Escape from Alcatraz (20 page)

Harris, understandably pleased with his eager pupils, commented: “A couple, at least, would never have gotten mixed up with crime if they’d taken up art. Some will never have any trouble making a living as commercial illustrators, if they get a chance. One or two could even become fine artists if they wished.” His students’ paintings decorate the large, airy office of the warden.

Warden Swope in 1950 brought a new diversion to The Rock—movies, every other weekend, in the chapel upstairs over the administration offices, reached by a stairway in the cellhouse. By now the work week had been reduced to five days and the men given an extra recreation period in the yard on Saturday afternoons. On movie weekends—mostly western and musical-comedy films, now and then a war picture, but never a gangster or sexy show—half the general population attended on Saturday, the remainder on Sunday afternoon. Only prisoners in good standing—out of D Block—were granted the privilege.

In 1955, another welcome innovation came. Radio outlets were installed in the cells at the suggestion of Director Bennett. The convicts were permitted to tune in on two approved stations devoted primarily to light music. They could lie on their cots, adjust their headsets and listen until lights out at 9:30—later, for major-league night baseball broadcasts. This inevitably led to wagering, and it was common such nights to hear a bet offered, and taken up, at adjacent cell fronts: “A hundred the Giants beat the Dodgers.” Not a hundred dollars, but pushups; and it became apparent on weekends in the yard who were the losers. Sometimes the bet was a hundred tailor-made cigarettes. They were now issued three packs a week.

Introduction of radio had little effect on the convicts’ reading habits. They still continued to peruse books—an average of seventy-five to eighty a year—as they listened; usually, light escape literature such as western novels, but volumes on philosophy and other intellectual fare were also well thumbed. Convicts could order books, or censored magazines, from a mimeographed library catalogue. They returned a book, along with a request for a new one, by leaving it on a wheeled table as they entered the mess hall for breakfast. Books and magazines were delivered to the cells during the morning by inmates on temporary library assignment. (The library now has about 15,000 volumes.)

University of California Extension has had a contract with Alcatraz since the thirties but in the past several years, for reasons unexplained, very few Rock inmates have enrolled, or been permitted to enroll. Some attribute the decline in Extension courses, once quite popular at Alcatraz, to the competition of radio, but the drop in enrollment has been fairly recent. University officials privately wonder about this in view of the great, continued success of their program at San Quentin where inmate students have gone forth, upon parole, to pursue careers that in many cases have won them distinction.

With the easing of restrictions came a lengthening of visits convicts could enjoy with a relative or now even a close friend—almost two hours a month. (To some, this is still a punitive limitation, as a relative may have to travel thousands of miles.)

Warden Madigan inspired a new kind of bloodletting at Alcatraz. In April of 1959 fifty inmates each donated a pint of blood to the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in San Francisco, credited to the account of the U.S. Public Health Service, whose medical staff at the Marine Hospital, San Francisco, is on call for emergencies. The blood donors enjoyed an equally rare social hour in the prison hospital, with sandwiches, coffee, lemonade, and cakes.

For some years the inmates had received a Christmas booty of six candy bars and two pounds of jawbreakers. Madigan added six cigars in 1957, two years later made another concession: any convict with two dollars in his account could buy a two-pound box of chocolates. He also created a new holiday spirit by providing special menus on Christmas and Thanksgiving, except for those in D Block.

All this did not mean that Alcatraz had been converted into a super-maximum-security country club, nor that violence had come to an end. In 1953 a score of convicts kicked up a fuss that quickly flared through the blocks. Warden Swope told the press: “It was caused by race prejudice. They demanded the right to be permitted to select their own cells. They challenged the authorities of the institution and created a disturbance,” indicating that, as always, the Department of Justice won. A few whites objected to living in a cell next to, or even opposite a black, and the disturbance they created was perhaps, outside of the Battle of Alcatraz, the worst bedlam that ever shook the cellhouse walls. They shouted curses to the rafters, banged tin cups on bars, beat their iron beds on the concrete, slammed hinged table tops against steel walls. They broke up toilets and washbowls, they set fire to papers and bed sheets, they even flung flaming garments into the corridors. And in the end, the challengers of the authority of the institution, not the Department of Justice, won. Thereafter, the black convicts were segregated in the bank of D Block facing Broadway. The tiers across the way, the inside of C Block, were set aside as a quarantine section for the temporary confinement of new prisoners.

Blacks were now segregated in the dining room by the simple process of ringing out inside B Block as a group. Racial segregation was even extended to the showers: whites first on Tuesdays, blacks first on Saturdays, the order reversed each week. At the movies, the black prisoners were directed to sit in the back rows.

Nor had the prison administrators experienced the last of their headaches over court petitions. An unusual incident occurred in February 1954, this time not the suppression of a petition but the denial, by an odd means, of a convict’s right to argue it in court. Prison officials had long maintained that no convict was ever sentenced to Alcatraz, nor ever paroled from there; he was “seasoned” at some other prison, later transferred back to that prison for discharge. This particular convict was booted right off The Rock.

He was Earl (Writ-a-Day) Taylor, an accountant who had been sentenced to five years in Leavenworth for tax evasion, then shipped to Alcatraz. He had no sooner settled in his cell at Alcatraz than he began firing off petitions, almost daily, thereby earning his nickname. He charged that his removal to The Rock was “a bum beef,” and at length a federal judge set a hearing for 10
A.M.
Wednesday, February 3. At 9:45 a guard came to Taylor’s cell and said, “Get your things together, you’re getting out.” Taylor later told the press: “They handed me five bucks and rushed me down to the boat. I didn’t want to be discharged. I had this petition for a writ of habeas corpus pending and I was supposed to be in court to argue it.” Taylor said he was convinced he was liberated, without parole restrictions, as a means of “beating that court order.” Prison officials declined comment.

Before that, in 1948, Warden Swope won a petition bout with Robert Stroud, the Birdman, but not before the judge offered a stinging reminder about the rights in general of men imprisoned. Stroud had petitioned the court to compel Swope to permit him to correspond with a literary agent and during one of the hearings Federal Judge George B. Harris commented, “To deprive a man of the fruits of the industry of his mind is to completely destroy that man.”

Said the prosecutor: “But a criminal is civilly dead.”

Retorted Judge Harris: “He may be civilly dead, but he’s not buried.”

Even with Warden Madigan’s excellent background at Alcatraz, and his experience with these very men, the old petition grievances kept recurring. After a prolonged dry spell, a flood of legal paper rolled over to the federal court during a fortnight in June of 1960. Madigan seemed hard put to explain the sudden rash of actions. “Perhaps it’s just a way of passing the time,” he told reporters.

Curiosity was not confined to the reporters. E. Herbert Schepps, law clerk of Federal Judge William T. Sweigert, likewise wondering about the tide of pleas, went to Alcatraz on his own initiative to discuss the matter with Madigan. He said the warden appeared evasive regarding the previous silence of the convicts but at one point let slip a remark: “Well, we sometimes consider a petition too scandalous and send it back to the prisoner.” This put the warden in the role of jurist, ruling on the merits of petitions. Schepps explained that federal judges were concerned about an individual’s constitutional rights, that men in prison have access to the courts.

“Wardens usually recognize these rights, even though convict petitions may mean extra secretarial work,” he said. “Many petitions may be frivolous, but what of the one with merit, the one that should be heard?” Men on Alcatraz have won their release by the time-honored habeas corpus process, by a showing they were held there unjustifiably.”

In September 1960, just months after this conference between law clerk and warden, a mysterious “lay-in” strike hit Alcatraz. The entire felon population refused to budge from their cells. It lasted more than a week and came to an end after a dozen suspected leaders were lodged in solitary, where they somehow managed to get hold of razor blades and slashed their heel tendons.

Madigan said convict tailors, paid seventeen cents a garment for making Army bakers’ pants, had started the trouble in a bid for higher wages but had never made any formal demand. Federal beat newsmen in San Francisco received reports, unconfirmed, that the strike and tendon cuttings were in protest against a denial of access to the courts.

This form of protest, common among chain-gang convicts in the South, broke out at Alcatraz in the fall of 1958 with a few scattered cuttings, then a batch of seven in one day, all kept secret. The first intimation to the press came after a rash of slashings that Thanksgiving. Warden Madigan said this is what happened: Razor blades were passed out in D Block around noon for the thrice-weekly shave. Three men, protesting the ban on desserts and smoking in solitary, severed their Achilles’ tendons and several others “scratched” their heels. For the next three weeks they enjoyed hospital privileges of sweets and cigarettes. Thereafter, electric shavers replaced blades in the isolation block. Nevertheless, a few weeks later two more took that drastic means to get their desserts and smokes, and the warden said it was a mystery how they came by the razor blades.

