

On October 12, 1933, Americans listening to the Flag Association’s radio series heard U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings announce that the federal government was building a new prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for convicts with “advanced degrees in crime.” The prison, he explained, would symbolize the federal government’s determination to reestablish law and order in American society. “Here may be isolated the criminals of the vicious and irredeemable type,” said Cummings, “so that their evil influence may not be extended to other prisoners who are disposed to rehabilitate themselves.” Among the prison’s first inmates, he promised, would be Machine Gun Kelly and Harvey Bailey, and Al Capone would soon follow.
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Cummings’s address signaled the final phase of an executive branch plan to act decisively against the wave of crime that was widely perceived as a threat to American society. When the first inmates arrived on Alcatraz less than a year later and were locked up securely on the island fortress, the capstone of that overarching campaign would finally be in place.

The federal anticrime crusade had begun in 1929, more than four years before, instigated by newly elected president Herbert Hoover. Described as a “rational social engineer” by criminal justice history scholar James Calder, despite his notable lack of success in coping with the deepening Depression, President Hoover was predisposed to deal with the crime problem in new and different ways. When he came into office, J. Edgar Hoover had “cleaned out the Bureau’s hacks, nuts, and incompetents,” in his effort to reform a major component of the federal crime-fighting apparatus.
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The president recognized, however, that much more had to be done, with people across the country concerned that gangsters and thugs were free to prey on the public. In his inaugural address, he proposed a major federal effort to fight crime—becoming the first president to mention crime in his initial speech to the nation.

A believer in the power of enlightened leadership, science, efficiency, and innovation, President Hoover realized that the federal government had a major role to play in meeting the transjurisdictional challenges posed by state- and locality-based law enforcement.
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He recognized, too, that the federal criminal justice system, as it was then constituted, was not adequately filling this role.

The president checked off the first major item on his reform agenda in May 1929 when he appointed the National Law Observance and Enforcement Commission and charged it with investigating the scope and character of crime in America and the agencies arrayed to combat it. Chaired by George W. Wickersham, who had served as attorney general during the Taft administration, it became popularly known as the Wickersham commission. Although the commission’s reports on Prohibition received the most attention, it made an impressively broad-based effort to examine crime and the criminal justice system in the United States, aiming, in the words of Calder, to “draw on intellectuals and practitioners and employ new social science information from the fields of criminology, law, political science, psychology, public administration and sociology.”
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The commission’s report on federal prisons, released in 1931, would play an important role in shaping the regime established at Alcatraz two years later.

While the members of the Wickersham commission set about forming committees to examine the major issues in the administration of justice, President Hoover looked for a progressive penologist to expand and professionalize the federal prison system. He selected Sanford Bates, then Massachusetts commissioner of corrections, as the new superintendent of prisons. Bates had risen to national prominence as a result of his reforms in Massachusetts, which included creating the first special camps for male and female delinquents, enacting a wage bill for prisoners, and consolidating all jails and county houses of correction into a single agency.
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According to historian Paul Keve, Bates had turned down the position of superintendent when it was offered during the Coolidge administration; the salary was low, and his family did not want to move to Washington, D.C. More important, Bates was not assured that Coolidge and his chief advisors would advance the reforms he regarded as necessary. Three years later, Bates accepted the leadership of the federal prison system, convinced that prison reform was in fact a top priority for President Hoover and his attorney general, William D. Mitchell.
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After Sanford Bates was sworn in as superintendent on June 1, 1929,
he began to assemble new headquarters staff. Austin H. MacCormick, president of the Osborne Association, a prison reform group, was appointed assistant superintendent, and Bates induced James V. Bennett to leave his post at the Federal Bureau of Efficiency to take on the responsibility for developing federal prison industries. Held over from the previous administration, William T. Hammack was charged with developing a career civil service system and a staff training program. Meanwhile, Bates prepared legislation to reorganize the office of the superintendent (subsequently changed to “director”) of prisons into a new Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

Legislation formally creating the Federal Bureau of Prisons was approved by Congress and signed by President Hoover on May 14, 1930. The bill transferred to BOP jurisdiction a U.S. Public Health Service hospital located at Springfield, Missouri, to house federal prisoners needing medical or mental health treatment and authorized the construction of a new penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, several regional jails and minimum-security camps, and a facility for treating drug addicts. A women’s prison and several youth reformatories were also incorporated into the new Bureau.

In 1930 the federal prison system consisted of three penitentiaries established in 1891 by the Three Prisons Act: two were big, walled, maximum-security penitentiaries that held several thousand inmates each—in Atlanta, Georgia, and Leavenworth, Kansas—while the smaller former territorial prison located on McNeil Island in Washington state housed medium-security inmates from the territories of Alaska and Hawaii and federal law violators from the western states. The wardens were appointed according to their connections to political patrons, particularly United States senators. Guards received relatively low pay, no uniform training program existed, and promotion was based on currying favor with higher-ups.

