Alcatraz (2 page)

Robertson’s response to doing time in a supermaximum setting—which could be summarized by the phrase “settling down”—was at variance with the then-current literature on the consequences of long-term confinement. Remembering what Karabelas had said about Alcatraz, and aware of the mystery and controversy surrounding the prison, I realized
that Alcatraz was a very different kind of prison and that a study of its convict culture could provide valuable insights.

In the early 1960s, when I had moved to UCLA to work on a study of psychologically based treatment programs in California prisons, I wrote to the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, James V. Bennett, and asked if he would authorize a sociological study of Alcatraz. Familiar with my work on the University of Illinois project, Bennett approved a visit to the island for me and for my UCLA colleague Gene Kassebaum. In June 1962, with a letter from the director in hand, we traveled to San Francisco and boarded the prison launch for Alcatraz. It happened that our visit came immediately after the sensational escape by the Anglin brothers and Frank Morris, immortalized in the Clint Eastwood film
Escape from Alcatraz
. While the staff was preoccupied with the search for the missing prisoners and investigating the failures in the security system that made the escape possible, there was agreement that a study of inmates’ adaptations to life on the island would begin once a research proposal had been developed and funding obtained. But that escape, and another the following December, provided the justification the Bureau of Prisons was looking for to cease operations. By the end of March 1963 Alcatraz was empty. The opportunity to study an unusual prison culture in operation had disappeared with the transfer of the prisoners and staff to federal penitentiaries across the country. The prison sat empty for ten years.

In fall 1973 Alcatraz Island was incorporated into the newly established Golden Gate National Recreation Area; it opened for public tours by the National Park Service.
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For the first time, members of the public were allowed to see for themselves the prison that for more than thirty years had been the source of so much controversy and mystery. Lingering questions about the prison and the prisoners were given new life. Had some prisoners actually been chained to the bars of cells in “dungeons” located under the floor of the cell house? Had men been kept in isolation for months or years until they went insane? Had prisoners suffered physical abuse? And, the most frequent question, had the minds of all the prisoners been damaged by being locked up in a prison called “America’s Devil’s Island,” a prison with no parole?

Since it began operations as a federal prison in 1934, Alcatraz had been kept under a shroud of secrecy. Prison employees had been strictly forbidden to talk with anyone about prisoners or events on the island; reporters had never been allowed to visit or talk to prisoners; nearly all communication between the island and the outside world had been effectively shut off. Even after the prison ceased operations, former members
of the prison staff continued to assume they could not talk about Alcatraz to anyone outside the Bureau of Prisons. In addition, the Bureau had never undertaken any systematic documentation of policies, procedures, and events on the island prison. Due to the lack of official information, everything that was “known” about Alcatraz had come from the published stories of former inmates, media accounts based on terse government press releases, sensational testimony from prisoners on trial for murders that occurred on the island, rumors, and pure speculation.

Faced with the need to provide information about Alcatraz to the public—to “interpret” the island as a national historic landmark—park rangers had to rely on the stories offered by several ex-convicts who lived in the Bay Area, along with the mass of popular knowledge about the prison that had accumulated over the years. Much of this information, because of its origins, was biased, incomplete, and inaccurate. The crowds of U.S. citizens and foreign visitors who began touring the island left with the impression that Alcatraz had been a place of brutal punishment.
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James Bennett, director of the Bureau of Prisons from 1937 to 1964, believed strongly that the reality of confinement for most of the inmates had not been as horrific as it was portrayed by the former prisoners. In particular, he was personally acquainted with the cases of more than a few former Alcatraz inmates who had not only survived their time on the island with their mental health intact but had gone on to build law-abiding lives in the free world. Bennett suspected that a significant number of former Alcatraz cons fell into this category, but the Bureau had never assembled any data on what happened to the prisoners after they had served their sentences and were finally released from prison. No one, including the former director, knew how many former Alcatraz inmates had resumed their lives of crime on the outside and how many had managed to stay out of prison. Filling this gap in knowledge was an assumption held by most Bureau officials, professional penologists, university criminologists, and even Alcatraz staff and prisoners: that confinement on the Rock was unlikely to have helped change “habitual and incorrigible” offenders into law-abiding citizens.

Mr. Bennett remembered my original study proposal and urged me to revive the project, with the inclusion of an effort to find out what had happened to the inmates after they were paroled from their federal prison sentences. In September 1974 Bennett and I met with Norman A. Carlson, who had been appointed Bureau director in 1965; he agreed that a study to accurately determine what happened to the inmates in the Bureau’s experiment with a maximum-custody, minimum-privilege penitentiary
would be worthwhile. It would be one of only a handful of studies of American penitentiaries that systematically collected data on both the in-prison and postrelease experiences of the prisoners.

Norman Carlson began providing a high level of support and assistance that continued in many ways throughout the life of the project. He authorized Annesley K. Schmidt of the Bureau’s central office to contact officials at every federal prison and at federal records centers across the country and ask them to locate the records of former Alcatraz inmates. A regional records center in the state of Washington received the Bureau’s request just in time to save upward of four hundred sets of files that were sitting on a loading dock awaiting destruction.
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The inmate and administrative records, including those at Bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C., were shipped to the Archives Division of the University of Minnesota Library, where supervisor Maxine Clapp arranged for their storage in a private, secure room. Ms. Clapp advised me and other members of the research staff on the proper care of aging records. Rubber bands that were cutting into folders were removed; crumbling newspaper and magazine articles and torn pages were copied to avoid further handling of fragile paper. Records from the federal prisons in which the inmates served different parts of their sentences, in addition to their time at Alcatraz, were brought together and the entire collection was organized by Alcatraz commitment number. The total number of men committed to Alcatraz was 1,546, but commitment numbers totaled 1,576, because twenty-eight men were sent there twice and one (James Audett) had three commitments.

