Alcatraz (30 page)

He asked to be allowed to subscribe to the
Federal Reporter
so that he could be informed of court decisions related to laws passed since 1932, one of which had been used to give him a life sentence; he also asked that the
Reporter
and copies of Supreme Court and Appellate Court decisions be made available to the inmates as a right. Without these materials, Phillips went on,

I would be better off to slit my throat, or perhaps, someone else’s and make you hang me, ending quickly and mercifully a life which would otherwise be carried on tortuously year after weary year without hope or possibilities of legal release.
³⁹

The denial of access to legal materials was only one restriction that bothered Phillips; he was also angered by the lack of sugar and sweets in the prison menu, writing to Warden Johnston in June and again in early September asking that more sugar, syrup, sweet rolls, and bread pudding be provided. After presenting his arguments for more privileges, Phillips agreed to return to work and was escorted back to his cell, where he waited for release for the noon meal. In the dining room he took his complaints to the warden in a way that impressed his fellow inmates.

In the dining hall Warden Johnston assumed his customary position—standing in the middle of the room facing the door to the cell house with
his back to the two columns of inmates who passed by him on either side as they exited. Lieutenant R. O. Culver, the senior officer on duty in the dining hall, described what happened next:

Everything seemed to be in order until prisoner no. 259, Phillips, reached a position directly in back of the Warden, whereupon he drew back his fist and without warning hit the Warden a terrific blow in the back of the head, knocking him to the floor unconscious. Inmate Phillips, with a determination to kill the Warden (as he stated to me later) kicked him in the side and in the face while he was prostrate. He also jumped on the Warden and continued to hammer him about the face and head until subdued by Officers Joe B. Steere, John F. Gilmore, and myself. After securing a firm hold Phillips continued to resist and would not let go of the Warden until struck a blow on the head [in fact, several blows] with a “Gas-Billy,” which rendered him unconscious.

The warden and Phillips were taken to the prison hospital; the rest of the inmates scattered, trying to find cover behind columns and tables when an officer on the catwalk outside broke the windows of the dining hall to point the muzzle of his automatic rifle inside. The inmates were reassembled and marched back to their cells. About three hours after the assault, Lt. Culver questioned Phillips in the hospital, and Phillips told him, “I am sorry that I did not kill him, now it will all be to do over again.”
⁴⁰

In later years, when Alvin Karpis recounted the incident, he noted that the three blows to the head of Phillips, administered in a “calm and cool manner” by Lieutenant Culver, involved the use of a club eight inches long that contained a tear gas shell in one end. Only lieutenants at Alcatraz were authorized to carry one of these gas billies or a sap, a leather-encased chunk of lead. Karpis also noted that the guard on the catwalk caused panic in the room when he thrust his rifle through the glass because the inmates recognized him as the same man who had shot Joe Bowers off the fence.
⁴¹
Harmon Waley told the author that when the unconscious Phillips was removed from the dining hall he “was dragged by the feet up the stairs to the hospital, Culver sapping him continuously and his head flopping on the stairs.”
⁴²

After receiving first aid, Warden Johnston was treated for multiple contusions to his face and ear and for “slight shock.” Phillips remained in the prison hospital for two weeks during which time he was examined by the psychiatrist, who noted that his patient was in “mechanical restraint [straps].” Shortly thereafter, Phillips was moved to a solitary
confinement cell and put on a restricted diet (one meal per day, bread and water at other times) for seventeen days, after which he was moved to an open-front (barred) cell in the D block segregation unit with his food increased to two meals per day.

Johnston, anticipating a news release by Bureau headquarters about these events, authorized his clerk to release a brief statement noting that a strike was in progress and that he had been assaulted. The “vicious slugging” of the warden was reported by the press in the usual inflammatory style and was placed within the context of the “seething revolt” that had been under way for several days in “the Federal Government’s Devil’s Island.”
⁴³

On September 30 Johnston felt well enough to dress and return to the main cell house. He went directly to the dining room, stood on the spot where he had been assaulted, and resumed his normal procedure of checking the lines in and out of the mess hall. “I deemed that to be the best way in which to resume my duties,” he said in a report to the director. By October 14 the strike had essentially ended: of the 132 inmates who joined the strike all but 15 had returned to work and those 15 were locked up in solitary confinement. With the exception of Capone, most of the big names on the island—Kelly, Keating, Bates, Holden, Bailey, Barker, and Karpis—had participated in the protest and stayed out for a week or more. The holdouts included the leaders of the protest the year before, along with two recent arrivals—Henry (sometimes Henri) Young and Harmon Waley. In early November Johnston reported to Bureau of Prisons headquarters that Phillips was still “unrepentant” and that it was “probably best for all concerned that he be kept [in segregation] for a long time.”
⁴⁴
Burton Phillips remained in the D block disciplinary segregation unit until June 23, 1946—a period of almost nine years.

The strike produced no changes in the regime and generated little sympathy for the inmates in the outside world. Most newspaper editors across the country expressed the view that whatever the Alcatraz cons had to endure they had earned and that other prison administrators should emulate the “no-nonsense” policies in place on the Rock. Their editorials confirmed the government’s success in creating an image of punishment appropriate for a group of master criminals.

