It was during the time of the California gold rush that the United
States first got the idea to build a fortress on Alcatraz Island. The reason
was to protect its newfound wealth from peg-legged pirates or whoever else they
were afraid was going to rob their coffers. One imagines President Zachary
Taylor at the time as some crotchety old bent over prospector rattling his fist
at the Pacific horizon and shouting in a dusty voice, “Our gold! We can’t let
‘em take our gold!”
It turned out after all that no one came to try to un-stuff the lumpy
mattresses of the United States government. The fortress on Pelican Island sat
uselessly for two decades until the Civil War broke out. At that point the army
decided it would be an ideal place for holding captured rebels, surrounded as
it was by the spine-eating cold and the swim fighting currents of San Francisco
Bay. But it was during the Spanish-American War that they raised it to its
full, dark potential, when four hundred and fifty POWs were crammed inside of
its walls.
By 1934 the United States Army, with no wars to keep it rich, could no
longer afford to maintain the Alcatraz Military Prison. The Department of
Justice however was prospering at the time from the increase of crime caused by
the mass poverty of the great depression, and they took it over. They wired it
for electricity; they flooded every utility tunnel with cement, and fortified
every cell and cellblock with modern steel. With all the money they had to blow
on renovations they decided to get especially fancy with the ceiling of the
cafeteria, where they installed tear gas canisters that could be triggered from
the outside. However, they didn’t take it into consideration the fact that the
guards would never leave the dining area. So if a riot were to occur, the
teargas would also be dropped on them.
Alcatraz was designed physically to be one of the strongest prisons in
existence and administratively to be the harshest and least forgiving of any other
correctional facility. No crime committed on the outside world would get
someone sentenced to Alcatraz. To end up there you had to already be a prisoner
somewhere else, and a bad one. Alcatraz was where you were sent when no other
prison could handle you.
Though there was some access to the prison library at Alcatraz, inmates
were not allowed to read or hear about current events through newspapers or
radios. There were also no movies, no plays, and no entertainment of any other
kind. The intention of such extreme isolation was to make “the Rock” an island
of men who were dead to the world. It was crucial to the administration that
all 212 men understand that whether by serving their time and being released,
or by staying for the rest of their lives, Alcatraz was the last prison they
would ever know.
At one o’clock in the morning on January
14th, 1936 the Alcatraz prisoners were woken up by the painful
groans of their fellow inmate, Jack Allen. He was moved to isolation so as not
to disturb anyone, but his non-verbal wrenching complaints filtered through the
walls and held everyone’s attention throughout the night. No one came to check
on him because the doctor had seen him a few hours before and believed that his
complaint was not serious. Past examinations over time had led the doctor to
conclude that Allen was a hypochondriac. Seven hours later he was rushed to
surgery, but two days later he died. This was the first civilian death in the
history of Alcatraz and the prison population was moved to a seething anger
over this event.
In April 1936 a
prisoner named Joe Bowers, after three months in the dungeon, had gradually
earned back enough trust to get a job at the prison incinerator, where he’d
been working for the last few weeks. Among the things he was supposed to burn
were leftover scraps from the kitchen, which caused seagulls to visit him when
he brought the food out. On April 26 when Bowers came out and the gulls
descended to meet him, he upended some garbage cans and piled them up to form a
stairway to the top of the fence. Then he climbed it without trying to get
over, but rather simply stood there, reached into his pockets and pulled out
bread to toss to the gulls. It wasn’t until the guards started firing that, in
fear and confusion, he began to climb down the other side of the fence. He
reached the ledge but decided to climb back up again and was trying to get back
over the fence when one of the bullets hit him. He hung by his hands with his
legs dangling when another shot tore into his body, causing him to fall
lifeless down the cliff and into the ocean. This event solidified in the minds
of the inmates that Alcatraz was not just a prison, but a place of inhuman
cruelty.
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