Alcatraz (82 page)

In Kansas City, Stamphill went directly to an AA meeting to meet his AA sponsor. He took up a temporary residence at a diagnostic and treatment center, began work at Goodwill Industries, and was soon able to rent an apartment. His probation officer reported that Stamphill visited his office “accompanied by a frolicking redheaded woman whom he introduced as his intended.” Stamphill got married for the fourth time. He continued his active involvement in AA and began making weekly trips to Leavenworth to offer AA classes. During the years he spent under supervision, he took a job as a maintenance man in a Kansas City park and worked as a volunteer with juvenile offenders. In 1978 he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Kansas Council on Crime and Delinquency
and his federal probation officer began asking him to counsel other parolees coming out of prison who had histories of alcohol abuse. In late November 1979 he was released from parole.
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When we asked him whether his prison experience, participating in prison programs, or just getting older were factors related to his success after his second release, Stamphill commented:

All the time I was in Alcatraz, Leavenworth or any other prison they made no effort to change my attitude or correct my way of doing things. In fact, everything I would try to do I was running into opposition with the officials. I had to do it on my own. . . . Prisons are geared for one thing—when a man is convicted, they have to keep him in prison. . . . They’re not geared to releasing the man. So what a man does, he has to do on his own.

Dale Stamphill’s postrelease problems were like those that were cited by many returnees—the pressure that came from not having enough work or money combined with alcohol abuse. The surprising aspect of his career was that he attempted a high-risk burglary when he was fifty-four years old after a decade of quite successful adjustment in the free world. In several interviews with the author, Stamphill expressed embarrassment about his return to prison based on such a poorly conceived attempt to get a large amount of money quickly. But he was justifiably proud that he had succeeded in staying out of prison after his second release.

Considering the successes described in this chapter, one important factor stands out: the assistance, encouragement, and trust from people in a position to make a difference in the prisoner’s life, both during and after confinement. Clear contributions came from family members—often sisters, parents (usually a mother), new wives, or wives who waited—but of equal or, in some cases, greater importance were employment counselors, parole officers, even the director of the federal prison system, and, in a few cases, a prison chaplain. Significantly, in almost every case an employer who did not ask questions or was ready to offer a second chance contributed to success on the streets.

James Quillen is a good example of an inmate who received support at many critical junctures. While he was in prison, his family members, Father Clark, Director Bennett, Warden Johnston, the hospital staffs at Alcatraz and McNeil Island, the psychiatrist at McNeil, and San Quentin
Deputy Warden Louis Nelson (who had been a guard at Alcatraz earlier in his career) all assumed a role in ensuring that Quillen would be released with the determination to “make it.”

One measure of Quillen’s determination to succeed is his willingness to take any job to support himself until he could find work in a hospital. Knowing that few questions would be asked if he sought work as a manual laborer, he took a job at $2 an hour breaking up concrete driveways with a sledgehammer. After his release, emotional and practical support were no less important. He survived a dangerous period of excessive drinking and a bad first marriage with help from his stepfather, stepsister, and brother-in-law; he was able to get the hospital position he had studied and trained for at Alcatraz and McNeil Island through the acceptance and help he received from the employment office counselor and the administrator and chief of radiology at the hospital. Finally, strong support for his new life came from his second wife, and from the birth of a daughter.

Many people at critical times during Quillen’s years in federal prison and the years he was under parole supervision made important, even critical, contributions to his postrelease success. But he had already decided to change the course of his life during the months he spent in a disciplinary segregation cell at Alcatraz. As Quillen himself said, a decision to stay out of prison might have come at Leavenworth or another prison, but key staff at Alcatraz, and James Bennett, took steps to encourage his transformation.

In most cases the resources, encouragement, and support from important people in the inmates’ lives were necessary for success, but they were not sufficient. They mattered only to men who had clearly determined while in prison that the costs of their criminal careers outweighed the benefits. Yet the prison environment creates the conditions under which this psychological change is more (or less) likely to occur. Doing time at Alcatraz was endlessly boring, almost always frustrating, sometimes dangerous, and many men during our interviews asked us—and themselves—“Why would I want to spend the rest of my life surrounded by this bunch of assholes?”

Those inmates who failed generally lacked one or both of these measures of success. In some cases, as with Blackie Audett and Gerard Peabody, the determination to succeed was entirely lacking—apparently replaced with a determination to continue living outside the law. Among other cases, there was a desire to stay out of prison, but factors difficult
to ascertain stood in the way. These men, in interviews, tended to attribute their returns to such causes as being “stupid” or “careless,” falling back in with old friends, abusing alcohol, or “bad luck.”

A resolve to turn their lives around and support from others helped many Alcatraz inmates become productive and law-abiding citizens after release; but these same factors have been important for men and women who have served time in other federal penitentiaries and state prisons. The next chapter’s focal point—the stories of success and failure, with the other findings from this study—applies to Alcatraz specifically.

During the three decades Alcatraz served as a federal penitentiary, and in the years following its closing, many claims have been made about the effects of the harsh regime on the men imprisoned there. Since operations ceased in 1963, most of these ideas have remained unquestioned, becoming part of the conventional wisdom about this special American prison. Many critics and even some BOP officials expected that the restrictive conditions would psychologically damage many of the inmates, leaving them incapable of functioning in civil society. Yet, prison and parole officials also insisted, the violation of these restrictions—misconduct—was an important indicator of character flaws and criminal tendencies that would land ex-convicts in prison again if they were ever released. As readers will remember, Alcatraz was specifically intended to confine “habitual and incorrigible offenders,” a group of such hardened criminals that no reform or rehabilitative programs were to be wasted on them.