The
Dallas Times-Herald
went further, suggesting that punishment on the Rock was not severe enough for this particular group of lawbreakers:

THE REBELLION IN ALCATRAZ PRISON

The authorities in Alcatraz prison have shown remarkable patience in dealing with the convict “sit down strikers,” if reports from the place of confinement are true. Alcatraz is at least one prison that is not classifiable as a reformatory. Its inmates are persons who are so far gone in crime that very few can be regarded as prospects for rehabilitation. . . . Criminals of their type cannot be expected to respond to fair treatment. These inmates may resent the stern discipline of the prison, but many of them are killers and ruthless gangsters who were absolutely merciless while they were at large. They are more dangerous than wild beasts which must be held in cages. The situation in Alcatraz might be regarded as an argument for capital punishment. It hardly seems worthwhile to spare the life of a criminal who is so incorrigible that he must be confined in this stronghold.
⁴⁵

The
Rapid City Journal
took a similar position:

NO PITY FOR CONVICTS

America has had a lot of prison disturbances in recent years. On investigation a dismaying number of them proved to be society’s fault. The prison was out of date, overcrowded, filthy; the management was lax, the guards were venal, the politicians had interfered too much. And so on. The newest outbreak, at Alcatraz, seems to stand in a class by itself. None of the above-mentioned defects applies there. Indeed, the trouble seems chiefly due to the fact that Alcatraz contains the toughest and most vicious thugs in America who don’t like the way society has put them down for the count. Alcatraz is a hard-boiled place; it has to be.
⁴⁶

The
Spokane Spokesman-Review
joined in invoking France’s Devil’s Island as a model for American prisons:

PRISONS SHOULD BE GRIM

Men incarcerated behind bars cannot be dealt with as ordinary individuals. Most of them have depraved natures, or they would not be there in the first place. Yet too many sentimental persons are prone to contend that convicts should be pampered. They hold to the fallacy that penitentiaries are reform institutions instead of places of punishment. America might benefit by the experience of the French in dealing with criminals. A French penal institution is a place to be shunned by every one. Confinement in a French prison is punishment which most men of criminal tendency fear worse than death. If our prisons were a little more grim they might have fewer occupants. A prison should be a prison.
⁴⁷

In general agreement with these views, the
Kansas City Star
accurately described the Department of Justice’s intention to cut down the reputations of the “public enemies”:

WHAT HAPPENED AT ALCATRAZ

The strike of 100 inmates at Alcatraz, followed by an attack on Warden James A. Johnston, probably constituted a protest against the government’s policy in handling prisoners on the . . . island. It is an interesting circumstance, attested to by all criminological experts, that an inflated ego is a characteristic of the super-criminal. . . . But Alcatraz knows how to break down that self-esteem of theirs. It is not done by ill treatment. The prisoners are fed well, clothed well, kept busy, and given excellent medical care. But they undergo the experience, terrible to a supreme egoist, of becoming less than mere nonentities—of becoming in effect, nothing more than statistics. Their individualities are taken from them. Their reputations, no matter how formidable in the outside world, are left behind them at the prison doors. Men like Capone, Kelly, Waley and Bates, inside Alcatraz are mere numbers to the authorities, to the other prisoners, even to themselves. . . . When such men as now occupy Alcatraz are released at the expiration of their sentences, they may not have reformed. They are perhaps too hardened for that. But there is the hope that they will have been so impressed with the understanding that society is bigger than any of them that they will out of sheer respect for its power conform to its code.
⁴⁸

These editorials demonstrate that the press during the 1930s promulgated two seemingly contradictory views on Alcatraz. On the one hand, newspapers published rumor-based, sensationalized stories about incidents on the island that tended to cast a negative light on prison policies and management. On the other hand, many newspaper editors supported the federal government’s “get tough on crime” policy, and Alcatraz as a central component and emblem of that policy. They expressed little surprise that a prison designed for the worst bad guys in the country had occasional disruptions, protests, assaults, and escape attempts.

The First Escape Attempts

The fog on the morning of December 16, 1937, was so heavy that the work crews were held in the yard for twenty minutes while the gun tower guards tried to determine how much visibility they had from their vantage points. The reports were negative and the inmates were sent back to their cells. After the noon meal, however, the fog appeared to thin out and the work crews were sent out to the industries area.

Ted Cole and Ralph Roe reported to their jobs in the model building (in full, the Model Industries Building; the first floor was called the “Model Shop”), on the north end of the island on the side facing the Golden Gate Bridge. Cole worked in the blacksmith shop as a janitor, Roe in the shop where used tires were converted into mats. Cole and Roe had carefully prepared for a day like this one. For weeks, perhaps even months, they had sawed away at the bars of one of the windows, cutting whenever the guard left their area. After finally severing the bars, they had temporarily reattached them with a mixture of paint scraps and putty.

Officer Joseph Steere made the 1:00
P.M.
count of inmates and left the mat shop to check up on the inmates in other shops in the building. Roe and Cole dislodged the cut bars, crawled through the window, dropped about five feet to the ground, and walked quickly to a catwalk next to the ten-foot-high fence that ran around the bay side of the building. They knew from looking out shop windows that the fence was topped by five feet of barbed wire and had a locked gate, so they took with them a twenty-four-inch Stillson wrench from the machine shop, which was available for use by any inmate worker in the area. They used the wrench to twist off the padlock that secured the gate.

Once through the gate, they dropped some ten or twelve feet to the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, which were covered with pieces of automobile tires discarded from the mat shop. They waded out into the water and began swimming toward the mainland. No one saw them again.

Cole and Roe were the first inmates to seriously attempt an escape from Alcatraz. That no prisoners had tried to make a break before the end of 1937 is remarkable. Almost half of the men sent to the island had attempted to escape from one or more prisons before their transfer and many of those tries had been successful. Indeed, a history of plotting and attempting escapes was one of the main characteristics that wardens and Bureau officials were looking for in selecting candidates for transfer to Alcatraz.