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While members of Ma
Barker’s gang of hoodlums, Doc Barker and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis,
terrorized the Midwest between 1931 and 1936. Their many crimes
included murder, bank robbery, kidnapping, and train robbery.
Karpis’ flamboyant style had earned him the wrath of J. Edgar Hoover
and soon found himself with the infamous distinction of being “Public
Enemy No. 1.”
Doc Barker was
arrested in January, 1935 and later sent to
Alcatraz
from
Leavenworth. He was killed in an escape attempt from
Alcatraz
in 1939. Carpis, who was arrested in New Orleans in May, 1936, found
himself in
Alcatraz just a few months later. He spent the next 26 years
on the “Rock” before being transferred to McNeil Island in April,
1962. In 1969, he was released and deported to his homeland of
Canada. Carpis died in 1979.
 Robert
Stroud, known as the Birdman of
Alcatraz,
received very little notoriety until he gained attention in the 1962
movie “The Birdman of
Alcatraz.”
Stroud, who was convicted of manslaughter in 1909, was initially sent
to McNeil Island to serve a 12 year sentence. While there, he
was difficult to manage and after attacking an orderly, he was sent to
Leavenworth. After less than four years at the
Kansas
prison, he killed a guard, and was later sentenced to hang.
After his mother appealed to President Wilson, the sentence was
commuted to life. It was during Stroud’s thirty years as a
prisoner at
Leavenworth that he began to study birds, which gained him
international attention. When Stroud began to openly violate
prison rules to continue his birding experiments and communications
with bird breeders, he was sent to
Alcatraz
in 1942, where he never again was permitted to continue his avian
studies. The “Birdman” occupied a cell in D Block for
approximately six years, before he was moved to the prison hospital in
1948, for the purpose of segregating him from the rest of the
population. After he genuinely became ill, he was transferred to
a Federal Medical Facility in
Springfield,
Missouri
in 1959. Four years later, Stroud died of natural causes.
Though the prison was heavily fortified
and it was assumed that the “treacherous waters” of the San Francisco
bay would prevent any escape, several attempts were made throughout
the years.
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Alcatraz Guard Tower.
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photographic prints and downloads
HERE!
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From a total of 1,545 prisoners that spent time at the prison, 36 men
attempted to escape in fourteen 14 separate attempts. Of those, 20
were captured, seven were shot and killed, two drowned, and five were
never found, assumed by prison authorities to have drowned.
Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe were the first disappear from
Alcatraz on
December 16, 1937. While working in one of the workshops, Cole and
Roe had, over a period of time, filed their way through the flat iron bars
on a window. After climbing through the window, they made their way
to the water’s edge and disappeared into San Francisco Bay. Prison
authorities declared them to have drowned but four years later, a San
Francisco Chronicle reporter reported the men were alive and well in South
America.
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The bloodiest escape
attempt occurred over a three day period on May 2-4, 1946 . In this
incident, known as the “Battle of
Alcatraz,”
six men by the names of Bernard Coy, Joseph Cretzer, Sam Shockley,
Clarence Carnes, Marvin Hubbard and Miran Thompson, took control of the
cell house. Overpowering officers and gaining access to weapons and
keys, they planned to escape through the recreation yard door.
However, when they found they didn’t have the key to the outside door,
they decided to fight rather than giving up. During the next couple
of days, the prisoners killed two of the guards they had taken hostage.
Eventually Shockley, Thompson, and Carnes returned to their cells, but
Coy, Cretzer and Hubbard continued to fight. The U.S. Marines were
eventually called out to assist and the escape attempt ended. In the
melee, Coy, Cretzer and Hubbard were killed, and 17 guards and one
prisoner were wounded. Shockley, Thompson, and Carnes later stood
trial for the death of the officers; Shockley and Thompson received the
death penalty and were executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin in
December 1948. Carnes, just 19 years old at the time, received a second
life sentence.
 On
July 11, 1962, Clarence Anglin, his brother John, and Frank Morris also
disappeared from
Alcatraz.
Their escape was made famous by Clint Eastwood's movie, “Escape From
Alcatraz.”
The three escapees, along with another man by the name of Alan (Clayton)
West, made plaster heads with real hair swept from the barber shop floor.
On the night of the escape, they left the heads on their beds and crept
through the ventilators in their cells, which had been widened with stolen
spoons from the kitchen, into the utility corridor. West could not fit
through his hole and remained behind. From there, they made their way to
the roof, then down to the water’s edge. Though prison authorities
believed the men had drowned, no bodies were ever recovered.
During the last escape
from Alcatraz
on December 12, 1962, John Paul Scott, 35-years old, swam from the island
to Fort Point, under the southern part of the Golden Gate Bridge, proving
that it could be done. Along with another prisoner named Darl
Parker, the pair bent the bars of a kitchen window in the cell house
basement and escaped. Parker was discovered on a small outcropping
of rock a short distance from the island. However, Scott, a better
swimmer, made it to Fort Point beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Collapsing from exhaustion and hypothermia, he was soon found by two
teenage boys who called for help. He was then taken to the military
hospital at the Presidio Army base. After being treated for shock
and hypothermia, he was returned to
Alcatraz.
Primarily due to rising
costs, its isolated location, and deteriorating facilities,
Alcatraz
was the most expensive of any state or federal institution. At this same
time, prison operating philosophy was changing to reinstitution and
rehabilitation, rather than the wholsale warehousing of inmates. The
government soon began to build a new prison at Marion, Illinois, with
plans to shut down
Alcatraz.
Though it was said that J. Edgar Hoover was opposed to closing
Alcatraz,
his power base had eroded over the years and his opinion was ignored.
Attorney General Robert
Kennedy officially closed the doors of
Alcatraz on
March 21, 1963, when the final twenty-seven inmates were taken off the
island. It was the first time that reporters were ever allowed on
the “Rock” to cover its closing which made headlines across the country.
Afterwards,
Alcatraz Island was transferred to the General Services Administration
in May of 1963.
During its 29 years of
its operation as a federal prison, the fog enshrouded island confined more
than 1,500 men under intolerable rules and deprivation. Former prisoners
continue to tell tales of the “inside” with numerous scenes that were
seemingly so terrible, that many of the prisoners preferred death to
continued incarceration.
Just as Warden Johnston
had envisioned it, life was hell for the prisoners on the island, and in
no time it was dubbed “Hellcatraz.” Suicides and murders were common
under the severe and stark rule system of the prison. Infractions of
the rules would quickly land a prisoner in “D” block, known as the
“treatment unit.” Here, men could leave their four-by-eight cells
only once in seven days for a brief, ten-minute shower. Harsher
punishments included solitary confinement, in total darkness, for days
without any release, or confinement in the dreaded steel boxes.
As prisoners looked out
the barred windows of the prison, they saw party barges passing by, cars
traveling on the highways of the mainland, and life going on normally for
those not incased upon the Rock. One prisoner described it this way:
“I looked out the window once when I first came to
Alcatraz
and saw that and I vowed to never look out the window again for as long as
I was there."
Though one of America’s
most escape proof prisons,
Alcatraz
served as an experiment that would never again be repeated.
Segregation on this scale had never before been seen and would never again
be practiced.
During the years that the
island was occupied by the prison, eight prisoners were murdered by other
inmates, five committed suicide, 15 died from illness, and numerous others
went insane.
From 1963 to 1969, the
island remained abandoned, with the exception of a short
Native
American occupation in 1964. Lasting for only four hours, the
symbolic occupation was led by Richard McKenzie, with four other
Sioux
Indians,
who demanded the use of the island for a
Native
American Cultural Center and
Indian
University. Though viewed as insignificant at the time, these
sentiments would later resurface. In the meantime, several other
parties lobbied for various development ideas, ranging from a West Coast
version of the Statue of Liberty, to shopping centers, and resort
complexes.
In 1969,
Alcatraz Island
again made national news when another group of
Native
Americans claimed the island as
Indian
land.
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