The foregoing chapters, and the study underlying them, have raised serious questions about the accuracy of these assumptions. As documented in the previous chapter, the label “habitual and incorrigible” was inaccurate for two-thirds of the gangster-era convicts. The statistical data, case studies, and anecdotal evidence we have described cast doubt on the claims that confinement at Alcatraz caused such serious psychological damage as to make postrelease adjustment unlikely and that misconduct was a predictor of postrelease failure. (On the careers of the prison’s major hell-raisers, for example, see
chapter 11
.) This chapter expands these findings and then considers possible explanations for the remarkable success of the island’s gangster-era convicts.

During his twenty-two years at Alcatraz, Harmon Waley fought with other prisoners, refused to eat and work, threatened to kill the associate
warden, cursed guards, and destroyed the contents of his cell. Yet, as the previous chapter reveals, he led a productive, law-abiding life after his release from prison. Conversely, Gerard Peabody caused little trouble while imprisoned at Alcatraz and McNeil Island but continued to commit bank robberies during several different periods of freedom, a pattern that continued until he reached the age of seventy-five.

The contrasting cases of Waley and Peabody were not unusual. The postrelease successes reviewed in
chapter 13
make it clear that bad conduct in prison did not preclude good conduct after release, and the several examples of postrelease failure support the finding that good conduct in prison was not a reliable predictor of good conduct in civil society.

These points are supported by statistics collected during the University of Minnesota study. Data for the Alcatraz population from 1934 to 1963 show that 53.4 percent of the prisoners who received no misconduct reports at Alcatraz came back to prison after release, while prisoners with ten or more misconduct reports returned to prison at the slightly lower rate of 49 percent. Counting only serious misconduct—measured by the number of times a prisoner was locked up in disciplinary segregation at Alcatraz—we found that 54 percent who never went to D block failed after being released, compared to 37 percent of men who were locked up eight or more times in the disciplinary segregation unit. As a whole, these findings suggest an
inverse
relationship between serious misconduct at Alcatraz and post-release success.

Did the penal environment at Alcatraz have anything to do with this finding? Our data show a very sharp drop in the number of misconduct reports for inmates in post-Alcatraz penitentiaries. While this decrease might be explained in part by the aging process, another likely factor was the growing proximity to release and the inmate’s appreciation of less restrictive regimes and greater privileges.

More significant is the pattern that emerged when we compared the misconduct rate during each phase of an inmate’s sentence with his eventual postrelease outcome.
¹
For the periods of pre-Alcatraz and post-Alcatraz incarceration, the results were consistent with the conventional wisdom—an inmate with many misconduct reports had lower rates of clear (without incidents) postrelease success, and recidivism was highest for men who got into disciplinary trouble most often. However, for the Alcatraz phase of these same prisoners’ terms, the relationship was in a negative direction: inmates who accumulated many misconduct reports while imprisoned on the island returned to prison at a lower rate than
those who had no, or very few, disciplinary reports.
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In other words, success defined as no-return-to-prison was highest for men who were repeatedly cited for misconduct while serving time on the Rock.

Finally, a comparison of these results with our Leavenworth sample showed that the Alcatraz prisoners differed from their counterparts at this standard penitentiary. As predicted by custody staff, parole boards, and conventional wisdom, Leavenworth inmates who accumulated a large number of misconduct reports were less successful after release than were those with no or only a few misconduct reports.

Why were the men at Alcatraz who broke the rules most often somewhat more likely than their more conforming peers to lead crime-free lives after release? What was it about Alcatraz that made misconduct there a predictor of postrelease success?

To find the answer to this question we need to place the meaning of misconduct in a somewhat different light. For many Alcatraz inmates, misconduct was an expression of resistance, and resistance in that punitive environment was a healthy and adaptive response. A tendency to defy the regime reflected a level of personal strength and determination to maintain their integrity that is necessary to succeed in the free world.

Resistance in prison has generally been portrayed in films and in prison literature as a matter of heroic convicts standing up to brutal regimes, sadistic wardens, or cruel guards. For the Alcatraz convicts, however, resistance was not a response to physical punishment or inhumane living conditions—it was, as described in
chapter 10
, evidence of prisoners striving to maintain their personal integrity. By trying to maintain some control over decision making in their lives, they gained psychological benefits, even though they paid a high price, both immediate and deferred (in terms of transfer and parole).
³

Alcatraz was unusual among prisons because most of the time it successfully limited traditional types of prison misconduct while simultaneously creating the conditions under which many inmates found it necessary to engage in resistance-related misconduct. The “traditional” types of rule-breaking—attacks on other inmates, drug use, possession of contraband as noted earlier—were limited relative to other prisons. Due to the strong prohibition in the convict code against homosexual relations, fights tended to be the result of personality clashes. With few personal items available there was little to steal, and no basis for gambling or strong-arming. These activities—the underlying cause of most violence
and misconduct in most prisons before the early 1960s—were further limited by the severe restrictions on physical movement and out-of-cell-time, and the presence of a large custodial staff supervising prisoners confined in a small physical area. In this sense, the Alcatraz regime was largely successful in promoting conforming behavior.