Alcatraz (63 page)

Joe Urbaytis accumulated a series of minor rules violations: for passing an article (a book of matches) between cells, wasting food (“left a large portion of dessert on his plate”), loafing, insolence, and speaking with profanity to an officer. When the January 1936 strike began, Urbaytis was one of the first men to walk off his job and was quickly identified as a ringleader, promoting the strike to other inmates. For these actions he was placed in solitary confinement and then sent to an isolation block cell, where he remained for the next seven months. When he was finally returned to the general population, Urbaytis continued to resist the regime with a series of infractions ranging from disobedience, refusing to work, insubordination, and insolence to participating in a strike, fighting with an inmate, and creating a disturbance. Each time he was placed in solitary confinement on a restricted diet and forfeited all privileges.
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Urbaytis’s conduct changed for the better after these violations—not as a consequence of months in the hole but as a result of a significant change in the length of his sentence. In October 1941 his fifty-year sentence was ruled invalid and his time was cut in half. With fifty years ahead of him when he arrived at Alcatraz, Urbaytis had little incentive to conform to the rules, but when his sentence was suddenly halved and he calculated the good time he could accumulate and deducted it from the new parole eligibility date for his remaining twenty-five-year term, a return to the free world suddenly appeared on the horizon and provided a powerful incentive for improved conduct. As Urbaytis’s experience illustrates, staff at Alcatraz used good time earned or yet to be earned in amounts that could add or detract years from a convict’s sentence as a powerful punitive sanction for infractions and equally powerful incentive for good behavior. Two months after his sentence was cut in half, a portion of the good time he had forfeited was returned because his conduct improved; the remainder of the good time he had lost was restored a year later, which advanced his release date to February 13, 1943. At the end of February
he was transferred to Leavenworth to spend a year in a standard prison environment before his release.

In 1946, following his release from Leavenworth, Joe Urbaytis was gunned down at an unlicensed after-hours supper club he operated. A newspaper account of this incident, titled “Joe Urbaytis, Gangland Desperado, Is Murdered,” ended with the statement “There were no witnesses to the shooting and Urbaytis died within a short time of wounds in the shoulder and chest, stubbornly refusing to name his slayer.”
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Jack Hensley arrived at Alcatraz from Atlanta on October 5, 1935, for the usual reasons—“the nature of the crime, duration of sentence, former prison record, and conduct of inmate in institution.”
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He had served previous sentences in the Tennessee State Penitentiary and at Tucker Prison Farm in Arkansas. With a confederate he had escaped from Tucker and kidnapped a taxi driver, who drove them to a town where they forced the postmaster and her husband to open the post office safe. Hensley and his associate took $27.89, bound and gagged the couple, and escaped in their car. Hensley lived off the proceeds of highway robberies for a year until he was apprehended, tried, and sentenced to twenty-five years for the post office robbery and assault. A psychiatric examination pronounced Hensley “correctly orientated in all spheres” but concluded that with an IQ of 77 he had “border-line efficiency . . . without psychosis.”
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After Hensley attacked another prisoner in the dining room and then “defaced” his isolation cell while continuing to “sing, whistle, and talk,” he made his way onto the list of prisoners who were being designated to populate the new prison at Alcatraz.

