Escape from Alcatraz (31 page)

Newsmen were not allowed in the cellhouse (“There’s a certain amount of unrest in there”) and photographers could shoot, no closer than eight feet, only a cot with a dummy set up in the visitors’ room. The warden distributed color shots of the cells with the escape holes.

“Any other convicts in on the plot?” asked Charles Raudebaugh, a
Chronicle
reporter.

“We’re still checking,” said the warden.

“Anybody chicken out?”

“No one chickened out.”

Back at his office, Raudebaugh studied the color photos. His sharp eye detected a
fourth
cell with a gaping hole, with a notation on the back of that photo: “Cell of A. C. West.” Raudebaugh phoned the warden. “What’s the first name of Convict West?”

“Why?”

“I have a photo of his cell with a hole.”

“Oh,” said the warden, “I shouldn’t have given that out. I’d prefer you didn’t use it.”

The
Chronicle
felt obliged to—the other papers had it. West’s role might never have come to light had it not been for the warden’s blunder and Raudebaugh’s alertness.

A few days later reporters on the federal beat in San Francisco were invited to the island and given a look at the cells. They inquired about the deterioration, and Blackwell said, “I’ve had structural engineers say that concrete doesn’t deteriorate. All I know is what I see.” A reporter picked at the concrete with his fingers, then remarked on its solidity, that it did not crumble to the touch and that digging through it with a spoon must have taken some doing. Blackwell said, “Spooning out sounds like they worked their way through ice cream. This isn’t ice cream.”

Before returning to Washington, Wilkinson announced that his investigation had disclosed “no indication of willful negligence.” Three days later the guards on duty during the two shifts the night of the escape were quietly suspended for twenty days without pay. Reporters heard about this weeks afterward and queried Blackwell. He said: “The officers were suspended for failing to make an accurate inmate count. Their failure jeopardized the security of the prison.” Who were the guards? “That’s a personnel problem, not a public matter,” he said. “You don’t want to blackball them, do you?”

Five months after the break, Bennett announced the appointment of Dollison as associate warden of the maximum-security institution at Seagoville, Texas. He commended Dollison, some thought a bit ambiguously: “His performance over the years has been of the highest quality. I am anxious for him to take a new job.”

By coincidence, the
last
escape from Alcatraz—on December 16, 1962—occurred exactly 25 years to the day after Roe and Cole effected the
first.
That is, it will stand as the last escape if the prison command manages somehow to persuade the plotters to hold off a little while, until The Rock can be closed down. After the December break Blackwell commented wryly, “Apparently we weren’t phasing out fast enough.”

The most significant aspect of that escape, neatly interring forever the Alcatraz myth, was the feat of a convict in reaching the mainland, the first known victory over the tides by a fleeing felon. The affair also produced a full quota of blunders and cover-up attempts that took on the features of a sexless French farce.

The escapers were two long-term bank robbers: John Paul Scott, thirty-five, of Kentucky, and Darl Lee Parker, thirty-one, of Ohio. December 16 was a Sunday, and they slipped away into the dark, drizzly, foggy night after the five-thirty count. As culinary workers, they had not yet been locked up. They were missed at five-forty-seven, and a half hour later the prison launch found Parker shivering on Little Alcatraz, a rock cluster one hundred yards west. At seven-forty teenagers phoned the military police at the Presidio of San Francisco that they had come upon a “body”—it was Scott—at Fort Point, just inside the Golden Gate, almost three miles from Alcatraz.

Inexplicably, the prison waited about an hour before alerting the Coast Guard. San Francisco police were notified eight minutes
after
Scott was found on the mainland. For the next hour squad cars and patrolmen prowled the shoreline for a fugitive already in custody. Reporters finally informed police that Scott had been captured.

Blackwell, pressed, reluctantly and sparsely sketched the escape: they had cut a window bar in a storage room below the kitchen, had scaled a barbed-wire fence and gone down to the water along the route taken by the Morris trio.

Scott, semi-conscious, body temperature down to 94°, was soon revived at the Presidio’s Letterman General Hospital and returned to Alcatraz. He had worn an improvised Mae West: inflated surgical gloves stuffed into the sleeves of a jacket tied around his waist. (Said Blackwell the next day: “I thought it would be pretty difficult to get those gloves, but apparently it wasn’t too difficult.”) Before he was silenced at the Presidio, Scott, either as a jest or to confound the prison authorities, said he had severed the toolproof bar with ordinary string, moistened and rubbed with a kitchen cleanser to serve as an abrasive.

