Alcatraz Read Online Free PDF Page B

persistent encouragement and his promise that this book would be published in my lifetime.
    Most important, a few words about Renée Ward, my wife, editor, and secretary. All the people listed above made significant contributions to this project, but her assistance, judgment, and support were indispensable. Like a long-term convict she’s seeking release after staying with this project (and with me) throughout the many years of its execution, manuscript preparation, and numerous revisions. She now deserves to do easier time.

Introduction
RECONSTRUCTING THE LIFE
OF A PRISON
    In the middle of San Francisco Bay there rises an island that looks like a battleship . . . and when it has not been armed as such, first by the Spaniards and then by the United States Army, it has been a prison of one kind or another. First it was a so-called disciplinary barracks for renegade Indian scouts. Then for captured Filipinos. And always for army traitors. The Spanish lieutenant who discovered it in 1775 might well have called it the Alcazar if he had not been struck by clouds of pelicans that floated around it. So he called it after the bird itself—Alcatraz.
    This genial christening has long been forgotten; and since 1934, when it became a federal prison, Alcatraz—the mere name of the place—has sent a shiver through the tourists who come to peer at it from the shore. For the mile or more of intervening water separates them from the most atrocious murderers, the stoniest rapists, the subtlest jail breakers now extant in the United States. It is not, as the popular gossip has it, a prison for lifers. It is, the warden insists, a “corrective” prison for men who know how to organize sit-down strikes in state prisons; for incorrigibles; for the bred-in-the-bone mischief makers of the Republic; for the men who employ a life sentence as a lifelong challenge to discover how, with a twisted hairpin or a stolen razor blade, to break away from any prison they are put in.
    A removal to Alcatraz is thus considered in the underworld as a kind of general’s baton, the reward of distinguished field service that cannot be overlooked. And the guides on the steamers that ply through the riptides close to the island never fail to call off the roster of the incurable desperadoes who have battled the state prisons and landed here: “Limpy” Cleaver, Machine-Gun Kelly, Gene Colson, and Al Capone.
    Alistair Cooke , radio broadcast, December 10, 1959 1
    Few periods in U.S. history have been without infamous criminals—those murderers, assassins, traitors, robbers, or outlaws whose unlawful acts, real or alleged, have inspired some combination of fear and outrage among Americans. While these lawbreakers often had sensational and well-publicizedcaptures, trials, and executions, if they landed in prison they served their time along with more ordinary inmates in ordinary prisons—that is, until Alcatraz. When this federal penitentiary began operations in the summer of 1934 on a rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, it opened a new chapter in American penal history as a prison explicitly designed to hold and punish the nation’s criminal elite.
    To federal criminal justice officials at the time, Alcatraz was needed to help the nation survive a crisis. In the half-decade or so preceding the opening of Alcatraz, a wave of sensational ransom kidnappings and daring train and bank robberies gripped the nation, and organized crime activity in large cities dramatically increased. These gangsters and outlaws—driving fast cars, armed with machine guns, and often able to elude capture for long periods of time—were branded “public enemies” because their exploits terrorized the citizenry and greatly eroded confidence in local and state law enforcement agencies. By 1933, with the arrest and successful prosecution of many of the most notorious lawbreakers, federal officials had achieved major victories in their campaign to show that they could deal