Alcatraz (83 page)

For a significant number of Alcatraz inmates, however, conformity had its limits. They were not willing to do everything the regime demanded, that is, relinquish all control over individual decision making. To continue managing some elements of their own existence, they resisted in ways large and small, cryptic and overt, individual and organized. They refused to obey orders, bent the rules, gave insolent replies, exploited their work assignments for contraband and organized work strikes and other protests. Even the most innocuous of these acts brought disciplinary action, which explains why the most frequently occurring violations at Alcatraz were for “creating a disturbance,” “insolence,” and “refusing to work or to obey orders.” A man who refused to obey an order was quickly written up to assure that the first hint of resistance to staff authority brought punitive consequences. Thus, even moderate resistance might over time result in a relatively long misconduct record. For some prisoners—Harmon Waley is a good example—incidents of more serious misconduct often began with a relatively minor attempt to resist; for this prisoner and others like him, being written up for refusing to obey a direct order could lead to rage, physically aggressive behavior, or a self-destructive act, as in the case of James Grove’s suicide.

Both prisoners and guards were aware, even if just in the back of their minds, of the psychological and institutional significance of resistance-related misconduct and treated it accordingly. Many of the officers we interviewed commented that if they had been prisoners there would have been occasions when they would have been insolent or refused to obey orders. Flaring up and telling an officer, a work supervisor, or even the captain or deputy warden “where to go” was seen as a normal response for men who could not, would not, “put up with the bullshit” any longer. Staff and prisoners thus drew a line between insolence, disrespect, and even fights among convicts (considered normal due to the obnoxious or provocative personality characteristics of some prisoners) and more serious acts of rebellion such as assaulting an officer, leading a riot, or attempting to escape. Incidents in the latter category not only involved implicit threats to physically injure personnel who tried to block escape paths to freedom but also threatened the reputation of Alcatraz as an escape-proof penitentiary. Although rule violations in the former category were
not ignored, they tended to be treated very differently from acts of rebellion, for which the full weight of the institution sanctions were usually brought to bear.
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Prisoners who occasionally made decisions not to go along with the program were more likely than conforming prisoners to maintain their psychological well-being and not lose their essential selves to the institution. Inmate and staff interviewees alike agreed that prisoners who resisted the regime were more likely to succeed. Their judgment was that a man who never protested the ever-present, overbearing regimen on the island was someone who would have difficulty functioning in the free world where many decisions had to be made every day.

With rule breaking often related to resistance, Alcatraz inmates with long records of misconduct were not only different from their more conforming peers on the Rock, but they also differed from inmates who accumulated many misconduct reports at standard federal penitentiaries. Our finding that Leavenworth inmates with the worst records of misconduct were more likely to return to prison after their release than those with better records bears out this point.
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While the unique character of the population sent to Alcatraz and the unique character of the prison itself must be taken into account, there are nonetheless clear implications from these findings for supermax prisons.

No more pervasive criticism was directed toward Alcatraz throughout its thirty-year history than the assertion that the prisoners—among them the toughest prisoners in the federal system—were psychologically damaged by their confinement on the island. Allegations of insanity were numerous. The article that appeared in a San Francisco newspaper a year after the first prisoners arrived, cited in
chapter 5
, was an example of the kind of hyperbolic sensationalism directed at Alcatraz; it repeated allegations from an Alcatraz convict, supposedly “smuggled” in a note to the mainland, that three prisoners had been driven mad by the harsh conditions of confinement, one had committed suicide, and several others had tried to take their own lives but failed.
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These reactions were said to be the consequence of doing time under a regime with no privileges, almost complete absence of contact with family members or anyone else in the free world, the inability to earn a parole, and the sense of hopelessness that went with the prospect of serving very long sentences.

These claims of psychological damage have survived to the present. They owe their staying power to their congruence with the media image of Alcatraz, and the possibility of negative psychological effects due to long-term confinement in contemporary supermax prisons has remained an issue for prisoner advocates and some mental health professionals. Critics of long sentences employ terms such as “prison psychosis,” “deterioration,” and “degeneration” to describe negative psychological effects, while academic researchers refer to the “institutionalization,” “colonization,” or “prisonization” of inmates. The latter term has been defined by MacKenzie and Goodstein:

a process involving the following: losing interest in the outside world, viewing the prison as home, losing the ability to make independent decisions, and, in general, defining oneself totally within the institutional context … this constellation of reactions is assumed to be traumatic to the individual’s personality and sense of self and to be a particular source of difficulty when the individual is ready to leave the institution.
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This project made an effort to gather data to test the accuracy of the complaint that Alcatraz caused psychological deterioration. Our task was complicated by the fact that the psychological assessments in inmate records from the 1930s and 1940s must be treated with skepticism, because they were made by the chief medical officer, who was trained as a surgeon, not a psychiatrist. (No social worker or psychologist was ever employed at Alcatraz.) Even more unreliable are descriptions of behavior in inmate files that seem psychological on their face—“antisocial personality,” “psychopath,” “emotionally unstable,” “impulsive,” “easily provoked,” and so on—but came from custodial personnel and work supervisors trying to make sense of behavior they regarded as puzzling, irrational, or threatening. Lieutenants and captains, like guards, took the position that only they “really knew” the prisoners; in their view the consulting psychiatrists from the Public Health Service who were called to the island to decide whether a prisoner was psychotic were subject to the guile and manipulation of men who are experts at “conning” the naive.

