Alcatraz (14 page)

When the Urschel kidnappers were apprehended and put on trial, Cummings could claim a major victory in the federal war on crime. Cummings’s assistant Joseph Keenan made certain that the jury in the Urschel case knew what was at stake in realizing this victory:

We are here to find an answer to the question of whether we shall have a government of law and order or abdicate in favor of machine gun gangsters. If this government cannot protect its citizens, then we had frankly better turn it over to the Kellys, the Bates, and the Baileys . . . and the others of the underworld and pay tribute to them through taxes.
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While Cummings and J. Edgar Hoover could convincingly claim they were doing their part, they were skeptical about the ability of the other arm of the Justice Department—the Bureau of Prisons—to contain and control gangsters and hoodlums once they were apprehended and prosecuted. By early 1933, senior policy makers in the Roosevelt administration and FBI Director Hoover—but not Sanford Bates and his associates in the Bureau of Prisons—were convinced that the federal prison system needed a new type of penitentiary. According to Richard Powers, an

idea that Cummings appropriated from popular culture was the “super prison” for the super criminals his “super police” were catching. Spectacular escapes like Frank Nash’s from Leavenworth made a new maximum-security federal prison a sensible idea, but the proposal’s chief attraction to Cummings was its publicity value. The public wanted proof that the government was getting tough, so adopting the popular notion of an American
Devil’s Island was a made-to-order way of giving the country what it wanted.
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In its search for a site for the new prison, the Department of Justice had to consider the public-relations impact of the location in addition to practical concerns. Islands were a focus at the very beginning because they dramatized isolation and conjured up a powerful image of real punishment in the minds of citizens. Testifying before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, New York’s former police commissioner reflected the widespread sentiment that isolation on an island was indeed a good idea for the most dangerous felons:

Exile the hardened criminal, isolate them. They could raise products for their keep: work outdoors in excellent climate—and they would not swim thousands of miles in an effort to escape. If prisons can be conducted humanely so could an exile base be conducted.
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The press was also supportive of an island prison. The same magazine writer who deplored the grip of the “crime octopus” called for

a new form of punishment that will terrify all potential wrong-doers and take out of circulation those individuals who by the repeated perpetration of crime, have proved that they deserve no place in normal society. . . . America needs an isolated penal colony if it is ever to shake off the tentacles of the crime octopus.
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If an island site appealed to the citizenry, it also provided the federal government with ready solutions to the problems of secure incarceration. Cummings suggested to Assistant Attorney General Keenan that a special prison for racketeers, kidnappers, and gangsters be located “in a remote place—on an island, or in Alaska so that the persons incarcerated would not be in constant communication with friends outside.”
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The government’s quest was solved when the War Department offered the Department of Justice its prison on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. Since the Civil War, this military prison had been a depository for assorted misfits and societal problems, including military offenders and deserters, “secessionists” and supporters of the Confederacy, Indians who made trouble for the government either in the Indian wars or on reservations, foreign stowaways found on American ships, and conscientious
objectors during World War I. For a short time in April 1906, prisoners from San Francisco’s Broadway Street jail had been removed to the island when the great earthquake struck the city but did not damage the Rock.
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Initially, Bates rejected the military prison as too small and too far from Southern California, from where he expected most of the commitments for a West Coast federal penitentiary to come. In addition, the island had no source of fresh water. But despite these drawbacks, Alcatraz offered several advantages. Since it was already being used as a prison, it could be retrofitted and opened relatively quickly. Its proximity to major cities and ports facilitated transport of prisoners. And it was an island, separated from San Francisco by 1.4 miles of cold, choppy water. Bates was forced to admit that it was a viable choice for the new federal prison, and on October 13, 1933, the secretary of war approved a permit for the Department of Justice “to occupy Alcatraz Island as a maximum security institution for hardened offenders, including racketeers and incorrigible recidivists.”
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The attorney general saw in Alcatraz the potential for a dramatic and visible symbol of federal authority. Press releases and speeches issued from Cummings’s office emphasized the extraordinary security measures that would be necessary to hold the nation’s worst desperadoes, and how Alcatraz would fit the bill. According to Powers,

the country was demanding that criminals be given new and more impressive punishments for their crimes. Setting up Alcatraz satisfied this demand, and gave American popular culture a new symbol of the ultimate penalty short of death.
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The choice of a small, rocky island for a new high-security prison was invested with powerful cultural connotations. In late 1933, the concept of an isolated island prison conjured up the image of France’s infamous Devil’s Island. One of several islands in the penal colony of French Guiana devoted to punishment, Devil’s Island had become well known during the Dreyfus affair, in which it came to light in the mid-1890s that French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongfully convicted of treason and imprisoned on the island. It had become even more notorious in the United States in 1928, when American author Blair Niles published
Condemned to Devil’s Island
, a novel based on a manuscript by an actual penal colony convict, René Belbenoit, who related its horrors—forced labor, starvation, dysentery, hookworm, malaria, “blistering sun, deluges of rain,” and, for those who attempted to escape it, months of
solitary confinement. The entry of Devil’s Island into American popular culture was then assured when a “talkie” movie version of the novel, written by screenwriter Sidney Howard, appeared in November 1929 as
Condemned
.
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When the federal government announced the establishment of a special escape-proof prison for the country’s worst felons on an island—a prison to be devoted only to punishment and incapacitation—the press and the public were quick to seize on the analogy to Devil’s Island.
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This harsh image had diverse implications. On the one hand, it dovetailed nicely with the Justice Department’s effort to restore faith in the government’s ability to protect its citizens and provide appropriate punishment for the country’s worst lawbreakers. On the other hand, the connection planted itself so deeply in the popular consciousness that Alcatraz became enduringly associated with deprivation, severe punishment, strict discipline, and psychological torture. As a result, the Bureau of Prisons for decades would have to counter the popular view that its new penitentiary was an American version of Devil’s Island.

