Alcatraz (54 page)

The Rock, rising like a ghostly fortress out of the fog of San Francisco Bay, is a grim monument to our perverse genius for concentrating science at the wrong end of the criminal road. One is overwhelmed by the bewildering array of scientific gadgets—including the latest in electronic devices—mobilized for the single purpose of keeping some 245 human beings caged on a five acre island. . . . As you pass through the intricate maze of steel gates and cell blocks you can’t help thinking how much more sense it would make if we expended as much time, money and brains in preventing delinquency as we do providing cages for the dead-end debris of adult crime. If we did that there would be no need of an Alcatraz to remind us of our social failures.

Deutsch also claimed that “years of highly restricted movement” at Alcatraz, and being “out of contact with the normal world,” had reduced many convicts to “a peculiar condition resembling feeble-mindedness” that could be compared to “a sort of living death.” He claimed that the
chief medical officer, Dr. Richard Yokum, supported this conclusion and added that Dr. Yokum estimated that “about one out of every four Alcatraz inmates is suffering from psychoneurosis.”

Based on his one-day visit, Deutsch accepted the warden’s statement that the inmates were treated humanely: there were no “sadistic, brutalizing individual beatings and tortures found in many penal institutions.” Although Deutsch reported that the prison provided a “splendid industrial program” and good food, he concluded, “Personally, I’d rather be dead than a longtime Alcatraz inmate.”
⁵⁸

At that point in the prison’s history, neither the Bureau of Prisons nor Alcatraz’s wardens could respond with any evidence to counter claims about the effects Alcatraz was having on the prisoners’ mental health—or address the related question of how inmates fared after they were transferred to other prisons or when they returned to the communities they left.
Part 3
of this book deals with these matters, based on data that Alcatraz employees and inmates and federal officials never had. But first,
part 2
examines more closely the daily lives of inmates, the ways in which they resisted and coped with the restrictions placed on them, and the details of the lives of inmates who were notable either for their celebrity or for their extraordinary responses to confinement on the island.

The daily existence of Alcatraz inmates as it was designed for them by the Bureau of Prisons, and as it was managed and enforced by the prison administration and custodial staff was discussed in earlier chapters. Here we turn to the related topic of how inmates reacted to and coped with the regime that was intended to regulate every aspect of their lives. Given the actions of Alcatraz convicts in
chapters 4
through
9
, it is easy to come away with the impression that some of these men were desperate and violent, and a few, mentally unbalanced. But in fact most prisoners stolidly did their time. They held strong beliefs about right and wrong, and had the same needs for social interaction and faith in the future as law-abiding people on the outside. Although the purpose of the Alcatraz regime per se was not to deny these elements of humanity to the inmates, the control exercised over them did in large part have this effect.

As indicated by the title of this chapter, inmates’ responses fell into two main categories—resistance and adaptation.
Resistance
involved denying or seeking to minimize compliance with the order imposed by the prison or trying to reduce the influence of the regime on daily conduct.
Active resistance
reflected some level of conscious conflict.
Adaptation
meant seeking to utilize or assimilate elements of the imposed order to a form acceptable to the self and converting resources available to make life there more comfortable.
Active adaptation
involved some form of conscious accommodation.

These categories are conceptually distinct but overlapping. Resistance was for many inmates an important part of adapting, or coping. But some forms of resistance had little to do directly with coping, and some modes of coping did not involve resistance. The inmates responded to their circumstances by working the system, resisting the controls, and rearranging their mental lives to find ways to meet their personal needs.

Although they had much in common with prisoners anywhere, it was also true that the Alcatraz inmates differed from most of their counterparts in state and other federal prisons—and this fact had important implications for their prison society. Many had been the leaders of sophisticated criminal enterprises, or the leaders of escape plots in other prisons. Compared to the average felon, they were intelligent, strong-willed, and self-assured. Almost all of them had accumulated considerable experience doing “big time” in very tough prisons. The members of this unique population approached their years on the Rock with a mindset somewhat different from that of their counterparts at Leavenworth or San Quentin. They referred to themselves as “convicts,” not as “inmates,” a term that connoted subservience to authority.

Each of them had been specially selected for transfer to the Rock, which even before it opened was widely regarded as the toughest joint in the country. For those who appreciated or sought reputations as the best of the bad, a transfer to Alcatraz could be seen as an achievement—a measure of a man’s status in the world of penitentiaries. Being sent to serve time with Al Capone, Dock Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and the country’s most notorious “public enemies,” tough guys, and escape artists was, for some of these men, akin to gaining admission to the most prestigious law school or graduate program in the nation. Many Alcatraz inmates had large egos and an enhanced sense of their own importance. Warden James Johnston recognized this quality in the men who arrived on the first trains from Atlanta and Leavenworth:

They were supposed to be the worst men in the country. They were reported to be dangerous. It was apparent that some of them liked the idea of being rated tough and intended to live up to their reputations—to do what they were expected to do to qualify as “big shots.”
¹

Alcatraz convicts were also more likely than other prisoners to highly value and express the macho characteristics of toughness and the ability to endure hardship. While American culture in general encourages seeing hardship and overcoming obstacles in a positive light, Alcatraz prisoners saw doing time in a prison called the Rock as a test of character. If being able to take anything that prison guards could dish out without showing fear or weakness was an important measure of strength for American convicts, then the challenge of surviving the experience of doing time in a prison designed to be the toughest of them all provided the
supreme test of character. Those who rose to that challenge felt justifiably proud and earned respect from others.

The fact that the men imprisoned on the island were a select group sharing a very challenging experience also predisposed inmates to develop socially cohesive bonds of camaraderie and solidarity. In this sense, Alcatraz inmates were very much like the survivors of a natural disaster or the members of a military unit during combat, experiencing the unique bonds that only shared trauma or hardship can produce.

Finally, many of those imprisoned on the Rock were facing very long sentences, with an unknown amount of that time to be spent on the island. As noted several times in earlier chapters, this prospect produced in some a feeling of hopelessness that translated into a tendency to take extreme risks. As Warden Johnston noted, “they were in a mood to risk anything, not caring much whether they lived or died.”
²

For prison administrators, these characteristics posed serious challenges to the task of controlling inmate behavior. On the inmate side, the particular characteristics of the men sent to this island prison created a unique prison society. To this day the successors of the Alcatraz convicts locked up at Marion, Illinois, and later at Florence, Colorado—the federal government’s supermax penitentiaries—still memorialize the men, the time, and the prison where prisoner solidarity under the convict code was a reality.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the informal norms and rules that governed convict life and social interaction at Alcatraz—and made up the fabric of its inmates’ culture—bore some resemblance to what prevailed at other federal and state prisons of the day. But the prison culture at Alcatraz had many distinctive features—the product of placing a unique population of inmates, with their particular value systems and life experiences, in the context of such a restrictive regime.

The majority of Alcatraz convicts were white and from working-class backgrounds. They had grown up in rural areas in the Midwest and Southwest and had been raised with very traditional values in poor but generally law-abiding families. Key among these values were the assertions that a man had to stand up for his rights and his self-respect, remain loyal to his friends, and take care of his family. These values became the foundation of a convict culture that emphasized psychological strength, solidarity with other prisoners, and unwavering opposition to the staff.

The solidarity came in part from doing time with men they already knew. During their first days on the island, many prisoners recognized in the yard, dining room, or workshops former crime partners, friends from the streets, acquaintances from other federal prisons, and associates from state penitentiaries and reformatories where they had served time. In this era of prison history, before witness protection programs and incentives for informing were in place, very few crime partners testified against each other in exchange for reduced sentences (a practice common in today’s prisons that has produced hostile and often lethal relations between once close criminal associates).
³

In addition to loyalty among friends and partners, there was a strong sense among inmates of shared values and interests. Even if a fellow convict wasn’t a close friend or associate, there was a certain responsibility to look out for his welfare and expect the same in return. In a world defined by the opposition between guards and convicts, this sense of shared interests and reciprocity developed into an unwritten set of rules for behavior that idealized the white, male, working-class values shared by most inmates during the 1930s and 1940s.

This set of rules was not unique to Alcatraz. Indeed, in the 1940s it was recognized as such a distinctive feature of American prison life that sociologists began to study it and give it a name: the “convict code.”
⁴
The convict code—with its essential proposition that one should never provide information about, let alone testify against, any fellow inmate—was very similar to the code mentioned in
chapter 1
. It was, in essence, the outlaw code transplanted to the prison context. Although the convict code existed in other prisons, gangster-era inmates on the Rock exemplified it: they followed its tenets more strongly and more consistently than any other group of prisoners in federal history.

For this reason, understanding the convict code is essential in understanding inmate culture at Alcatraz during the years that so many “public enemies” and their criminal associates occupied cell space. The code was much more than a prohibition on giving staff or FBI agents information about fellow cons. As an expression of a coherent set of values, it had a fundamental role in shaping the inmate community. Its general effect—as expressed by George Kelly in a letter about life on the island—was to create “comradeship—a rough kindness of man to man.”
⁵

In their classic 1960 study, Sykes and Messinger described the elements of the code, showing how it was embodied in various maxims that could be grouped into five clusters.
⁶
Even though their analysis was not derived
from studying social life at Alcatraz itself, it accurately represents the essential components of the convict code as it existed on the Rock.