Alcatraz by David Ward Read Free Book Online Page A

How did the prisoners adapt to the isolation, deprivations, and restrictions they had to endure? Did they succumb psychologically or did they emerge with their minds and spirits intact? Did the isolation and time alone prompt them to review their lives, consider the costs and benefits of their criminal careers, and decide to lead more law-abiding lives, or did the strict controls and punitive conditions leave them bitter and more determined that ever to thwart government authority?
    Many other books have been written about Alcatraz, some succeeding in accurately relating parts of the prison’s history (see the bibliographic essay). This book differs from all others in several important respects. No other book draws on so many firsthand experiences—interviews with one hundred inmates and guards, almost all of whom are now deceased—or on the results of a federally funded sociological study that took many years to complete. No other author has been given such unrestricted access to the records of federal criminal justice agencies or received the assistance of federal probation offices—circumstances that combine to make this the only book about Alcatraz to document the long-term careers of Alcatraz inmates, from their criminal activities before confinement on the Rock to many years after their release.
    Most important, no other book takes as its starting point the crucial fact revealed in the research and unknown to other authors: that a significant number of Alcatraz’s habitual and incorrigible convicts proved the experts wrong and stayed out of prison after they were released. During the era of the “public enemies,” Alcatraz confined the most desperate, dangerous, troublesome, and highly publicized inmates in the federal prison system—all of them shipped there precisely because no one held any hope of their being rehabilitated or reformed—and provided them absolutely nothing in the way of psychological counseling or remedialprograms. Yet two-thirds of these men emerged from the experience to lead constructive, law-abiding lives. Explaining this unexpected, counterintuitive result is the key challenge that lies at the heart of this book.
    Finally, this book does more than chronicle lives, describe events, and explain the culture of a famous prison—it raises questions relevant to the ongoing debate about the value and role of maximum-custody, minimum-privilege prisons. Alcatraz was this country’s first supermax penitentiary, and since its closure it has become the prototype for similar prisons established over the past two decades in thirty-six states, and for the indefinite administrative segregation regimes established at its federal successors at Marion, Illinois, and Florence, Colorado. Like Alcatraz, these prisons have attracted controversy. The question today, as it was with Alcatraz, is whether a penal regime that attempts to control inmate behavior as completely as can be allowed under the prohibition in the U.S. Constitution against “cruel and unusual punishment” is justified and necessary, or whether it is too harsh even for the nation’s most dangerous felons and most prolific prison hell-raisers. That doing time at Alcatraz did not cause significant, long-lasting mental health effects for most of its inmates or preclude their successful adjustment in other prisons and later in the free world, adds a new dimension to the debate: that a penal environment designed specifically for punishment, incapacitation, and deterrence does not negate the possibility of reform or rehabilitation even when the government does not expect or plan for that outcome.

PART I
ALCATRAZ FROM 1934 TO 1948

4
THE PROGRAM
    Since Alcatraz opened to the public in 1973 as an attraction managed by the National Park Service, millions of visitors have walked through the cell house, looked into the small cells for a few moments, and viewed the mess hall and yard, all the while trying to imagine the experience of doing time on