Alcatraz: The Gangster Years (review)

America's gangster era, from the 1920s through the immediate post-World War II years, never ceases to fascinate professional historians and crime buffs. Populated by characters such as mobster Al Capone; bank robbers George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and "Dock" Barker; ransom kidnappers Harvey Bailey and Albert Bates; and others whose exploits simultaneously generated both fear and admiration among millions of hard-pressed Americans, the period was romanticized in a host of "tough guy" movies starring the likes of James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart. But for law enforcement authorities, especially officials in the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the gangsters were "public enemies," many of whom were even more dangerous because of their skills in escaping from state and federal prisons.

The desire of law enforcement officials to prevent incorrigible convicts from wreaking further havoc spurred the opening of Alcatraz, a new federal penitentiary on an island in San Francisco Bay, in the summer of 1934. With a location that made it virtually escape proof, an inmate population that included many of the nation's most notorious criminals, and a harsh regime that resulted in some inmates spending years in disciplinary segregation, Alcatraz acquired an image as "America's Devil's Island." The BOP's tight control on the flow of information into and out of the prison fueled the public's appetite for sensational accounts of life within the walls. From motion pictures such as Birdman of Alcatraz, starring Burt Lancaster, and Escape from Alcatraz, featuring Clint Eastwood, to Don Knotts' comedic portrayal of the Mayberry jail as "The Rock" in his role as Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife on television's The Andy Griffith Show, Hollywood proved ever willing to meet the public's demand for information, no matter how sensational or inaccurate.

In Alcatraz: The Gangster Years, David Ward, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Minnesota, and Gene Kassebaum, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Hawaii, seek to tell "an authentic history of Alcatraz," one that gets behind its myths and "tries to answer the most basic questions about America's most notorious prison and its effects on the men imprisoned there" (8). Their analytical narrative draws upon a broad variety of primary documents that resulted from unrestricted access to records of the BOP and other federal criminal justice agencies. Another major resource includes approximately one hundred interviews with former inmates, guards, and administrators. The combination of oral and documentary sources enables the authors to follow the lives of Alcatraz inmates from their initial confinement through the years following their release. Given that Alcatraz was a maximum security facility whose mission was to confine the most habitual and incorrigible of convicts and that its regime contradicted an emerging emphasis on rehabilitation, the findings of Ward and Kassebaum are strikingly counterintuitive.

Although a sociological study, the book is remarkably free of social sciences jargon and is written in a crisp narrative style that historians of twentieth-century crime and punishment will find appealing. The first part, which encompasses about half of the text, summarizes the federal government's war on "public enemies," explains Alcatraz's inmate selection processes and confinement program, and narrates many instances of inmate resistance, including food and work strikes and escape attempts. The most dramatic chapter is devoted to the May 1946 "Battle of Alcatraz," which costs the lives of two guards and three inmates when guards and military personnel suppressed a daring escape attempt by four experienced escape artists who had smuggled weapons onto The Rock. Ward and Kassebaum employ oral history throughout the first part of the book to flesh out and add color to the narrative and to present the often-conflicting perspectives of participants on both sides of the bars. They are especially effective in melding oral and documentary evidence to reveal gross security breaches that encouraged escape attempts and to illuminate infighting between the BOP and the FBI...