Alcatraz: The Gangster Years

reviewed By Ben Pesta

Alcatraz. The Rock. America's Devil's Island. It was a small prison (only 260 inmates) in an inaccessible location, and its operational life was not even 30 years, but it still looms in America's consciousness.

At the beginning of the thirties the federal Bureau of Prisons was a small-scale operation. There were only three federal penitentiaries in the United States: Leavenworth, Kansas; Atlanta, Georgia; and McNeil Island in Puget Sound, Washington. The bureau felt it needed a maximum-security institution to house the big-name crime lords of the gangster era, so the War Department contributed its Civil Warvintage military prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

Attorney General Homer Cummings announced on radio that Alcatraz was intended for those with "advanced degrees in crime. ... Here may be housed the criminals of the vicious and irredeemable type, so that their evil influence may not be extended to other prisoners who are disposed to rehabilitate themselves." Among the convicts (the term prisoners at Alcatraz preferred to "inmates") in the prison's 1934 entering class were Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis ("Don't shoot, g-men!"), and Harvey Bailey, one of the nation's most notorious bank robbers. Al Capone was soon to follow.

David Ward's magisterial study of the prison, Alcatraz: The Gangster Years, will appeal to anyone interested in crime and punishment, although, at 616 pages, it's longer than Crime and Punishment. The book is the Peter Jackson film of prison studies. Ward, a penologist and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Minnesota, began planning his work on Alcatraz in 1962, the same year he made his first visit to the prison. One of the researchers who assisted him as a law student is now a judge; another is a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. Ward and his longtime collaborator, Gene Kassebaum, have produced a combination oral history, documentary history, and longitudinal study (with a few statistics thrown in) unprecedented in scope and duration. (The acknowledgments section of the book takes up seven pages.) And, like an epic film, there's a sequel coming, about the second half of the history of Alcatraz.

Over the past few centuries, our society has given quite a lot of thought to how best to incarcerate people. Both of the traditional American approaches date to the 1820s. The congregate, or Auburn, model was first used at Auburn State Prison in New York. Prisoners there slept alone in their cells but worked and ate together, although communications were restricted. "It was a clear reference to the monastic model," according to Michel Foucault, the French intellectual and author of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In the Philadelphia model, prisoners were confined to their cells for as much of their sentences as possible. "In absolute isolation - as at Philadelphia - the rehabilitation of the criminal is expected not of the application of a common law," Foucault wrote, "but of the relation of the individual to his own conscience and to what may enlighten him from within."

Alcatraz was the then-current exemplar of the Philadelphia model, the supermax prison of its day. The entire prison was run on what we now call "ad seg," administrative segregation. Alcatraz cons were isolated psychologically as well as geographically. There were no newspapers, no radio until the fifties, and no television. Mail was restricted, family visits were restricted, and attorney visits were restricted to a degree that, today, would clearly violate the Sixth Amendment. Also, Alcatraz had no commissary, no psychologists, and no vocational training instructors.

Officials maintained a Guantanamo-style secrecy about the prison and its operations. Staff were forbidden to speak to reporters or civilians about their jobs. The objective was to forestall controversy, and to "create an air of mystery" about the island and what went on there. It worked, but it also created an insatiable public curiosity about Alcatraz and its infamous denizens.

Ward's surprising conclusion about imprisonment at Alcatraz during the 1934 - 48 period is that it was actually effective in rehabilitating the men who did time there. The gangster-era cons released from Alcatraz had a higher success rate than did their decennial cohorts at other prisons. Equally surprising, the success rate of the men who had once posed discipline problems at the Rock was better than that of those who hadn't. Fifty-four percent of the men who were never sent to D block, the dungeon-like isolation cells under the penitentiary, failed in the outside world, compared to 37 percent of those who were sent there eight or more times. "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," concludes Ward.

He offers a number of reasons why this should be the case. One is his belief, following Foucault, that the island's isolated, monastic regimen encouraged self-reflection.

"Doing time at Alcatraz was endlessly boring, almost always frustrating, sometimes dangerous," Ward writes, "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?' "

Forty-six years after the Rock was closed, the Alcatraz system remains the paradigm for the federal prisons at Marion, Illinois ("the new Alcatraz"), and Florence, Colorado ("the Alcatraz of the Rockies"), as well as for 36 supermax state prisons, including California's Pelican Bay and Corcoran. Public discourse about "public enemies" with "advanced degrees in crime" has been replaced by talk of "super-predators" raised by abusive, drug-addicted (usually minority) parents and growing up devoid of conscience. But the circumstances of imprisonment have changed radically. The Alcatraz population during the gangster era was almost entirely white, and there were no prison gangs, probably because there was no racial or ethnic conflict to engender them.

Alcatraz, as David Ward has re-created it, is irresistible to read about. But we should be very wary about projecting any Alcatraz-derived conclusions into the present.

Ben Pesta, a white-collar and criminal defense lawyer in Century City, has written for Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Bar Association Journal.

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