Alcatraz: The Gangster Years.

Kahan, Paul

ALCATRAZ: THE GANGSTER YEARS

By David Ward with Gene Kassebaum (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2009, 548 pp., $34.95 cloth; $24.95 paper)

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REVIEWED BY PAUL KAHAN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY, AND AUTHOR OF EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY: A HISTORY

WARD AND KASSEBAUM have achieved something extraordinary with Alcatraz: The Gangster Years: a monograph that will appeal to the general reader. The book is an incredibly detailed and provocative account of prisoner life at Alcatraz between 1934 and 1948 that forces the reader to reexamine many of his or her preconceptions about U.S. prisons.

Alcatraz is the culmination of Ward's nearly thirty-five-year investigation into what happened after inmates were released from the prison. The prevailing wisdom was that, since Alcatraz housed the most difficult offenders in the federal prison system, the institution's former inmates would have a high rate of recidivism. Using previously unavailable postrelease data, Ward came to a startling conclusion: despite the inmates' notoriety as "the worst of the worse" in the federal system, men who served time at Alcatraz during the 1930s and 1940s had a lower recidivism rate than did inmates at other federal prisons. Ward was shocked because Alcatraz was never designed to rehabilitate offenders--men were sent to the institution because administrators did not believe they could be rehabilitated--and he set out to discover how this "accidental rehabilitation" happened.

Ward reconstructed the institution's history using previously unavailable sources, including the Department of Justice's inmate files. The most exciting new material, however, is the oral histories he collected from Alcatraz's former inmates, guards, and administrators. Because the Justice Department had more or less barred reporters from the island and ordered employees not to divulge any details of the prison or its administration, little firsthand information made it into the public sphere. Not surprisingly, the public's imagination ran wild, creating a mythical image of the prison as a brutal hellhole. In reality, inmates never faced the sort of physical brutality that many people imagined and, while the prison's regimen was difficult, its inmates had much more freedom during this period than convicts enjoy in today's supermax penitentiaries.