Summary and Analysis of Escape from Alcatraz: The True Crime Classic: Based on the Book by J. Campbell Bruce
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Summary and Analysis of Escape from Alcatraz: The True Crime Classic: Based on the Book by J. Campbell Bruce
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This short summary and analysis of Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce includes:
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About Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce:
A true crime classic, Escape from Alcatraz recounts the history of the infamous prison on Alcatraz Island and the many men who risked their lives trying to escape it.
Bruce’s book brings to life the grim, gruesome conditions of life in lockup on Alcatraz, and the prisoners who lived there—from notorious gangster Al “Scarface” Capone to robber Frank Lee Morris, the architect of Alcatraz’s most audacious escape. More than a tale of prison break, Escape from Alcatraz is a scathing indictment of a penal system that strives for dehumanization, rather than rehabilitation, of its prisoners.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504044202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of Escape from Alcatraz: The True Crime Classic
Based on the Book by J. Campbell Bruce
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4420-2
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Chapter 1
On a stormy day in January 1960, Frank Lee Morris was brought in shackles to the supermax prison on Alcatraz Island. Almost immediately, he began casing the place, noticing guards' positions and searching for security weaknesses in the famously escape-proof labyrinthine facility.
Need to Know: The handsome, well-mannered, and deeply intelligent Morris was keenly observant and coolly composed.
Chapter 2
The origins of Alcatraz Island are shrouded in mist — literally. The San Francisco Bay's famous fog obscured the Golden Gate from seafaring explorers' view for two centuries. In 1769, Don Gaspar de Portolá discovered the rocky mass that would become known as Alcatraz on an overland mission, during which he spied the island from a high peak. In 1775, Spanish scout Don Juan Manuel de Ayala led the first boat through the Golden Gate, naming the barren rock La Isla de los Alcatraces after the pelicans he saw there. He also named the neighboring island La Isla de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles, now known simply as Angel Island.
Before anyone set foot on Alcatraz, the island changed hands from Spain to Mexico to the United States. With the Gold Rush came plans for a lighthouse and fortress to be used as a lookout and point from which to potentially engage any ships coming though the Golden Gate. Fort Alcatraz and Alcatraz Light were both completed in 1859. No enemy ships ever posed a threat, however, and the fort was obsolete in less than ten years.
Alcatraz housed a few Civil War prisoners, eventually leading to a new building, and in 1868, the upgraded fortress became a full-fledged incarceration facility for long-term military prisoners. In 1907, the penitentiary was converted into the Pacific Branch, United States Disciplinary Barracks — a place where men could earn reinstatement to military service if they proved their worth. Of those eligible men, 89 percent of prisoners returned to active service.
Need to Know: Barren, obscured by fog, and bordered by rocks, Alcatraz Island is an isolated, inaccessible location. With no running water of its own, it appears to have been largely unused by the native populations and the Spaniards. Geographically, it seemed almost destined to become the site of a prison.
Chapter 3
In 1933, Alcatraz was renovated to become a "superbastille," designed to confine the violent gangsters of the Prohibition era. The idea was to separate the most notorious criminals from minor offenders who might be able to reassimilate as productive members of society one day.
The Justice Department assumed control of the facility in 1933, and Head Warden James A. Johnston was the architect of this transition. A veteran administrator of Folsom and San Quentin Prisons, he envisioned Alcatraz as an innovative and progressive approach to the penal system. He installed automatic locking devices, gunwalks, tear-gas outlets, and steel doors and enclosed the prison with a barbed-wire fence and guard-manned gun towers.
Strict disciplinary policies were also put in place, such as a rule of silence — absolutely no talking among inmates. Violators would land in the Dark Hole: a dungeon with dank, pitch-black cells where prisoners were chained up to keep them from digging out. The men were allowed out after nineteen days for a shower and a break, but often went right back into solitary. The thinking at the time was that the types of prisoners in Alcatraz were incapable of being rehabilitated, so they must simply be subjugated. This harsh reality was made clear to new arrivals right away: As part of the intake process, in order to remove any traces of dignity, prisoners were stripped naked before being led through the prison to their cells while other inmates watched.
Need to Know: The transition of Alcatraz from a military jail to a maximum-security prison came with a paradigm shift. The attitude that inmates might actually be reformed by their time in lockup was replaced by a concerted campaign to simply force them into obedience.
Chapter 4
In its new incarnation, Alcatraz was believed to be escape-proof — the strongest prison in the United States. As such, it became home to many infamous prisoners, especially notorious gangsters such as John Paul Chase, Machine Gun Kelly, Bugs Moran, and Al Capone, who were considered too dangerous to be housed in less secure facilities.
The gangsters found new vocations on The Rock. Chase became a painter, selling his work to benefit a cancer charity. Kelly took up bookkeeping and became a cobbler. Capone was likely the most famous prisoner on Alcatraz. He was used to manipulating other prisons in his favor, but on Devil's Island, he worked in the laundry. The rule of silence was especially difficult for the boisterous Capone, and he repeatedly landed in solitary for talking. He was hated among the prisoners, for his wealth and for his gang activity on the outside, and so he hid among the prison orchestra, playing a $1,500 bejeweled banjo brought to him by his wife.
The hatred of Capone eventually led to some violent incidents: Chase hurled a sash-weight at his head and Tex Lucas stabbed him with a pair of scissors. When the media got wind of these attacks, Warden Johnston denied any knowledge. Capone, already suffering from symptoms of syphilitic dementia, also became increasingly debilitated from time spent in the dungeon. He was transferred from Alcatraz to Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor to serve the last year of his sentence.
Another infamous criminal, train robber Roy Gardner, was generally regarded as a model prisoner, even advising on security flaws within the prison. Released in 1937, he relayed an account of "Hellcatraz" to a San Francisco paper, one of a few glimpses the public had into the conditions within the prison. In 1939, he committed suicide.
Need to Know: On one level, Alcatraz's draconian policies succeeded in their mission: breaking the spirits of hardened gangsters. But they went far beyond making these prominent prisoners obedient, driving some to violence, mental breakdowns, and suicide.
Chapter 5
While the prison was open, a small group of guards and other prison staff lived on the island — some with wives and children. About seventy-five children were born on Alcatraz, and the island had a kindergarten class for a time.
Surprisingly, these families enjoyed relatively normal lives, thanks to ferry service to and from San Francisco, and the very isolation of the prison facility ensured that children rarely had direct contact with the inmates.
Need to Know: The coexistence of families living relatively normal lives alongside prisoners surviving under extreme conditions made for an almost surreal parallel.
Chapter 6
It wasn't only high-profile prisoners like Al Capone and Roy Gardner who found themselves psychologically undone by life at Alcatraz in the 1930s. The detailed, rigorously enforced day-today routines made some inmates desperate, irrational, and even "violently insane." The days were identical, timed precisely; the only variations could be found in the mess menu and in an hour in chapel on Sundays. Desperate for any interaction, prisoners befriended mice and lizards. They were also known to brew their own liquor, known as pruno, by fermenting raisins and other dried fruits with yeast from the bakery.
One convict, Joe Bowers, blatantly attempted to climb a fence in broad daylight and was shot to death by a guard — leading some to believe that what looked like a mad dash for freedom was really a calculated escape from his mortal existence. Another inmate, John Stadig, used his mess-hall fork to extract the veins from his wrists and bite them off. He was transferred to Leavenworth, where he committed suicide the day he arrived. A third, Rufe Persful, chopped off his own fingers with a hatchet. These incidents were all covered up by Johnston.
The inmates made a few inroads against the super strict rules. The rule of silence was enforced in the mess hall, until one day in 1937, when an inmate loudly asked for sugar. All at once, everyone started talking, and since solitary couldn't hold all of them, the rule was abandoned. Likewise, after one inmate threw his hated coveralls into the center aisle of the cells known as Broadway, others followed suit. Turpentine and a flaming roll of toilet paper burned them all, and the inmates were given pants.
Need to Know: The numbingly repetitive nature of days spent in Alcatraz made prisoners lose all track of time — and, in some cases, their minds. Though Warden Johnston viewed his disciplinary model as progressive, inmates who had survived The Rock compared his methods to medieval torture.
Chapter 7
The dynamics between the prisoners and the staff at Alcatraz were complex; they coexisted with one another, often on friendly terms, but were separated by the obvious boundaries of their roles. Officers could never let down their guards.
At times, the convicts found ways to skirt, or even openly defy, the rules of The Rock. They invented and passed signals to communicate, started fires in their workshops, even crafted guns from shop materials. They created diversions for the guards when they were up to no good.
In 1937, the inmates, led by Tex Lucas, went on strike from their prison jobs. Within a week, during which convicts were fed a bread-and-water diet, the mutiny petered out, its ringleaders sent to solitary. But afterward, Whitey Phillips, the last to give up on the strike, dared to punch Warden Johnston, knocking him out cold. Phillips continued to attack Johnston, who spent a week hospitalized in San Francisco. Phillips was also beaten and hospitalized. It was presumed that Phillips had lashed out about the failed strike, but it turned out he had been working on a manuscript about Alcatraz that the warden had confiscated.
Bill Mahan invented a gun created from copper tubing and rubber bands with match heads and lead pellets as ammunition. While the guards couldn't prove he made the weapon, they did find instructions for building it in his handwriting.
Guards were under a lot of pressure themselves. Often locked in a tower for eight-hour stretches, the tedium sometimes got to them. But in the early years of Alcatraz, under their close watch, no one escaped.
Need to Know: Even faced with the prospect of harsh and brutal punishment, convicts did whatever they could to assert themselves and retain some measure of humanity.
Chapter 8
As far back as when Alcatraz was a disciplinary military barracks, there were rumblings of mutiny amid the inmate population. In 1926, Colonel G. Maury Cralle, the commandant of the facility, caught wind of a plan to have every man in lockup make a break for it at once. He managed to quash the plot simply by calling their bluff: Did they really want to chance the frigid, choppy water? They did not.
