Alcatraz (25 page)

These exchanges between the director, far away in Washington, D.C., and James Johnston reflect in very civil language the tension between Bureau headquarters trying to avoid negative publicity related to a very controversial penitentiary and a warden used to having almost complete autonomy in running a prison placed in his charge.

The most serious punishment that could be imposed upon an Alcatraz inmate was the removal of some or all of his good time. Most of the men on the Rock were quite accustomed to doing time in isolation or disciplinary segregation units, but the loss of months or years of good time substantially lengthened the actual time served. It also generally foreclosed the possibility of transfer from Alcatraz and thus weighed heavily against any consideration for parole. Through normal disciplinary proceedings, an inmate could lose days or weeks of the good time he had already accumulated, and he could lose months or years of accumulated good time—as well as good time yet to be earned—through a pseudo-due-process procedure carried out by a “good time forfeiture board” usually comprised of the deputy warden and the captain or a lieutenant. Such boards were constituted when an inmate committed a serious violation of prison rules, such as attempted escape or assault.

At these hearings, an inmate was not allowed to call other inmates as witnesses; he was not given advance notice of the charges lodged against him; and no appeals were permitted. Since inmates were asked insultingly, “Can you tell your own story or do you need someone to help you?” none asked for help. A verbatim transcript of the testimony was recorded, since the warden was required to submit a copy of good time forfeiture proceedings to the Bureau of Prisons’ central office in Washington, D.C.

No decision at Alcatraz regarding loss of good time—which in some cases amounted to as much as ten years—was ever overruled by Bureau headquarters. Throughout the prison’s thirty-year history, no inmate was ever given the right to a review of the reasons for his transfer to the island, officially informed of the reason(s) for denial of his request for a transfer from the island, or provided with the reasons for losing privileges or for being placed in disciplinary segregation or solitary confinement or for losing months or years of good time. Alcatraz convicts never had a law library; no lawyers from the civil rights division of the Justice Department, the American Civil Liberties Union, or any prisoner’s legal aid group ever visited the island; and no congressional committee or federal judge ever ordered an inquiry into conditions for prisoners on the Rock.

The restrictive regime at Alcatraz was intended to establish and maintain control of the prisoners. In this sense every rule, prohibition, and policy was a practical (though not necessarily effective) solution to the problem of managing a population of inmates defined by their unmanageability at other prisons. But there was also another reason for the tight controls on prison life—to project an image of severe punishment to deter criminal wrongdoing by the general public as well as to discourage escape and misconduct by federal inmates. This rationale, less apparent on the surface, was important to the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons.

The dual nature of the regime at Alcatraz helps explain the changes that occurred in prison rules and policies over time. When the prison was designed, it was hoped that the program at Alcatraz would simultaneously serve the purposes of internal control and external deterrence. But it soon became apparent to prison administrators that the practical concerns of running the prison were not always well served by rules rooted in the need to project a harsh image. The silent system is a good example of a rule that helped create an appropriately harsh image of punishment
but was almost impossible to enforce and thus did not contribute to inmate management.

The competing purposes of the control systems in place at Alcatraz also help explain the divergence and conflict that arose between Warden Johnston and the Bureau of Prisons headquarters around issues related to prison rules and practices. Johnston naturally made practical considerations of control a priority. When he felt that effective management required practices not in line with Bureau guidelines—for example, his use of the dungeons during the prison’s first years—he was not afraid to put them into effect. The punishment that occurred in lower solitary was explicitly forbidden by Bureau headquarters, but for almost four years Warden Johnston insisted that it was absolutely necessary to have the dungeon cells available to deal with the most disruptive rule breakers.
³²
Several cases in which confinement in dungeon cells involved handcuffing prisoners in a standing position to the bars in front of the cells were as close as Alcatraz got to physical punishment of prisoners.

It has been emphasized in this chapter that the solitary, almost monastic nature of existence at Alcatraz was intended to control inmates, not rehabilitate them. But is it possible that despite official intentions, keeping inmates isolated from the outside world, allowing them very few material goods, and requiring them to spend long hours alone had unforeseen positive consequences?

This possibility would not sound farfetched to the thinkers of the eighteenth century who considered the problem of the lawbreaker in society and put in place the foundations of the progressive penal philosophy that has shaped American penal policy for more than two centuries. In the early penitentiaries that arose from their theories, it was believed that solitary confinement, combined with religious instruction, would help produce self-reflection, guilt, and a determination to sin no more. In this way, imprisonment, while unpleasant and even painful, would be rehabilitative. Relating literature to prison reform in the late 1700s, John Bender points out the central importance of solitude and contemplation in this formulation and cites the classic popular novel
Robinson Crusoe
as an example. Crusoe was an idle, heavy-drinking hellrake who refused a place in his father’s business and struck out on his own. After a series of adventures, including being a slave, he is shipwrecked and cast up alone on a desolate island—a kind of solitary confinement. Separated from normal existence, Crusoe thinks with clarity for the first time. Reviewing his entire life, he transforms the despair of solitude into remorse and then resolve. Bender explains how this story works to put incarceration in a positive light:

Prison, now equated with solitary reflection, is first viewed as negative, random, punitive, vengeful; but it slides into another thing entirely—something salubrious, beneficent, reformative, and productive of wealth and social integration.
³³

Bender sees the equation of incarceration with solitary reflection as the basis of a “mythology of reform,” but when a prison is organized in such a way that austere solitude becomes a dominant feature—as it was at Alcatraz—it is difficult to completely disregard the possibly redemptive aspects of solitude and isolation.

