Alcatraz (16 page)

• Escape must be virtually impossible. Convicts who had tried to escape other prisons using force or violence, along with those who had contrived escapes using ingenuity and subterfuge, must find opportunities for escape completely eliminated.

• Inmates must be deprived of opportunities to foment riots, organize resistance to the regime, or perpetrate violence against other inmates or staff.

• The power and influence of big shot racketeers and gangsters must be eliminated, not just reduced. The message has to be clear—no inmate could be allowed to conduct business from prison or enjoy any special privilege while confined.

• The flow of information into and out of the prison must be strictly controlled to inhibit rumors and to deny not only to the inmates but also to the press any basis for stories that would further glamorize “the criminal element.”

• The regime must represent real punishment. Inmates whose criminal activities earned them the “menace to society” label must finally be held accountable for their actions.

The Bureau of Prisons set down a variety of policies to accomplish these ends and create what it announced would be a “maximum-security, minimum-privilege” institution, a regime to be described in detail in the following chapter. Director Bates and his assistant directors realized that controlling personnel was vital in the control of prisoners. Thus, an important
component of the Alcatraz regime would be the requirement that all administrative personnel live on the island: the warden, deputy warden, captain, lieutenants, the chief medical officer, the chief steward, industry supervisors, important maintenance staff such as plumbers and electricians, and most of the guard force. In spite of the social isolation that this policy entailed, the BOP expected no recruitment problems because federal employment in the early 1930s offered more security than most other jobs. In addition, working at Alcatraz would include inexpensive living quarters with great views of the bay.

Having staff members reside on the same small island where they worked made them available in the event of an emergency situation, but more important it allowed the warden to establish strict rules for employee conduct both off and on the job. When not working, employees would be prohibited from discussing any aspect of prison operations with any person outside the federal prison system; this prohibition was intended to apply in particular when employees took the prison boats over to San Francisco, where eager newspaper reporters might be waiting. Relatives and close friends could visit employees on the island, but each visit required permission to board the prison launch. By limiting the ability of employees to socialize with people in the outside the world, the rules would greatly reduce opportunities for establishing corrupting relations. On the job, guards were told to refrain from talking with prisoners, apart from issuing orders and directing routine activities. This rule was intended to eliminate opportunities for prisoners to try to corrupt or improperly influence employees.

It was important that all rank-and-file officers and industries staff receive close supervision, and this was made possible by the small cell house and the limited inmate work and recreation areas. Compared to their counterparts at the big Atlanta and Leavenworth penitentiaries, supervisors at Alcatraz would have an easier time keeping tabs on both employees and prisoners.

A key policy decision by Cummings and Bates was to permanently bar the press from the island. Once gangsters, high-profile kidnappers, and bank robbers had been sent off to prison, they should not be further “glorified” by news stories or reports pertaining to their prison experiences. Continued attention from the press would only bolster the egos and reputations of big shot offenders and possibly earn them sympathy from the public. Wary of negative press, federal officials assumed that if reporters had access to inmates, they would write articles critical of staff actions, administrative decisions, the prison regime, and probably all of
the above. The only person authorized to release information or news about any person or event at Alcatraz would be the warden.
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Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington, D.C., would issue statements only on those occasions when government policy needed clarification or the justification for the prison needed to be repeated.

With Alcatraz destined to house a relatively small number of troublesome convicts—less than 1 percent of the total federal prison population—special rules were established for transfer to and from the island prison. Offenders would not be committed directly to Alcatraz after conviction in federal courts. A convict would merit transfer to the island only after he had demonstrated his inability or unwillingness to adjust at other prisons, or because his stature in the convict subculture or as a “public enemy” gave him undue influence over other inmates or members of the staff. Transfer from Alcatraz was similarly constrained. A punitive measure at other penitentiaries, transfer to another prison would be a reward for good conduct on the island. Yet it would come only after four or five years of improved conduct. No man was to be paroled directly from Alcatraz island. (According to guard Robert Baker, this policy was to assure Bay Area residents that Alcatraz convicts would not be released directly to their communities.) The only other legitimate way for an inmate to leave Alcatraz was by dying, being deported, or serving every day of his sentence (going out “flat”).

In late 1933 the Bureau of Prisons turned to the task of refurbishing the military prison. James A. Johnston—former warden at two California state prisons, San Quentin and Folsom—was appointed warden in November, began supervising the refurbishing process on January 2, 1934, and moved into the warden’s home on the island on April 5. Trained as a lawyer, Johnston was an influential businessman and banker who had important political connections to California’s United States Senator Hiram Johnson. But Johnston was also known to Sanford Bates as a member of the Wickersham commission. While Johnston assembled a staff, he worked with Bates and BOP headquarters to outline the policies and procedures that would be in place for the first prisoners, who were expected to arrive during the following summer.

Instead of transferring experienced guards from other federal prisons to staff the new special-purpose penitentiary, Bates and Johnston decided that operations would begin with a large contingent of new officers. The
advantage to this strategy was that new employees could be selected and trained as BOP administrators wished. The FBI was moving to establish higher standards for recruitment, training, and supervision of agents, and federal prison officials intended to move in the same direction. Another advantage of hiring guards with no prior experience was that they would not bring with them bad habits learned under other administrations or inappropriate relationships with any prisoners.