Hensley’s trouble on the Rock began two months after his arrival and continued for years. By December 1948, after his conduct finally improved and he was transferred back to Leavenworth, he had accumulated fifty-one misconduct reports, mostly for causing disturbances by talking too loudly or fighting with other prisoners. He was also cited for being a “mean leader and a dangerous agitator” in two strikes, for which he spent eleven days in lower solitary and twenty days in closed-front isolation cells on the third tier in A block. He resided for many months in D block isolation and solitary confinement cells as well as in the isolation cells in A block for insolence, possession of contraband, disobeying orders, refusing to work, creating disturbances, and assorted offenses ranging from smoking violations and wasting food to refusing to clean
his cell and entering the cell of another inmate. A 1945 special progress report commented that though Hensley’s misconduct reports were “not serious in nature,” their frequency made him a “great nuisance . . . and reflected his ‘maladjustment.’ ”
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The Alcatraz staff attributed Hensley’s misconduct to a feeling of hopelessness related to a detainer that required he be returned to the Tucker Prison Farm after he had served his federal sentence. Tucker Prison Farm was noted for its brutality and for forcing prisoners to work as indentured slaves for private contractors.
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In addition, a psychiatric assessment by Dr. Ritchey, the chief medical officer, diagnosed Hensley as having a “Constitutional Psychopathic Inferiority, Paranoid Personality.”
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In 1940, when Bureau headquarters was concerned about the possibility that mental health issues were becoming a problem on the island, Dr. Ritchey was asked to produce a list of prisoners suffering from “clearly defined constitutional psychopathic inferiority” to be considered for transfer to the Springfield Medical Center. Jack Hensley’s name appeared on a list of eighteen, but like almost all of the others he was never transferred to Springfield.
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Hensley was also an active litigant. His first action in federal court, on November 21, 1934, shortly after he arrived, challenged the legality of his imprisonment. In October 1941 he filed a writ of habeas corpus arguing that his convictions and sentences should be voided because he did not have the assistance of legal counsel, that he did not voluntarily waive the right to the assistance of counsel, and that the U.S. attorney denied him assistance of counsel. He also contended that he was deceived and coerced into pleading guilty by the U.S. attorney, who threatened him with a sentence of thirty-five years and told Hensley that if he pleaded guilty he would get a term of only ten years—which was not the sentence he was awarded. In October 1943 he applied for executive clemency; he wrote letters to Congress and continued to file appeals and writs until 1946.

In September 1948, with his conditional release scheduled for June 1950, Hensley was transferred first to Leavenworth and then to Atlanta. He maintained clear conduct records in both institutions. A new test raised his IQ from 77 to 100 and he was regarded as a reliable worker. In April 1950 Hensley was conditionally released from Atlanta and taken into custody by Arkansas authorities. After serving only a short time in Arkansas, he was conditionally released to Memphis, Tennessee.
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From the beginning of his federal sentence in 1934, Hensley had maintained correspondence with Willie May Tanner, reported in probation documents to have “a good reputation in her community.” Hensley’s release
plan called for him to marry Tanner as soon as possible after his release. (She had written to the warden in Atlanta pleading for his release: “he is awful dear to me and I am living and praying for the day when he can return to me . . . will you please do this for a woman that has loved and waited for 20 years for her one and only love?”)

Hensley married Tanner and remained with her for three years until, as he put it in a letter to James Bennett, “things just drifted from bad to worse and now my wife and I have separated.”
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Hensley moved in with his aged mother and went to work for a company that manufactured furniture for churches. He informed Bennett that he had learned about machinery and woodworking at Alcatraz and had become the supervisor of eighteen men working under him. His postrelease arrest record, during eight years on conditional release, listed one arrest for selling heroin to undercover officers in Washington, D.C. The circumstances of this offense are unclear since no jail or prison time followed and he continued under conditional release supervision to its termination in 1959. Jack Hensley had accumulated more disciplinary reports at Alcatraz—fifty-one—than his fellow prisoners, but that record did not stop him from building a successful life in the free world, or from sending a Christmas card every year to his principal captor, James Bennett.

Howard Butler’s criminal career, like Richard Neumer’s, was unremarkable and would normally have qualified him only for confinement in a standard medium-security prison. He served some jail time for minor offenses and an eight-month sentence in an industrial school. Then Butler and a co-defendant robbed four gas stations in Washington, D.C., taking $35 and a radio in one case, $40 in another, $10.80 in a third, and $47.40 in the fourth. He received what appears to be a rather stiff sentence of twelve to twenty-two years for these robberies, and he was committed to the District of Columbia’s Lorton Reformatory. There, he combined consistent insolence to staff and refusal to obey prison rules with assaultive behavior toward other prisoners.

After compiling eleven misconduct reports, he was committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He was diagnosed as a “constitutional psychopath” and returned to Lorton, but because he could not get along in a dormitory setting, D.C. authorities received permission to transfer him to the Bureau of Prisons. Butler was sent to the Atlanta penitentiary, but living in a cell did not improve his conduct.
Within a year, he had been locked up in solitary confinement on three occasions, twice for being disorderly and once for using profanity. After another psychiatric evaluation confirmed the earlier diagnosis, the Atlanta staff concluded that Butler would continue to be a problem “due to his inability to learn by experience” and predicted that he would “continue to agitate and resist . . . properly constituted authority.” They asked Alcatraz to take their problem.
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Butler arrived at the island in June 1940, where a neuropsychiatric examination agreed with the “constitutional psychopath” diagnosis but added that the prisoner had a “paranoid personality.” (Butler told Dr. Ritchey he had asked to be placed in isolation at Atlanta so that he could avoid the “nagging of officers.”)

Howard Butler might have been an inconsequential felon, but the staff and inmates at Alcatraz came to know him well over the next ten years due to his continued inability to submit to “properly constituted authority.” He was written up thirty-seven times, including nine times for fighting (each with a different inmate), fourteen times for infractions in the dining hall (ranging from loud talking and wasting food to causing confusion), and on many occasions for insolence, making threats to officers, and refusing to work (his usual response to guards was “fuck yourself”). In addition to refusing to obey orders and fighting with his fellow prisoners, he was caught on two occasions on his knees “committing an act of degeneracy,” which made life with his fellow prisoners even more difficult. Altogether he lost 2,640 days of good time and spent many months in D block because he was labeled “a sex pervert and a troublemaker.”

But by 1948, Butler was eleven years older than when his term began, and following a familiar pattern for prisoners at all penitentiaries, including Alcatraz, his conduct improved. He completed a course in English, read books of fiction, subscribed to five magazines, and gradually saw his good time restored. Although black, he tried not to associate with other black prisoners, particularly those who had been sentenced for offenses committed while they were in the military.
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Staff reported favorably on the turnaround of Butler’s conduct even though he had occasional fights with other prisoners, interpreting these events as the consequence of his being provoked by other prisoners about his homosexuality, and because “his courtesy and affability with staff does not enhance his popularity.” Large segments of his good time were restored, and in June 1952 he was conditionally released from Alcatraz to the District of Columbia with $195.

In 1954 Butler’s freedom was threatened when he was arrested for
having “carnal knowledge” and committing sodomy on two girls, one age thirteen and the other age fourteen, at the residence where they all lived. Subsequently, several of the charges were dropped and a trial on the other charges resulted in a hung jury. The assistant U.S. attorney then advised the court that all charges should be dropped because “the two girls were not truthful and both had bad reputations.” Butler’s supervision in the community was continued; he returned to his job as a steam-fitter and continued working toward reconciliation with a woman he had married before his imprisonment.
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In these cases of persistent individual resistance the actions, irrational as they may have seemed to others, stemmed from the prisoners’ unique psychological needs and personal histories. Some believed they were victims of injustice and acted out of anger and even a sense of moral outrage; others, perhaps with a stronger than usual drive to preserve their individual integrity and not bow to the humiliating demands of the regime, found that acting self-destructively was the only available way to assert their individuality. And most of these men seem to have been caught up in a self-reinforcing cycle in which their resistance brought on sanctions that only increased the anger, despair, and hopelessness that motivated the resistance in the first place.

These cases also cast doubt on assumptions about the relation between prison behavior and postrelease success. Interviews with staff revealed their uniform judgment that persistent rule breakers were highly unlikely to stay out of prison after release. In fact, this view was reflected in the rationale for the creation of Alcatraz. However, as intimated in this chapter and described more fully in
chapter 13
—and despite prodigious records of rule violations at Alcatraz—Howard Butler, Jack Hensley, Richard Neumer, Burton Phillips, and Harmon Waley all had productive lives after they were finally released and never returned to prison.
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These cases raise important questions about the assertion that troublemaking in prison leads to troublemaking after release. This proposition will be discussed further in
part 3
, where the postprison experiences of all the men released during the gangster era are examined. Contrary to both conventional and penological wisdom, more than half of the Alcatraz convicts, including the rule breakers, decided in prison that they had served enough penitentiary time and that the remainder of their lives should be spent in the free world.