But once the fortress became a superbastille, escape attempts became wilder and more desperate — the stakes were higher. In 1937, inmates Ralph Roe and Ted Cole prepped for their escape by using a hacksaw to weaken the bars of a cell window, with the ultimate aim of reaching the beach of Alcatraz Island. On one particularly foggy day, they broke through the weakened bars, smashed through a window, and presumably dove into the bay, making the escape that the prisoners of 1926 didn't dare try. Roe and Cole vanished completely: Despite many false leads from the citizens of San Francisco, neither the men nor their bodies were ever found, and authorities presumed them dead.
Other attempts followed, with less mysterious consequences. In 1938, taking advantage of a Guard Royal C. Cline's routine, Thomas R. Limerick, Rufus Franklin, and Tex Lucas snuck into a workshop with the intent of escaping through a window. Cline caught them, and they hit him fatally in the head with a hammer. The three inmates succeeded in escaping to the roof. However, Limerick and Franklin were shot by a gun-tower guard, and all three men were captured. Limerick later died from the gunshot wound. Franklin and Lucas were tried for the murder of the guard, and their sentences were extended to life.
In an even bolder breakout in 1939, five convicts — Doc Barker, Dale Stamphill, Rufus McCain, William Martin, and Henri Young — actually managed to get free from solitary confinement cells and made it as far as the beach. It was presumed that they had used a combination of banjo strings or piano wires and valve-grinding compound to weaken the bars at the bottom of the solitary confinement cells.
These episodes stirred fear in mainland San Francisco residents, stoking a "not in my backyard" attitude as it became clear that Alcatraz was not, as authorities insisted, escape-proof, even with the deathly riptides around the island. A women's group sent a teenage girl to test the authorities' theory by swimming to the island and back, which she did with no trouble. Another swam out to the island, all the way around it, and back again. They demonstrated with ease — again, contrary to officials' insistence — that a person could survive the trip. An investigation following the 1939 incident recommended greater transparency into Alcatraz's security protocols. This did not happen.
Need to Know: The prison's secrecy meant there were discrepancies and omissions in what the press and public were told about escape attempts on Alcatraz.
Chapter 9
Despite the suppression of the activities at Alcatraz, disturbing news about the conditions of the prison continued to come to light — most notably in the murder trial of Henri Young, who, upon emerging from years in the dungeon after the botched 1939 escape from solitary, killed one of his co-conspirators, Rufus McCain. McCain had emerged from the hole first, and told his fellow inmates that he planned to kill Young for foiling their plans. But Young got to him first, stabbing him in the stomach.
The trial was a sensation, drawing throngs of people and press eager to gawk at Young and the fellow inmates his lawyers called to the stand. The defense's argument was that the horrific treatment of prisoners made Alcatraz itself responsible for the killing.
Many prisoners testified to the horrible conditions at Alcatraz: spending weeks, months, even years at a stretch in the dank, dark dungeon cells with only a pillow, blanket, and bucket (to serve as a toilet); going without baths or proper meals. They recounted stories of sick prisoners dying after their pleas for medical attention went unheeded. They recalled witnessing brutal, sometimes fatal, beatings by guards and prisoners being driven insane and sent to mental institutions. Ultimately, the jury decided in the defense's favor, and Young was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder, adding only a maximum of three years to his sentence.
Need to Know: In a statement condemning the "unbelievably brutal and inhuman" practices at the prison, the jury called for "a proper and speedy investigation of Alcatraz ... so that justice and humanity may be served." No such investigation was to come.
Chapter 10
Three months after Young's trial, news broke in San Francisco that Alcatraz guard John F. Gilmore — a gentle man known as Big John among the guards — had brutally beaten a young woman for picking wildflowers in a vacant lot by his home. When twenty-eight-year-old Thelma Fleming defied him and threw her flowers in his face, Gilmore punched her, and then continued to hit her. Her wounds required stitches.
Need to Know: Gilmore's unsettling incident speaks to the culture of Alcatraz and the mentality of its guards, who were conditioned to constantly assert their authority and punish anyone who defied it. Just as prisoners became traumatized by the abuse they received, guards may have sustained psychic damage from inflicting that abuse day in and day out.
Chapter 11
Once he was inside Alcatraz again, Henri Young landed right back in the dungeon. In a cruel twist of fate for prisoners, decisions made by the prison's internal disciplinary board could supersede those made in court — rendering the jury's rejection of Young's murder charge essentially meaningless. The additional three years were added to the end of his sentence.
Prior to his trial, Young had been studying through the University of California Extension courses. Afterward, he petitioned for an hour of light a day so he could study. He was denied, despite having an almost straight-A record in his classes.
Many convicts studied law while incarcerated at The Rock, among whom the smartest may have been Cecil Wright. He worked to petition for his own release from Alcatraz, and for the causes of hundreds of other inmates — including small quality-of-life demands such as sweets and cigarettes. The first time he got off The Rock was by arguing that he had been incarcerated before his parole from Joliet expired, and that he was technically still an Illinois prisoner. But once his parole ended in Illinois, he was sent back to The Rock. After thirteen more court petitions, Wright managed to gain his freedom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Escape from Alcatraz: The True Crime Classic by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Summary,
Timeline,
Cast of Characters,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
About J. Campbell Bruce,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,