The question of how the monastic mode of existence that prevailed on the Rock may have contributed to the unexpected “rehabilitation” of many gangster-era convicts will be explored in
part 3
. For now, it should be noted that the absence of visual and auditory stimuli on Alcatraz and the many hours spent in quiet contemplation were cited by many convict interviewees as important factors in their decisions to end their criminal and prison careers.

A Regime Tested

The answer came early to the question of whether a large custodial force could control a small group of trouble-prone prisoners confined to single cells with every element of daily life carefully regulated. The first shipments of prisoners from Leavenworth and Atlanta arrived on the island at the end of August and in early September 1934; organized inmate resistance came less than one month later, on October 1.

The protest began in the laundry, where inmates complained about the limitations on their privileges, particularly the denial of radio, movies, and newspapers. Warden Johnston received word that “the agitators would slug any prisoners who held out and perhaps wreck the laundry.”
¹
Johnston ordered that four convicts identified by guards as fomenting the unrest be locked in their cells, but at the end of the eight-minute morning smoking break, other “agitators” refused to return to their work posts. All of the laundry workers were promptly rounded up, marched back up to the cell house, and locked up. After questioning the entire crew, guards took twenty-one men to isolation cells. The remaining workers were allowed to leave their cells for the noon meal, after which they were told to return to their jobs; nine men refused and were taken to A block to join the first group of protesters. Since there were not enough isolation cells in this unit to accommodate thirty men, the more vociferous strikers were put in the barred alcoves below the floor of the main cell house—lower solitary, or what the prisoners called the dungeons.

Over the next four years lower solitary was used to house prisoners too loud and too insolent to be kept in the A and D block isolation cells. In addition to Leo McIntosh, Charlie Berta, John Messamore, and Clyde Hicks cited earlier, other dungeon residents in late 1934 and early 1935 included Edward Wutke from December 27, 1934, to January 4, 1935,
for refusing to work, insolence, and “profanity”; and Edgar Lewis from December 31, 1934, to January 14, 1935, for refusing to work, insolence, and “cursing guards and the deputy warden.”

Charlie Berta was sent to lower solitary again on February 2, 1935, after being told by a guard to hurry his shower:

Berta squared off as if he wanted to fight and said in a loud tone of voice, “God damn it, if you want to fight, come on and put up your hands.” I marched the other inmates out of the bathroom and when they had gone, Berta again offered to fight not only myself but guards Faulk and Chandler. All the time this was taking place Berta was very insolent.
²

No other dungeon cases were recorded during 1935, since no strikes were recorded during that year. But these cells came back into use in January 1936 when prisoners began another protest. Eight strikers, including those identified as ringleaders, were taken to the basement cells where they could talk to each other but could not communicate with the rest of the inmate population.

Harmon Waley, one of the Rock’s most obstreperous prisoners during the more than two decades he spent on the island, earned two trips to dungeon cells. His first, after being confined in an A block isolation cell for refusing to work, followed his refusal to stop singing in a loud voice, “they’ll hang Jim Johnston in a sour apple tree.” The disciplinary action taken against Waley was reported to Bureau of Prisons headquarters:

Waley was sent downstairs, that is to basement solitary . . . for insolence to the doctor . . . he would not work . . . and he was making noises to attract attention and disturb others in the cell house. It therefore became necessary to move him downstairs where he was kept until he promised to behave and was then moved back to regular solitary. [The entry in Waley’s file recorded his movement “from lower solitary to upper solitary D block.”]
³

Waley returned to the dungeon on September 27, 1937, and remained there for thirteen days; on this occasion his offenses involved participating in a work strike and “creating a disturbance in the isolation section of the cell house.”

They took me down the stairway through D block floor, and across to the cells under A block. There appeared to be four or five cells with the old-time flat bars, as was in A block itself. None of the cells had toilet, water, sink, bed, or anything save a slop bucket, which they did not empty. They gave us the three slices of bread each morning, then every fourth day we
got a small bowl of watery tomato soup, and I mean watery! There was no lights in the cells, and only one light, about 100 watts, in front of all four or five cells, it was pretty dark. The doctor came down every morning to see if there were complaints. Usually it was Hess or sometimes Beacher. Every morning and evening the guards gave us a drink of water. We wore slippers and coveralls, which we slept in since there were no blankets. The floors appeared to be rock or cement, the light was so bad it was hard to see for sure. We got fed up, and since they didn’t dump the slop buckets we threw the contents out into the corridor and started to urinate through the bars. Because of the stench the doctor refused to come down into the dungeon. No guards were stationed in the dungeon. We were down there fourteen or fifteen days, then back into D block. The dungeon cells that previously were under D block evidently had their bars scrapped for I saw none going over to the A side. James V. Bennett, head of the U.S. prison system, lied about the dungeon “not being used” to newsmen at the close of the Henry Young trial!
⁴

Six other protesters in the work strike joined him in lower solitary (see table 2).