While the Alcatraz records were being sent to the University of Minnesota for use in the study, their final disposition became subject to an order to the Bureau of Prisons by the General Services Administration: destroy old files and reports in order to make room for new records. To assure the long-term preservation of the Alcatraz records, I solicited letters of support from prominent historians, sociologists, and legal scholars at major universities to make the case that these records had enough “historic value” to be saved. In addition, Norman Carlson instructed his staff to compile a list of other notable inmates whose files would also be preserved. The National Archives, which already housed a small number of administrative records in Washington, D.C., shortly thereafter classified the Alcatraz inmate and administrative records and Bureau files as having historic value and agreed to take custody of the collection when my research was completed; the collection was then placed in the Western Regional Office of the National Archives in San Bruno, California.
(Historians, criminologists, and other writers, including former inmates and employees and their family members, who have since been able to take advantage of this unique collection of records should know that inmate records and administrative files are not routinely rounded up from federal prisons and sent to the National Archives. If this project had not been funded by the National Institute of Justice and the case made for the preservation of the Alcatraz records, the collection at San Bruno would not exist.)
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Before we had received funds for the project from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), Anne Schmidt of the Bureau’s Research Division performed a preliminary analysis that produced surprising results: tabulating arrest, conviction, and return-to-prison records of 975 Alcatraz prisoners who had been out of prison for more than five years, she discovered that only 37 percent of these men officially labeled as “habitual and incorrigible” offenders had returned to prison and nearly two-thirds were still living in the free world. Of those who had not returned to prison, 27 percent had been arrested for minor offenses only, offenses that either did not result in imprisonment or resulted in sentences of less than one year in local jails, and 73 percent had no reported arrests.
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These early surprising results motivated us to design a follow-up phase of the investigation that would focus on identifying the “successes” (men not returned to prison) and determining how they overcame the significant odds against them. We recognized, however, that locating the men who had not been returned to prison would not be easy; although the Bureau of Prisons knew exactly where all the “failures” were locked up, the only people who might know the whereabouts of the successes were dozens of federal probation officers, some retired, scattered over the country. (Federal probation officers supervise prisoners released on parole as well as offenders placed on probation.)

To be successful, the project required that additional information be obtained from the files of two federal agencies besides the Bureau of Prisons—the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. At the outset of the project, the FBI agreed to Norman Carlson’s request that the “rap sheets” (arrest and conviction records) of nearly all the 1,547 Alcatraz inmates be sent to BOP headquarters; the only records not available were those for eighteen ex-prisoners then over the age of eighty. The FBI provided additional information beginning in 1984, after Director Carlson, to test the new spirit of “inter-agency cooperation” offered by FBI Director William Webster in the post–J. Edgar Hoover era, asked the FBI to allow me access to investigative
reports of “incidents” (murders, riots, escapes) that occurred at Alcatraz from 1934 to 1963, as well as the files of high-profile offenders sent to the island—Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Alvin Karpis, Arthur “Dock” Barker, and other “public enemies.” Special Agent R. G. Schweickhardt provided valuable assistance as I examined these investigative files, explaining FBI procedures and the organization of files, and verifying J. Edgar Hoover’s “H” signature and handwritten comments on certain records.
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The Administrative Office of U.S. Courts provided the third important group of records: the files of parolees and men released under conditional/ mandatory provisions.
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Following authorization from Administrative Office headquarters, I sent lists of Alcatraz releasees to the federal probation offices in various judicial districts across the country, requesting what records and information they could provide for the men assigned to their jurisdictions. These probation offices forwarded the files of closed cases to the federal probation office in Minneapolis, where they were stored, organized, and temporarily made available to me and the University of Minnesota research staff. In addition to Garold Ray, other chief probation officers helped us establish contact with active and retired probation officers who had supervised Alcatraz parolees and conditional releasees. These agents provided important information about their clients’ experiences, contacted men still under supervision, and, most important, called releasees who had successfully completed parole or conditional release to ask if they would agree to be interviewed. Their assistance was needed because we did not want to directly contact these ex-prisoners when we did not know what their work or family situations were, or whether they would be able to talk freely over the telephone with a stranger about scheduling an interview.

The cooperation and assistance of federal probation offices, particularly those in Boston, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Kansas City, San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, was essential for a project that, unlike most prison studies, sought to identify men who never returned to prison. The complete, even enthusiastic, assistance provided by the probation officers, along with the personnel at the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI, allowed us to assemble a very large mass of hard data on which to base our conclusions.

In the fall of 1978 the National Institute of Justice awarded a study grant and I hired research assistants. My assistants and I turned to the challenge of systematically coding and analyzing the information from the 350 cartons of inmate files—the most complete set of records compiled
for any American prison. This task, which involved integrating information drawn from three federal agencies, proved to be of such a massive scale that we soon realized that we could not complete it with the funds available from NIJ. Early experience determined that it took twelve hours or more to code the numerous items covering the personal life, criminal and prison careers, and postrelease experiences of one prisoner. Consequently, using every third file from the total of 1,546 files, we created a sample of 508 men whose records would be systematically coded. When it became clear that even a one-third sample could not be coded before the NIJ funds were exhausted, we selected 308 of the cases for coding on a lengthy form, leaving the remaining two hundred cases for coding on a shorter form on which we recorded only the most essential personal, offense, sentence, prison conduct, and postrelease data.
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