With only rudimentary social history and no standard psychological test data available, we focused on cases in which there was a diagnosis reported by a mental health professional. These judgments occurred when the custodial staff was convinced that an inmate’s behavior was so bizarre that genuine mental illness might be present and called for psychiatric consultation. Thus, the empirical basis for testing the claim that the Alcatraz regime was psychologically destructive was limited to cases in
which the staff asked for psychiatric evaluations, along with a few judgments of what seemed objectively to be bizarre behavior made by the prison’s chief medical officer. Confirmed diagnoses of serious disorders generally resulted in confinement in the mental health ward in the prison hospital, followed by transfer to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Springfield, Missouri.

Despite numerous allegations that confinement at Alcatraz constituted “cruel and unusual” psychological punishment, we found that only a very small number of men experienced serious mental health problems during their confinement on the island. Of the 508 men whose records in prisons before, at, and after Alcatraz were included in our study, forty-one (8 percent) were diagnosed as psychotic during their confinement at Alcatraz. This figure has to stand on its own, because we do not know what proportion of prisoners in a standard penitentiary during this era displayed symptoms of serious mental health problems, and we do not know whether the psychological problems experienced by these Alcatraz prisoners would have appeared in any other prison in which they were housed.

It is likely that at least some of these forty-one men brought their psychological conditions with them to the island—in other words, their mental illness cannot be attributed solely to the effects of the Alcatraz regime. Of the twenty cases for which relevant information was available, five had a prior history of psychotic episodes or had been previously certified psychotic. In addition, there is the possibility that in some cases Leavenworth or Atlanta staff mistook genuine pathological behavior for rationally calculated misconduct or feigned mental illness and transferred to Alcatraz an inmate who should have gone to Springfield. Such may have been the case for nine prisoners in the study sample, who were diagnosed as psychotic by consulting psychiatrists within their first six months on the island—possibly too early for Alcatraz to have caused their mental declines.

To evaluate the reliability of these diagnoses, we reviewed transfers to the Springfield Medical Center and the records of those inmates who spent time in the mental ward at Alcatraz. The choice of these two indicators is based on the assumption that inmates who had been diagnosed as psychotic or seriously mentally ill would have been hospitalized in at least one of these two settings. Seventeen of the forty-one inmates were placed in Alcatraz mental wards one or more times and twenty-five were transferred to Springfield.

The dilemma posed by prisoners who had been diagnosed as mentally
ill but assaultive at other prisons emerges clearly from the example of number 1800. He began a seventeen-year sentence for bank robbery at the Atlanta penitentiary in March 1942 and was soon involved in assaults on other inmates. After being diagnosed as suffering from “Dementia Praecox, Catatonic and Paranoid Features,” he was transferred to the Springfield Medical Center in November. He and two other inmates attempted to escape through the front gate by taking hostages, including the warden and his secretary. He threatened staff with a knife and had to be forcibly subdued, and the Springfield neuropsychiatric staff supported 1800’s transfer to Alcatraz.

He arrived on the island in March 1944 and soon accumulated fourteen misconduct reports, including destroying the toilet, sink, bedding, and light fixtures in his isolation cell, as well as trying to stab inmate Henry Young. In June 1944 senior officer Frank Johnson reported being attacked by the prisoner: “While being questioned by Deputy Warden Miller, [no. 1800] became enraged and struck at me. I warded off the blow and hit him over the head with my billy.”
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In November 1947 number 1800 was checked into the prison hospital, where he told the chief medical officer that he had three hummingbirds in his cell. The doctor and a guard searched his cell “but found no birds [and 1800] then stated that someone had stolen his birds. He did not eat his supper, breakfast or dinner [because] he wanted his hummingbirds. . . . He knew that the Deputy Warden had put these birds in the stew and he did not want to eat his little birds.”

In February 1948 he was back in the prison hospital, as the surgeon–chief medical officer reported to the warden,

[admitted] with another attack of catatonic excitement . . . a type of schizophrenia in which the patient is very violent, often needs restraints, and is often a very difficult nursing problem. This patient is very untidy and filthy in behavior. He is completely unable to care for himself. It has become a daily routine to clean his cell of feces and feed him. . . . It has been necessary to restrain him in order to prevent him from killing himself. It has been necessary to administer large doses of sedatives to quiet him. . . . It is advisable to transfer this man to the Medical Center as soon as possible.

On April 13, 1948, number 1800 was transferred to Springfield, where the staff determined that his fear of being killed by another inmate (Henry Young) was the cause of his “catatonic excitement” evident at Alcatraz and that, having been removed from the island, “he had a remission of this condition.” His transfer to Leavenworth was recommended by Bureau
headquarters, with a proviso, “If he causes trouble, consideration could then be given [to a return] to Alcatraz.” Determining the extent to which confinement at Alcatraz, in and of itself, provoked serious mental health problems appears impossibly complex in cases like this.

Other studies of psychological disorders associated with long-term confinement have reported a positive relation between the onset of these disorders and length of confinement.
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More specifically, they found that as the amount of time served increased, the severity of psychological problems experienced by the inmates also increased. This line of research led to the expectation that the onset of these problems would occur after the inmates had spent a substantial amount of time at Alcatraz. The data from our study, however, did not support this prediction. Of the forty-one inmates diagnosed as psychotic at Alcatraz, sixteen received these diagnoses within the first year of their confinement; only ten inmates had been at Alcatraz five years or longer.

The preceding analysis suggests that if the conditions of incarceration at Alcatraz promoted the onset of psychosis, they did so only for a very small number of inmates. This conclusion was supported by almost all of the one hundred former prisoners and employees we interviewed. They identified the same handful of inmates as “crazy”—generally defined by the prisoners as not being able to “stand up” to the rigors of doing big time. Only three of fifty-four inmate interviewees reported that their own mental health had been seriously affected by confinement at Alcatraz; however, two of these men maintained that they had not been so negatively affected that hospitalization, psychotropic medication, or psychotherapy was required; no. 1600 was the exception (see
chapter 13
).