Alcatraz (58 page)

Their resistance took many forms—refusing to work and obey orders, fighting with other prisoners and with staff, and going on hunger strikes that if prolonged led to forced feeding. Many of these men drafted myriads of protest letters to federal judges, elected officials, and the U.S. attorney in San Francisco; they also filed writs to protest their convictions, their sentences, and the conditions of their confinement. For some of the most prominent convicts in this group, writing itself was a form of resistance that resulted in numerous articles, short stories, books, even poetry about life in prison and life in general.
¹

The names of the island’s most famous gangsters are not among the persistent individual resisters. Al Capone, George Kelly, Harvey Bailey, John Paul Chase, Basil Banghart, and Floyd Hamilton did their time quietly, only participating in a strike or some short-lived protest to show solidarity with their fellow convicts.

Resisting individually was very different from participating in organized
resistance in which organizers and key participants collaborated and encouraged each other. Joint planning helped counter the fear and trepidation that accompanied death-defying actions like escape. Organized resistance won the respect of most of the convict population because it showed both courage and solidarity and risked receiving the most severe punitive measures available. Individual resistance, in contrast, was a lonely path. Not only did most individual resisters lack support and encouragement, their actions often cost them the respect of other prisoners. Without collective statements that explained the motives for such conduct, their actions often remained a mystery to their fellow convicts as well as to the staff. Their conduct appeared to bring a lot of grief on themselves and made doing time much harder. Their lack of friends and the absence of goals such as changing the regime to benefit all prisoners led most of these men to be labeled “crazy” by fellow prisoners and “psychopaths” by the staff. They were, however, not looking to be liked, admired, or understood; they had their own agendas.

It is important to know what these men did, what they said about their actions, how they were treated in response, and how their behaviors changed during their time on the island in order to shed light on their motives and on the relation between the prison’s policies and inmate behavior. The prison careers of individual resisters are relevant for another reason as well: looking at their lives
after
they were released provides an empirical test of theories about the relation between prison conduct and postrelease behavior. Such theories then, as now, were the basis of policies regarding transfers between different security levels and the criteria governing parole and conditional release.

Except for a few brief summaries, this chapter is not concerned with how individual resisters fared on their return to the free world.
Chapter 13
will examine the postrelease lives of these men and the other inmates of the gangster years. But by looking at the prison careers of individual resisters, this chapter provides the foundation for understanding the significance of the findings examined in
part 3
.

James Grove’s sad but noteworthy life started out badly. Raised by foster parents until he ran away from home at age twelve, he was convicted of burglary two years later and was sentenced to three years in the Missouri State Reformatory. After his release he worked briefly as a dishwasher in a dining car, but at the age of nineteen he was convicted of
robbery and sent to the Utah State Prison. He escaped from that institution, was apprehended, and then released after two years. Soon after his release he was picked up on another burglary conviction, for which he was sent to the state prison at Walla Walla, Washington.

Paroled after one year, he was allowed to join the army despite his three prison sentences. But he soon was in trouble; five months after his induction he was charged with attempting to rape the ten-year-old daughter of an army major. The girl reported that, finding her alone at home, Grove had forced her upstairs into her room; when she resisted and cried out as he tried to place her on the bed, he almost choked her and then fled. For the rest of his life, Grove denied he had attempted to rape the girl, but he was found guilty and sent to the Fort Leavenworth disciplinary barracks with a twenty-year sentence.

Four years later, he stabbed another black prisoner, which earned him a twenty-year term to follow his original sentence—and a transfer to the federal prison system. At Leavenworth he got into three fights with other prisoners and made several attempts at suicide, one by cutting his wrist, and another by trying to hang himself in his cell. A Leavenworth surgeon/ psychiatrist estimated his mental age at twelve years and four months and made the following assessment: “This classifies him as a case of borderline intelligence (I.Q. 77). . . . In view of this man’s history and his psychopathic instability . . . he should remain under observation in the mental ward.”
²

Despite this diagnosis, James Grove was placed on the first train bringing transfers to Alcatraz on September 4, 1934; his first disciplinary report came four days later. Within a year he had been written up seven times for offenses ranging from “loud talking in cell” to yelling at a guard on the wall, “Go ahead and shoot.” Meanwhile, his mental health became a more serious issue. In the hospital ward he managed to cut the veins in both arms with a safety razor blade. When this attempt at suicide, his third, was reported to Bureau headquarters, Director Stanford Bates wrote to Warden Johnston expressing concern: “In the light of recent publicity it would be extremely unfortunate if the attempt at suicide of one of our inmates should prove to be successful.”
³

Grove’s condition in the hospital ward was described by a consulting psychiatrist:

attempted suicide by striking head on bars of cell—immediately placed in bed put in restraining sheet—necessary to use arm and leg cuffs. . . . I saw him in a maniacal state, yelling and screaming at the top of his voice and
throwing himself about the bed in which he was restrained. . . . I regard him as extremely dangerous both to himself and others.
⁴

A year after his transfer to Alcatraz, Grove again became hysterical when a guard attendant was taking his temperature. He broke the thermometer into three pieces, threw his hands about, calling out, “Mother, mother.” The chief medical officer requested that a psychiatric evaluation board be appointed, which was expected to approve Grove’s transfer to the Springfield Medical Center; instead he was returned to Leavenworth in October 1935 as a “mental patient.” At Leavenworth, Grove wrote poignantly to Attorney General Cummings about his experience at Alcatraz:

It’s worst than hell out there Sir, with the sea gulls and fog horns, and wind blowing fifty miles an hour and nothing but silence. . . . I can’t begin to try to picture that place for you. Your own prison for humans—why out there Sir, we are all living dead men, just living life that means nothing.

He went on to write of his lack of hope for his future:

I am not asking you for anything. . . . I just want to be where I can forget a lot of things. . . . You can never realize what hell is like until you live through it. . . . So I will live through the rest of my life a wreck, and try to believe that some day it will all end as God wills it.

And at the end of the letter, Grove alluded to racial discrimination as a reason for his wanting to commit suicide: “I wanted to die out there, and tried to make it so. But not because I was a coward. But because it was just too much hell for me and my face was black. I remain your prisoner of Devil’s Island.”
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Grove was transferred to the Springfield Medical Center about a year later, where the prognosis of his condition was bleak and unsympathetic: “Segregation is recommended. Not that it will help this individual inmate in any manner but that others may be protected from his depravations and evil influence.”
⁶
He was returned to Leavenworth in February 1938, where he attacked and seriously injured another prisoner.

Grove requested a transfer to another prison, “even if it be Alcatraz.” The Leavenworth staff agreed, noting that he was not likely to get along in any prison but “the close confinement and supervision available at Alcatraz appears necessary as a most effective solution of the behavior problem subject presents.” However, they admitted, “He will probably be unable to make a satisfactory adjustment at Alcatraz.”
⁷

Several months later, in July 1939, James Grove was back on the Rock,
where the prediction that he would not “adjust” proved to be correct. Six transfers in ten years shows the difficulty Bureau officials had in finding the appropriate setting for an inmate with Grove’s combination of violent outbursts, suicide attempts, bizarre conduct, and problematic behavior, but no official diagnosis of psychosis. Over the next twenty years James Grove accumulated thirty-four misconduct reports. Many of his infractions were serious, and his troubles continued even after he was placed in D block; thirteen involved fights with other inmates and he twice assaulted officers. For these actions, Grove spent years in disciplinary segregation and isolation cells.

In June 1943, given an opportunity to shave in D block, he slashed his elbows and both legs with a safety razor. He forcibly resisted being taken to the hospital, and once there, his hands had to be restrained to the sides of the bed to prevent him from tampering with the wounds. But, as in previous evaluations, the medical report concluded, “I do not consider him psychotic but he is subject to deep emotional fluctuations.”
⁸

During the battle of Alcatraz in May 1946, Grove was wounded by a bullet in the arm that other convicts claimed was fired from a gun held by fellow convict Joseph Cretzer. Grove did not share this view. Two months later he wrote to the NAACP complaining that he was a victim of discriminatory treatment. His letter noted that although he had “the privilege of reading
The Crisis, Negro Digest
, and the
Ebony
magazines” and “enjoyed the right of reading about the great work my people are doing for the more unfortunate of this world,” he felt he was the victim of job discrimination on the island. He also complained that during the May 1946 fire fight, he was “deliberately shot in the arm while confined in a cell
with the door locked
. I was the only person so badly shot out of 265 innocent inmates during the escape attempt of three insane men.” Grove claimed that he received poor medical care, insufficient pain relief, and that Dr. Roucek held to “that old hatred prejudice and . . . discrimination of the negro.”
⁹

Several months later Grove sent a letter to the secretary of war complaining that the food served in D block was “not fit for human consumption,” that military prisoners had been beaten for protesting this treatment, and that a deliberate attempt had been made on his life by a staff member during the 1946 battle: “I escaped with my life only because of poor marksmanship.” He asked to be transferred and called for an investigation of Alcatraz by the inspector general.
¹⁰

Grove’s next misconduct was his most serious. During a quarrel with
other inmates on March 20, 1946, he stabbed fellow inmate Ben McMiller in the abdomen with a seven-inch kitchen knife, and McMiller later died from the wound (as recounted in
chapter 10
). Grove was tried and convicted on a charge of second-degree murder, for which he received a fifteen-year sentence to be served following his current forty-year term. He was returned to D block, where he spent the next four years in and out of solitary confinement. He spent some of his time writing special purpose letters, sending nine during 1951 to “courts, attorneys, Father Divine, and a senator.”
¹¹

By 1952 his misconduct had cost him all his good time credits—4,378 days, the equivalent of twelve years—but a report in February of that year noted that he was “a heavy reader of both fiction and nonfiction . . . maintains no social ties by correspondence or visiting [but shows] some emotional maturity, appears less inclined to explode over minor frustrations and heeds staff counseling to remain free of the involvements prevalent among the members of the colored cliques.”
¹²
The positive change in his behavior resulted in the restoration of 365 days of good time, but nine months later he committed another serious violation of the rules by attacking two officers in the prison dining room. Lt. Isaac Faulk reported:

Grove walked into the dining room at the end of the line, picked up a heavy serving spoon as if to serve himself. Instead, he swung the spoon with all of his strength at Officer Burlingame’s head. This vicious blow struck [the officer] just in front of his right ear inflicting a serious cut and a large bruised area. Grove then assaulted me by hurling a stack of nested serving trays which struck me in the chest. He then threw trays of potatoes savagely at me and other officers until finally overpowered. It was necessary to carry him bodily from the dining room so furious was his resistance to lawful restraint.

In no location in any penitentiary does violence call for more serious punishment than when it occurs in the mess hall where a large number of prisoners are together. When mess hall violence was directed at a staff member, the level of seriousness increased. Grove’s response to the charges brought against him was to tell the good time forfeiture board that Officer Burlingame “would not leave him alone . . . that he had killed before, was all washed up and had no fear of any consequences.” According to a November 27, 1953, special progress report, Burlingame had incurred Grove’s wrath by reporting him “for giving home brew to one
of his homosexual friends.” Grove lost 1,365 days of good time and was locked up in “a dark [closed front] cell in D block” for an “extended period” on “a restricted diet.” It was noted in his file that he was “considered an extremely dangerous individual with aggressive homicidal and homosexual tendencies.”
¹³