Actually, the Thanksgiving Day carvings reached an appalling toll. One of the surgeons summoned from Marine Hospital says, “Yes, I recall that Thanksgiving well. A real bloody holiday. Fourteen cut their heel cords, and four of us spent the day repairing the damage.”

Former inmates offer still another contradiction. Blades were not passed out in D Block three times a week. The men were permitted to shave only after a twice-weekly shower in the block’s own shower room. A guard stood by as the naked convicts shaved—with a
locked
safety razor, such as those used in mental hospitals, to prevent removal of the blade.

Early in January 1959, newspapers heard of more tendon slashings, and Madigan said two convicts again had obtained razor blades in some mysterious way. This will clear up that enigma, and the riddle of the blades in subsequent cuttings: They were smuggled to the men in the dark cells by the occupants of the light cells directly above. How
these
convicts acquired them cannot now be disclosed.

To understand the smuggling maneuver, consider certain features of the cells. The upper ones had a wash basin and toilet; the lower ones neither, only a hole in the floor connected to the same outlet that served the basin and toilet above, and flushed by the guard in the corridor. Before passing down a blade, the man above talked to the man below over probably the world’s most novel telephone system. He tapped a signal on the floor, and the man below bailed the water out of the hole with his paper cup (no tin cups in D Block). The man above drained the trap under the basin by removing the plug or blowing out the water, then spoke into the basin, his voice traveling down the sewer pipe to the man listening at the hole.

They could carry on a conversation in normal tones. “Sending down a blade, Stu,” and Stu would reply, “Okay, Mike, let her come.” Mike would drop the blade, tied to a long string, into the toilet and flush it. Stu would wait for the water to rush past, then reach in and pull out the string, untie the blade and say, “Okay, take her away.” And Mike would haul up the cord for future use.

Madigan, who had withheld the names of the “three” Thanksgiving cutters, readily identified this January pair as Joseph Wagstaff, thirty, a Washington, D.C., robber doing eight years, and Homer Clinton, forty-one, the Oklahoma kidnaper-lifer known as the Green Lizard, the trade name of a hair tonic he preferred over bourbon. It seems the warden forgot two: Jack Waites and Red Stetson, a brace of bank bandits. The surgeon summoned for the suturing also missed them—they were already back in the Dark Hole. A medical technical assistant, or MTA, had looked at their wounds, remarked “Hell, they’re only superficial,” and sewed them up.

Waites’s tendon had been cut, but not quite severe, and it kept bothering him. One day, about six weeks later, he fell down; his right ankle just gave way. His left leg, its heel cord cut in the mass Thanksgiving demonstration, was still wobbly, and he was unable to stand up. They carried him up to the hospital, and it so happened than an orthopedic surgeon was there, called over on a sacroiliac case. He inspected the scar left by the January repair job and ordered him into surgery at once. A witness recalls, “He found an inch of Jack’s tendon rotted away. He spliced it together, then asked who had done that needlework. The MTA owned up to it and, man, did that orthopedist chew him out! ‘This is strictly the work of a physician,’ he told the MTA, ‘and I don’t want to ever hear you messin’ around with it again.’ ” What happened to Red Stetson could not be ascertained.

During this latter-day period of The Rock’s existence, conditions in the hospital gradually worsened, report a number of former patients. To reach the hospital, over the mess hall, an ailing convict entered the hall and turned left to a locked gate. A guard opened it, and he climbed a stairway to another gate. He pushed a button. An officer came down a long hallway and let him in. He walked down that corridor through a third gate into an infirmary starkly grim as a morgue. Fronting the duty officer’s desk were three large ward cells, each with five hospital-type beds. In addition there was a doctor’s office, a dentist’s office, the chief MTA’s office, a treatment room, a surgery, a medicine supply room, a kitchen, two isolation wards (the “bug cages” of prison argot) for mental patients, and next to these a similar ward, also with both a gate and a solid wooden door, built especially for Stroud. The kitchen, where dietary meals were once prepared, was now reserved mainly as a retreat; the doctor on his daily visits usually had coffee there with the MTA on duty.