Bennett flew out from Washington, investigated the break, then held a press conference in a seldom-used bankruptcy courtroom in San Francisco, the largest and most clamorous ever experienced on the federal beat. Poised, suavely smiling, he announced at the outset: “I’ve read all of the newspaper accounts of the escape. They are substantially right in all major aspects. Of course, there are certain minor details that you didn’t know about.” He patently intended a brief conference and several times started to rise, but was pinned down by questions. And then he made a slip—a remark about “going over the roof.” The newsmen bored in, pried out the truth, bits at a time, like prying gold flakes out of quartz. Most queries drew a repeated response: “I don’t know; maybe the warden knows.” The warden stood mutely by, chain-smoking cigarettes. The bits pried loose added up to:

Scott worked alone in the storage room “under constant supervision.” Another convict had started the cutting more than a year earlier, had passed the secret on to Scott when he was transferred elsewhere. Bars throughout the prison are “regularly” checked for soundness. Yet the sawing was never detected? Well, Scott “went when he did” because those bars were due to be checked and, though camouflaged by paint after each sawing stint, he feared his work “would be detected.” (Bennett neglected to explain how Scott could be aware that the bars, so long safe from a guard’s rubber mallet, were now due for a check.)

Had Scott, as the convict said, actually cut through a 1½-inch-thick steel bar with string and a sink cleanser? Well, some of the sawing may have been done that way “but not all of it.” (Indeed, not. A metal expert says a convict working at it full eight-hour shifts would require about 75 years, give or take a decade; five tons of string, and perhaps 10,000 cans of cleanser to do the job.) Scott presumably used banjo strings and a saw fashioned out of a spatula by notching its edge (found in a drainpipe in the room). He removed both a 14-inch length of bar and a section of horizontal flat bar; and to do the cutting, a few minutes at a time while the guard was out of the room, he had to climb onto a table and on up the cross-bars to his project, 15 feet above the floor. Then he had to cut out a small steel-framed window.

After crawling out, Scott and Parker went to the north side of the cellhouse, shinnied up a drainpipe, crossed the roof to a blind spot (out of sight of the road tower), then descended. By another pipe? Oh, no, they’d brought along a 50-foot extension cord ripped from a waxing machine, to slide down. This route—
not
the Morris route—gave them access to an area without a cyclone fence. They hurried right by the gun tower, on down to the shore.

Reporter Rich Jordan of the
San Francisco Examiner
wrote of the news conference in the bankruptcy court: “Bennett, after a huddle with Blackwell, girded himself for an explanation to the press. Unfortunately, after almost 90 minutes of backing and filling and half-answered questions, the assembly press went away with the idea that Bennett was not sure exactly what happened, either.…

“Bennett, who obviously had not been briefed as well as he would have liked, had no explanation for the two-hour delay in notifying police and the Presidio, why a guard tower covering the escape route was unmanned, how presumably closely supervised convicts could saw away at a bar for, by his own admission, a year, or how they could have stolen surgical gloves.”

Nonetheless, as he had so staunchly done after every escape and riot over the years, Bennett voiced “great confidence” in the warden and custodial staff. And, as he had announced after each escape over the years, he announced that the security setup would be tightened to make Alcatraz, uh, escapeproof. He remained unshaken in his belief that, though Alcatraz as an island prison had outlived its usefulness because of its “crumbling condition,” Alcatraz as a penal concept was “the greatest deterrent against crime.”

Several months after the Morris-plotted break, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy came to San Francisco, and he too held a huge news conference. A reporter broached a subject that had long nettled newsmen, although no editor had ever thought to seek a remedy: “Sir, the Department of Justice apparently has competent people out here but why, when anything happens at Alcatraz, are they voiceless? At such times, why is it necessary for newspapers to go to the trouble and expense day after day of calling Washington to check out tips or other information? Have you, Sir, any proposals for correcting this problem?”

The young attorney general grinned. “Call collect.”

