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Authors: J. Campbell Bruce
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surprise at the captain. A guard headed for the culprit. A voice broke forth in response to the speaker, then a convict piped up at another table, then another. Within moments the place range like a boilermakers’ banquet. The guards were helpless. There wasn’t room in the eight dungeon cells to hold everybody. The rule of silence on The Rock had come to an end, by the simple expedient of talking.
Years afterward a sartorial change was effected by a similarly spontaneous, but much more dramatic, action. One evening a convict flung his coveralls out onto Broadway and shouted to the officer on the floor, “You can shove ’em!” Soon the hated garments were flying from all the tiers. Artists shook out bottles of turpentine, then a convict threw a flaming roll of toilet paper from a top-tier cell. Broadway blazed merrily, bright as its namesake. And the men were measured for trousers.
Weapons at their disposal to protest conditions, when verbal pleas fail, are cellhouse rackets and strikes, a refusal to work or to eat. Publicized hunger strikes imply dissatisfaction with food, which is sometimes the case but not always; more often, these are merely a means to an end. Even an industrial strike takes on a hunger aspect: the men are locked up and kept on bread and water, a no-work, no-eat management countermeasure that invariably proves effective. In a hunger strike pure and simple, the men refuse to leave their cells for the mess hall.
In 1940 the strangest strike of all occurred at Alcatraz. No violence of any kind, no shouting, no banging on the cell bars at night. By choice they invoked silence. They did their work in the shops without a word. They filed mutely into the mess hall and on past the steam tables without touching the hot food. They sat down and silently dined on a slice of bread and coffee. Word of the novel action leaked out and the papers, enchanted by the passive, Gandhi-like behavior of the nation’s toughest criminals, played up the story as the Mystery of The Rock.
Warden Johnston felt impelled to comment, and his words were in tone with the bizarre quality of the affair: “It’s the reaction of frustrated men. You lock a man up in a hotel for sixty, seventy, even ninety-nine years, and every so often he will seek to gain the attention of the world outside.” The silent strike lasted a week, ending as abruptly as it had begun; to the press still a big mystery. Actually, the men were seeking to gain attention, but not so much the attention of the world outside as the attention of the federal jurists in San Francisco. Convicts there at the time report that petitions were not getting off the island and the strike, its purpose no mystery to the officials, was called to protest that denial of access to the courts.
Monotony dominated life on The Rock, but there were moments of relief. Work offered physical activity and a companionship of sorts: you were in a room with others; and in the three-minute conversation breaks in the forenoon and afternoon, you could hear your own voice in natural talk. Religious services—Saturday, for Jewish inmates; one Sunday for Catholics, the next for Protestants—provided both spiritual solace and a break in the grinding monotony. So bent was the warden on punishing that equal time was deducted from recreation—surely the only place in America where prayer drew a penalty. The warden theorized that, without such an option, all the convicts would want to attend chapel simply to get out of their cells for an hour. (It could be argued that long exposure, even on this basis, to the teachings of the chaplains might well prove beneficial.) This theory was disproved years later when, at the insistence of a priest, the penalty for church attendance was removed. The convicts did not all suddenly get religion. Chapel attendance continued as it had been, and as it has been through the years: an average of 10 percent of the inmate population.
Convicts devised their own ways to
Years afterward a sartorial change was effected by a similarly spontaneous, but much more dramatic, action. One evening a convict flung his coveralls out onto Broadway and shouted to the officer on the floor, “You can shove ’em!” Soon the hated garments were flying from all the tiers. Artists shook out bottles of turpentine, then a convict threw a flaming roll of toilet paper from a top-tier cell. Broadway blazed merrily, bright as its namesake. And the men were measured for trousers.
Weapons at their disposal to protest conditions, when verbal pleas fail, are cellhouse rackets and strikes, a refusal to work or to eat. Publicized hunger strikes imply dissatisfaction with food, which is sometimes the case but not always; more often, these are merely a means to an end. Even an industrial strike takes on a hunger aspect: the men are locked up and kept on bread and water, a no-work, no-eat management countermeasure that invariably proves effective. In a hunger strike pure and simple, the men refuse to leave their cells for the mess hall.
In 1940 the strangest strike of all occurred at Alcatraz. No violence of any kind, no shouting, no banging on the cell bars at night. By choice they invoked silence. They did their work in the shops without a word. They filed mutely into the mess hall and on past the steam tables without touching the hot food. They sat down and silently dined on a slice of bread and coffee. Word of the novel action leaked out and the papers, enchanted by the passive, Gandhi-like behavior of the nation’s toughest criminals, played up the story as the Mystery of The Rock.
Warden Johnston felt impelled to comment, and his words were in tone with the bizarre quality of the affair: “It’s the reaction of frustrated men. You lock a man up in a hotel for sixty, seventy, even ninety-nine years, and every so often he will seek to gain the attention of the world outside.” The silent strike lasted a week, ending as abruptly as it had begun; to the press still a big mystery. Actually, the men were seeking to gain attention, but not so much the attention of the world outside as the attention of the federal jurists in San Francisco. Convicts there at the time report that petitions were not getting off the island and the strike, its purpose no mystery to the officials, was called to protest that denial of access to the courts.
Monotony dominated life on The Rock, but there were moments of relief. Work offered physical activity and a companionship of sorts: you were in a room with others; and in the three-minute conversation breaks in the forenoon and afternoon, you could hear your own voice in natural talk. Religious services—Saturday, for Jewish inmates; one Sunday for Catholics, the next for Protestants—provided both spiritual solace and a break in the grinding monotony. So bent was the warden on punishing that equal time was deducted from recreation—surely the only place in America where prayer drew a penalty. The warden theorized that, without such an option, all the convicts would want to attend chapel simply to get out of their cells for an hour. (It could be argued that long exposure, even on this basis, to the teachings of the chaplains might well prove beneficial.) This theory was disproved years later when, at the insistence of a priest, the penalty for church attendance was removed. The convicts did not all suddenly get religion. Chapel attendance continued as it had been, and as it has been through the years: an average of 10 percent of the inmate population.
Convicts devised their own ways to
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