In addition to the custodial staff there were several stewards who managed kitchen operations, supervisors of inmate work crews at laundry, tailor, carpenter, and mat shops, two chaplains, a medical staff, including physicians who worked for the Public Health Service and orderlies (later called medical technical assistants), electricians, plumbers, painters, clerical workers, and a business manager.

To make the old military prison secure enough to control the federal prison system’s most influential convicts and its most prolific escape artists, the Bureau of Prisons undertook major modifications of three of the existing cell blocks. The old, flat, soft steel grills and doors that covered the front of each cell on both sides of B and C blocks and the B side of A block were replaced with bars of tool-proof steel; two gun cages were erected at each end of the cell house. Three new guard towers, to be manned around the clock, were constructed to supplement the existing one, and a fifth tower was installed on the northeast side of the powerhouse for use in emergency situations.
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Barbed wire fencing was strung between walls and buildings close to the sea and on the cliffs themselves. A new armory with tool-proof steel doors was constructed in the administration building outside, and immediately adjacent to, the main cell house. New steel detention sash windows were installed in the laundry and workshop buildings. Tear gas canisters were attached to the tops of columns in the center of the inmate dining room and above the main gate between the administrative offices and the cell house.

A “dead line” marked by orange buoys three hundred yards offshore ringed the island; outsiders who ventured within the dead line risked being fired on. Large warning signs painted on exterior walls and erected at other points on the island made the prohibition against coming too close clearly visible to vessels approaching Alcatraz from any direction. Employee housing—barracks for single men, apartments for families, and the houses for the warden, chief medical officer, and other senior staff—was remodeled and renovated. As the Bureau of Prisons completed its retooling and the army vacated Alcatraz Island on June 19, 1934, Warden Johnston announced that the prison was open for business.

Anticipating the arrival of the first inmates, the public and the press became intensely curious about the facilities, the convicts who would occupy them, and the regime those convicts would face. Reporters’ desire for information, however, ran up against the policy decisions to bar the press from the island and limit the release of public information.

In July Warden Johnston informed Director Bates that wire service and newspaper reporters were very anxious to obtain information about certain features of the prison; for one thing, they wanted to know how the prisoners would be controlled and prevented from escaping. “They have heard about gun detectors, wooden gates, light beams, robot guards, and electric eyes,” said Johnston, “and some of them seem to think that we have secret stuff that we are concealing.” The press also wanted to know the names of the “public enemies” to be shipped to Alcatraz and the dates and details of their transfers. Most reporters were assuming that Capone, Kelly, Bailey, and Albert Bates would be included, along with the surviving associates of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson, and (when apprehended) the leaders of the Barker-Karpis gang—in short, the most highly publicized criminals in the country. Johnston suggested that reporters be allowed to tour the prison before any inmates arrived “so as to be able to deny such requests immediately after we open.”
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Director Bates gave his approval. But he advised Warden Johnston to make only the most general responses during the press tour and to deny specifics due to “security considerations.” He recommended that Johnston purposely create “an air of mystery” about the measures that would safeguard the country from the prisoners.

On August 1, 1934, Attorney General Cummings and Director Bates officially activated Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary. Two weeks later, just before the arrival of the first inmates from Leavenworth and Atlanta, the members of the press were given a guided tour of the prison—on the occasion of an inspection of the island by Attorney General Cummings. Reporters’ requests to learn the identities of the notorious group of desperadoes who would soon populate the island were not assuaged by the tour. From that day until the prison closed in March 1963, the “air of mystery” so carefully crafted by the Bureau of Prisons shrouded the lives of inmates and employees and every event that occurred on the island. Again and again, a lack of accurate information led to speculation, rumor, and fantasy.

It was one thing to design a new federal prison for the likes of Machine Gun Kelly and Harvey Bailey and another to fill the 270 cells on Alcatraz with inmates appropriate to the prison’s mission. Bureau of Prisons officials knew from the beginning that once all the Kellys, Baileys, Capones, and other “public enemies” in the federal prison system—men federal officials many years later called the “worst of the worst”—were designated as Alcatraz transferees, there would still be room for a large number of prisoners of lesser notoriety. Therefore, in the autumn of 1933, about the same time the federal government announced the future opening of a prison on Alcatraz Island, the BOP set about determining who those other prisoners would be.

In October 1933 Director Bates asked each of the wardens at Leavenworth, the Ft. Leavenworth Annex, Atlanta, McNeil Island, and the new prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to nominate “not over fifty men who might be classified as desperate or difficult enough to be suitable for transfer to Alcatraz Island.”
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As Henry Hill, the warden at Lewisburg, understood it, Bates wanted the wardens to choose “unruly, antisocial, agitating characters” who were sources of “constant trouble,” men known as “potential ‘escapers’ and who by virtue of the terms of their sentence and the nature of their crimes would escape if possible,” and men who “attract unto themselves numbers of prisoners through whom they might seek to control certain elements of the population.”
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