Alcatraz, as a scientific stir secure against escape, had clearly failed. And as a place of punishment, not reformation? Again, failure. Joe Cretzer’s second escape try, for an example, had a cold-blooded brutality that his first lacked, five years earlier, when he docilely submitted to the advice of a trussed-up captain. As a fearsome threat to keep others in line? John K. Giles voiced a thought on this principle when the judge lengthened his term by three years for his escape attempt. The judge expressed a hope the added years would act as a deterrent to others, and Giles politely dissented: “I speak as an expert, Your Honor, and I know if you gave me a life term it wouldn’t deter any escapers.” He qualified as an expert: he had spent thirty of his fifty years behind bars, was a fugitive when picked up on a federal rap.

This experiment in penology, as Warden Johnston phrased it, also carried a high price tag. The cost as of June 1962, Bennett told Wallace Tower of
The New York Times,
was running $13.79 a day to keep a prisoner on Alcatraz, compared to a daily average of $5.37 in other federal prisons. Estimates on the upkeep of Alcatraz in the past have run even higher. In 1953 Senator William Langer, North Dakota Republican who had long favored abandonment of The Rock, told the Senate that Alcatraz convicts could be boarded cheaper at the Waldorf-Astoria. He said the island prison was then costing approximately $5,000,000 a year to operate and “on my last inspection trip, it had only 150 inmates.” This would average $33,333.33 a year per prisoner, or slightly more than $91 a day.

Why did Alcatraz fail? Despite certain shortcomings, the men who ran it were for the most part conscientious. Former guards and convicts alike attest to Warden Madigan’s decent instincts. Warden Johnston, who set up this penal lab, was known as a humanitarian for his work in ridding Folsom Prison of its medieval barbarities. Yet his own creation soon took on the aspect of medieval cruelty, refined in the mental torment of routine, raw in the physical brutality of the dungeon. Patently, it was the system itself that was its own undermining agent.

At the very beginning, when the Department of Justice first disclosed it had such a thing as Alcatraz in mind, responsible penologists spoke out in protests that proved prophetic. Commissioner William J. Ellis of New Jersey saw “grave danger … of cruelties and repressive measures.” Commissioner Walter N. Thayer, Jr., of New York felt that “prison officials should be able to handle dangerous criminals by segregation within their own walls.” Dr. A. Warren Stearns, Commissioner of Massachusetts, warned: “The history of the world if bespattered with stories of wretchedness and misery resulting from such concepts of the care of the criminal.”

Four years after the laboratory of Alcatraz began turning out men in straitjackets, a writer, Anthony M. Turano, gave this appraisal: “France, following a recent report to the Chamber of Deputies urging that the infamous isolation system in Guiana be abolished as ‘a notorious failure, inefficient from a penal point of view,’ and a blot ‘on the good name of France,’ has stopped exporting its criminals to Devil’s Island and vicinity.

“Nevertheless … the same discredited theories of criminology were pronounced valid in America. A medieval code of ‘punishment and not reformation’ was put in force; and the agents of justice proceeded to exemplify the general proposition that civilized society should stoop to the level of its lowest rat.… It is not easy to perceive the sociological wisdom of transforming convicted scoundrels into raving maniacs. Their summary execution would reflect more humanity and official dignity than the maintenance of a costly suite of torture chambers.”
³

(France stopped sending prisoners to Devil’s Island in 1938, and the Free French Government abolished the penal colonies in French Guiana during World War II.)

In the 1950s, when the Bureau of Prisons sought funds from Congress for a substitute Alcatraz inland, two of the nation’s top penologists, Harry Elmer Barnes and Negley K. Teeters, branding Alcatraz as the ultimate in “dead-end penology,” wrote: “There were many misgivings among prison men about the advisability of creating such a bleak maximum-security facility. Their protests went unheeded and through the years the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been obliged to maintain it although its excessive expense as well as its basic philosophy of correctional treatment have never been justified. Alcatraz is a monument to the thesis that some criminals cannot be reformed and should be repressed and disciplined by absolute inflexibility. But today not even the Federal Bureau defends Alcatraz. Yet it contends that a new and more modern maximum-security plant is the answer to those relatively few inmates that defy discipline and order. All of our states must handle this type of criminal without the benefit of new construction especially designed for the ‘rotten apples out of the barrel,’ as Director James V. Bennett calls them. Alcatraz is no longer justifiable, but to erect a super-maximum-security prison in its place is highly debatable.”
⁴