As a result of having only three regional prisons and no system in place for classifying inmates, the populations in each penitentiary included first offenders and career criminals, compliant prisoners and men whose bizarre conduct would in later years call for confinement in mental wards or—beginning in the mid-1930s—in the special federal prison hospital at Springfield. New federal criminal laws related to drug trafficking, interstate automobile thefts, and Prohibition violations, passed between 1910 and 1920, had produced serious overcrowding. But most problems in the three prisons reflected the presence of untrained, incompetent, corrupt, and poorly supervised personnel. The challenge for the new superintendent
was to establish strong central control over these prisons and professionalize their staffs.

During the Hoover administration, penal policies and their underlying philosophies were fair game for reexamination, but various countervailing forces pushed in different directions. In general, there was a strong tendency to shape penal policy to better reflect the emerging literature in the social sciences that emphasized the importance of both rehabilitating offenders and deterring criminal behavior by “instilling respect and fear in the minds of those who have not the intelligence and moral instinct to obey the law as a matter of conscience.” Bates was committed to the rehabilitation side of the equation, while others in the administration, sensitive to the public outcry over rampant crime, focused on deterrence and advocated a tougher stance. Anticipating the reasoning that would characterize penal policy in the next administration, President Hoover recognized that it might be necessary to “segregate degenerate minds where they can do no further harm.”
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In a meeting with the president, Sanford Bates was asked which was more important: deterring members of the general population from engaging in crime, or reforming prisoners. His judicious reply was

Why not do both, Mr. President? Why not so contrive the punishment of the 90,000 that it will be both deterrent and constructive? A prison need not be dirty, or lax in its discipline; or managed by grafting officials, or overrun with idle men, to exercise a deterrent effect. Men can be punished, and at the same time their bodies can be rid of disease and their minds cleansed of delusions. They can be kept busy at productive tasks, and they can be given opportunities for education and betterment without weakening the sanctions of the law.
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As the reorganization and expansion of Bureau facilities proceeded during the early 1930s, however, philosophy took a back seat to immediate, on-the-ground reform. The problems described in the previous chapter—escapes and incidents involving staff corruption and incompetence—embarrassed Bates and his associates and made it clear that better selection, training, and supervision of new employees were urgently needed. Poorly run federal prisons were inconsistent with the president’s plan for the federal government to provide the states with a model of an efficient and professional prison system. The escapes in particular underscored the need for a prison to house the government’s most disruptive prisoners and sophisticated offenders—a prison that would be more secure than any existing federal penitentiary.

In early 1933, as Franklin Roosevelt began his first term as president, most Americans believed that in spite of all that President Hoover had done to fight crime and strengthen and reform the federal criminal justice system, the country was still under siege by organized criminal gangs. Violence, graft, and corruption plagued many urban areas, and bank robbery rates were at historic highs. But the problem was also perceptual. In the grip of the Depression, Americans had a psychological need to focus blame for their misery and anxiety on something they could visualize and understand, and that something was increasingly the “public enemy.”

The despair felt across the country that gangsters and thugs were free to prey on the public, was recognized in Washington, D.C.:

Oppressed by a sense that prohibition and the depression were draining American society of discipline and order, popular culture sought to explain the national plight as the work of a new breed of criminal. Once the image of the public enemy had been pieced together from the careers of the most famous criminals of the day, the myth took on a life of its own, persuading Americans that the authorities had neither the brains nor the courage to cope with what seemed to be a calculated rebellion against society.
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With the exploits of the gangsters and outlaws described in the previous chapters as real-life fodder, the press, Hollywood, and pulp-fiction authors constructed an image of a new breed of sophisticated criminal who preyed on law-abiding citizens. Because it undermined Americans’ faith in the ability of the federal authorities to maintain order and protect them, the public-enemy myth (and its underlying reality) posed a serious problem for President Roosevelt, his new attorney general, Homer Cummings, and Director Bates. Americans increasingly saw the government as impotent, lacking the intelligence, courage, resolve, or competence to maintain the rule of law. Incidents such as the June 1933 Union Station massacre in Kansas City, in which three police officers and an FBI agent were killed and two agents were wounded, only solidified the sense of government weakness.

Roosevelt recognized this perception as a threat to the government’s effort to restore the trust of citizens. According to historian Richard Powers, the president and Attorney General Cummings crafted a kind of public relations campaign with the explicit goal of promoting “a ‘new psychology of confidence’ in the law and in society’s ability to defend itself.”
As part of the campaign, Cummings wove into each big criminal case “a continuing Justice Department saga, an adventure cycle that demonstrated the solidarity of society, the strength of the law, and the potency of the government.” While other federal agencies waged their battles against the Depression, the Justice Department under Homer Cummings “was giving the country a war against an even more dramatic villain, the public enemy.”
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With Cummings’s encouragement, the media used martial metaphors when reporting on all the big cases, portraying each as a battle in an ongoing confrontation that the federal authorities, under the leadership of Attorney General Cummings, would ultimately win. One popular magazine explained the situation as understood by the typical citizen: “This is war time. The Roosevelt administration is fighting against fear, against depression, against moral decay. It is fighting against the octopus of crime.”
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