While the country at large welcomed this new form of punishment, the same was not true of the prison’s future neighbors. Attorney General Cummings’s rhetoric produced cries of outrage in the city of San Francisco. Led by Police Chief William J. Quinn, dozens of civic groups and organizations protested the location of this new home for the “the criminal element” in San Francisco. They argued that the new Golden Gate Bridge, then under construction, would add thousands of citizens and visitors to those entering and leaving the Port of San Francisco. Those living on the hills surrounding the bay complained that the prison would dominate their views. To these segments of public opinion, this highly negative and frightening symbol of the Justice Department’s determination to win the war against the gangsters was an unwelcome intrusion. (It is hard today to imagine how the little island of Alcatraz could “dominate” views of the bay, so it is likely that citizen concern was not about personal safety, but about real estate values and civic image.)

Chief Quinn claimed that federal inmates, unlike military prisoners, would be serving longer sentences and would thus have a greater incentive to escape. He noted that a seventeen-year-old girl had been able to swim from Alcatraz to the shore in forty-seven minutes, “arriving with long easy strokes, not even panting.”
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Quinn also speculated that confederates in small boats could pick up inmates who got off the island into the bay, that the island was too small for any industry, and that “there would be nothing for the prisoners to do but wander around in the sunlight
in rather pleasant surroundings.” Bay Area citizens, said Quinn, were of the view that “these gangster criminals do not give up their operations even though incarcerated. . . . They continue to keep in contact with their associates . . . who congregate in surrounding territories . . . and create a police problem.”
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The
San Francisco Chronicle
printed editorials opposing the prison, pointing out that twenty-three military prisoners had escaped from Alcatraz over the years, many by stealing boats or swimming. In January 1934 the
Chronicle
suggested in an editorial that instead of a prison, a peace statue be erected on the island.
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To assuage the concerns of the citizens of San Francisco, a statement was issued assuring them that Alcatraz would “not be a Devil’s Island” in their beautiful bay. It would be an integral part of the federal prison system, operated “in conformity with advanced ideas of penology.” The prison, it promised, would “house but a mere handful of men,” and would employ “all modern scientific devices . . . to insure the restraint of the inmates.” It concluded that the establishment of the new federal prison would offer “a splendid opportunity for the citizens of San Francisco to cooperate in a patriotic and public-spirited manner in the Government’s campaign against the criminal.”
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Despite these assurances, the citizens of San Francisco were not prepared to cooperate in the federal government’s campaign, and they would complain about the prison until it closed thirty years later.

When top Department of Justice officials decided to open a new, high-security federal prison they had an explicit penological rationale in mind. They reasoned that if the small number of convicts in the federal prison system who could not be controlled by “ordinary discipline” were segregated in a special institution, the inmate population at large would benefit. The presence of these troublesome convicts at Leavenworth, Atlanta, and McNeil Island forced wardens to operate these prisons as though every inmate was trying to escape, operate a strong-arm gang, or engage in illegal activities. It followed that removing these inmates to a separate prison would

permit the Federal Prison System to enter a period of rapid penological progress, unimpeded by the presence of inmates who would have forced its programs to remain geared to the lowest common denominator in terms of custody, privileges and regimentation.
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The Bureau of Prisons put forth this characterization of Alcatraz in its official communications, and the press accepted it readily. The
Saturday Evening Post
, for example, in a December 1933 editorial used all of the Bureau of Prison’s arguments to praise the establishment of the new island prison:

Unfortunately, in many prisons the treatment and discipline of [the] majority must be geared down to the small but worst element of stick-up men and killers. It is this element, rather than the majority of prisoners, which seeks to escape and which commits so many violent crimes after escaping. . . . To classify, segregate and isolate them not only narrows down the problem of preventing escapes, it makes more feasible the task of reformation of a great mass of potentially useful human material.
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This logic resonated with the public and criminal justice officials alike. It became so fixed as a commonsense principle that it would later be the leading justification for Alcatraz’s supermax successors at Marion, Illinois, and Florence, Colorado.

The rationale for the establishment of Alcatraz in large part predetermined the prison’s character. Since Alcatraz would hold America’s most dangerous and prominent felons, biggest escape risks, and worst prison troublemakers, security and control had to be the highest priorities. Because the problems presented by these convicts arose in part from their reputation and influence in the underworld, they would have to be effectively isolated from the outside world and from other inmates. And perhaps most important, because the men to be incarcerated on Alcatraz were officially labeled “habitual and incorrigible,” resources and staff time would not be wasted trying to rehabilitate them. Designed for “irreclaimable,” “recidivistic,” “irredeemable” offenders, the new prison would exist solely to punish, incapacitate, and deter others.

The deterrence aspect of Alcatraz was important to Department of Justice officials. The idea was that inmates at other federal prisons would look at the harsh, punitive regime on the island and think twice about landing there themselves by assaulting or threatening staff, attempting to escape, participating in strikes and protests, or refusing to follow rules and obey orders. Similarly, it was hoped that the general public would see in Alcatraz a lesson about the harsh consequences of engaging in criminal conduct. This reaction, the essence of deterrence theory, is what comparative literature scholar John Bender calls “imaginative sympathy” for the unfortunate souls in prison. Bender cites the eighteenth-century philosopher and economist Adam Smith to explain the deterrent effect of imprisonment: