Alcatraz_ A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years - Michael Esslinger [71]
The inmates at Alcatraz were not always amenable to the confinement rules enforced by their keepers. During the course of the island’s history as a federal penitentiary, there were twenty-four major inmate strikes in protest of the harsh rules. Former inmate Roy Gardner would comment in his 1939 memoir entitled Hellcatraz:
... discipline. Rigid, severe, unrelenting. Rules on Alcatraz, like the bars, are steel. Both are inflexible; neither bends.
In January of 1936, nearly one hundred and forty inmates went on strike to protest the rule of silence and the lack of privileges at Alcatraz. As inmates filed from the cellblock to their work assignments, many of them encouraged fellow convicts to help them protest by joining the strike. The tower guards came out onto the catwalks and raised their weapons toward the inmates, who walked defiantly and slowly to their assignments. The prisoners who refused to work were marched back into the cellhouse and locked down in their cells. Then one by one, the inmates were pulled from their cells and given hearings. A small percentage of them chose to return to work, but several were hostile toward the administration, and maintained their stance. The known ringleaders and vocal agitators where escorted to the dungeon cells in the basement.
The following day, kitchen workers joined the strike, forcing the prison staff to take over the kitchen. The inmates who continued their protest were fed only bread and water. Most of the prison population returned to work after only a few days on the reduced diet, but a handful continued to stand their ground. As the strike continued, a group of six inmates who had refused to take a full meal after nearly five days on bread and water were taken the hospital and force-fed with a tube. This was a traumatic experience, and all of the men eventually returned to work.
Over the years, there were a vast multitude of other strikes and protests, generally all taking aim at the prison regulations and strict confinement practices. When protests occurred inside the cellhouse, the inmates would throw toilet paper or anything else at hand into the cellblock corridors. The inmates would thud their steel-framed bunks onto the floor, drag their tin cups across the bars, and yell at the top of their lungs, thus creating a thunderous and resonating surge of sound. Former Correctional Officer Louis Nelson (nicknamed “Red” by fellow officers),who would later become the Warden of San Quentin, described the noise:
It didn’t happen too often, but when it did, it was fierce. It sounded similar to standing inside a stadium with the crowd yelling and stomping their feet. The first time I experienced it; I admit that it was a little intimidating. When new inmates would arrive, the rest of the population would let off a little steam and put a little fear into the new fish. It haunted the new inmates for at least a few days.
On average there would be six to ten small-scale riots in the Mess Hall per year, whenever the food quality waned. Phil Bergen recalled that on some occasions the stewards would fail to budget properly and toward the end of the month, they would be forced to serve the same type of meal for days on end. This would provoke the inmates into protests in which they would violently overturn the tables, and pitch food all over the floor. These outbreaks would often cause the officer on the Mess Hall catwalk to punch out windowpanes and take aim at the inmates. The prisoners would then file back to their cells without any further disturbance. In the prison’s entire history there were only eighteen major strikes, aside from those incidents that occurred in the Mess Hall.
Famous Inmates
The concept of using Alcatraz as a maximum-security penitentiary was developed in the 1930’s as a response to gangster violence.
When Alcatraz opened as a Federal penitentiary in 1934, the operating premise was to gather the nation’s worst offending criminals under one roof, in a strict minimum privilege / maximum security setting, under the securest possible circumstances.