FINDING SAN FRANCISO PARTIII: ALCATRAZ

 

Everyone should visit Alcatraz if only to erase every romanticism surrounding it created by Hollywood. It wasn’t just a gritty cold penitentiary. It was a deadly, unsanitary and dirty building of tiny cages not fit for a zoo animal. It has gotten worse since it shut its doors in 1963. The water saturation corroding the structure which was a factor leading to its closure has continued its path of destruction and many of the buildings which were burned during the American Indian Movement’s Occupation of 1969-71 (notably the warden’s house) have been left in ruin and graffiti from the occupation is still visible at entry. Sea bird defecation is inescapable throughout the island.

It is not easy to muster much sympathy for a man of the prison’s most notorious inmates. Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly and even Robert Stroud, the famous bird man, all had multiple murders in their records.  Hollywood has at least been honest about the brutality of many of these thugs, though The Birdman of Alcatraz painted all together too snuggly a picture of Stroud. In a curious twist, however, Murder in the First starring Christian Slater and Kevin Bacon, based on the 1941 trial of inmate Henri Young which first put the treatment of inmates in Alcatraz under scrutiny was, naturally given its aim, candid about the inhuman routines of the prison, but painted such a gross lie of the real Henri Young that it cancels out any revelation it could have brought.

Decay has certainly crept into the cells but its not what shocks at first. The size of those cells, which never were a paradigm of humanity, even by prison standards, is the real horror. Even the library, which prisoners could gain access to after proven good conduct, was a pitiful metal enclosure with small wooden bookcases. The courtyard was but little bigger than a greenhouse and the showers lost their privacy partitions in the 50s to discourage violence. Some lucky inmates who got in good with the guards would be privileged with slightly more spacious cells, but the standard cell was such a sensual, mental and emotive nightmare that it makes but little difference that an even more frightful sight existed at the end of D-Block (the block reserved for the most violent of brutes) known as “The Hole”.

Perhaps it was a necessity for those who ran the place to operate as they did or perhaps it was the point of Alcatraz, but dehumanization of criminals was part of the process. As inmate Jim Quillen stated, “You were a number, you weren't a name; I wasn't Jim Quillen. Hell, I was Number 586 and nobody wanted that.” That was what was needed to be believed about humans being crammed into rat cages.

Alcatraz has been under the care of the National Park Service since 1976. Little has been done to polish the derelict structure. It is the way it should be. Alcatraz was a hell hole and that is how it should be remembered.

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