Alcatraz by David Ward Read Free Book Online

such duress? Was he a murderer or a victim? 5
    This review followed a news story about the making of the film, which had appeared in the
Times
ten months earlier. In that article, the director related how the brutal treatment of Young “set off a chain of events that helped lead to the closing of the ‘Rock,’” and actor Kevin Bacon reported: “To be honest, I almost went nuts playing this part . . . there’s no light. It’s wet. You’re in shackles. You’re naked. It’s horribly cold. Thereare rats and bugs. It was a nightmare and I was in a controlled situation. I can’t imagine living it.” 6
    What
Times
readers and viewers of the film did not know is that the conditions described by Mr. Bacon were created for the movie and did not apply to Henry Young; Young was never confined in an underground vault; there were no rats in the cells at Alcatraz; and prisoners were not shackled, even in disciplinary segregation cells. Nor was Young tortured by “a sadistic warden” wielding a straight razor. A multitude of other events and claims in the film—including Young’s suicide two years after the trial—were also false. This film, however, continued the standard media portrayal of Alcatraz prisoners and their keepers. That the film could claim it was based on a true story, and the most prestigious newspaper in the country could call it “semi-true,” are indications of how deeply the Alcatraz myth has been ingrained in American culture.
    More than a dozen movies have been made about Alcatraz since it opened and along with countless documentaries on cable television, the image of Alcatraz as “Hellcatraz” and “America’s Devil’s Island” has been sustained. 7 Not only has the prison retained its highly negative reputation, it has even become a symbol of harsh and inhumane punishment in other parts of the world. High-ranking American pilots in the Vietnam era who became prisoners of war, for example, used the label “Alcatraz” to describe a prison where “die-hard resisters” were subjected to particularly brutal conditions. 8 More recently, the
New York Times
reported that prisoners confined “at a notorious jail in Smrekovnica north of Kosovo’s capital Pristina . . . were beaten, stripped of their identification cards and given little to eat. A sign there read: ‘Welcome to Alcatraz.’” 9
    Behind the myths created and spread during its service as a federal prison and a tourist attraction is another Alcatraz. It is a place where prisoners deprived of the ability to make decisions about the most basic aspects of their lives nevertheless coped, adapted, and struggled to retain their sense of self; where men followed an ethical code, steadfastly refused to inform on their fellow inmates, and presented a common front against the government’s attempts to exert maximum control over their behavior. It is also a place where a hard-nosed warden who survived a vicious attack in the mess hall made an exception to the rules to allow his attacker to receive the materials the man needed to continue his education in prison. In the real Alcatraz, inmate-on-inmate violence was relatively rare, especiallycompared to modern prisons, and guards did not employ corporal punishment. Although the inmates confronted an extraordinarily severe regimen, they were not pressed into chain gangs or subjected to the inhumane living conditions and physical abuse suffered by many of their counterparts in some state prisons of the time, and they had more freedom to move about and more congregate activities than those locked up in today’s supermax prisons.
    The main purpose of this book is to tell its story—or rather, the many stories that make up an authentic history of Alcatraz—as accurately and completely as possible. In relating this history based on hard facts and primary sources, the book tries to answer the most basic questions about America’s most notorious prison and its effects on the men imprisoned there: