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with “the gangster element,” but they faced a serious obstacle in winning back the public’s confidence. The federal prisons then in existence were not prepared to hold such dangerous and important criminals. Corrupt and poorly managed, they were widely perceived as coddling influential felons by permitting special privileges and allowing them to continue involvement in criminal enterprises from behind bars, while flaws in their security systems offered them opportunities for escape.
    Alcatraz was created to solve this problem. Surrounded by cold ocean currents, it was intended to hold the nation’s “public enemies” to an iron regimen, reduce them to mere numbers, cut them off from the outside world, and keep them locked up securely for decades. With Alcatraz in business, the country would finally be safe from Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Dock Barker, Alvin Karpis, and their gangster cronies, and these notorious felons would finally get the punishment they deserved. Alcatraz was to became a monument to federal authority.
    The extraordinary measures taken at this particular prison to control the behavior of its prisoners and to project the appropriate image of harsh punishment to the public made it starkly different from other American prisons, including other federal penitentiaries. For more than half a century, national leaders in penology had been moving away from the model of prisons as institutions designed mainly to punish and deter criminal behavior and toward a model that included the goal of reforming or “rehabilitating” prisoners. By the 1930s the Federal Bureau of Prisons hadfully embraced the concept of imprisonment encapsulated in the term “corrections.” When it opened, Alcatraz thus became a conspicuous anomaly in the progressive evolution of American penology.
    The inconsistency between Alcatraz and other efforts by the Bureau of Prisons was noted by two prominent academic criminologists of the era, Harry Elmer Barnes and Negley K. Teeters, who wrote in the early 1940s:
    During the period between 1935 and the present we have witnessed amazing paradoxes in this area of the new penology—now referred to as corrections. We have seen the expansion of the efficient Federal Bureau of Prisons and the development of modern concepts of corrections in several of the states. But in the first instance we have witnessed the sorry career of that nullification of progressive penal treatment—Alcatraz, the super-maximum-security prison in San Francisco Bay, maintained by the same progressive Federal Bureau of Prisons. 2
    While officials in the Department of Justice believed that a maximum-custody, minimum-privilege regime at Alcatraz was necessary for practical reasons of security and to convince Americans that the “public enemies” were receiving their just deserts, they also recognized that the prison’s deviation from the ideals of progressive penology could be controversial. In an effort to limit criticism of the prison, its methods and management—and because isolation of the prisoners from the outside world was a key part of the regime—they instituted a policy of secrecy, a deliberate effort to “create an air of mystery” surrounding the island.
    Throughout Alcatraz’s thirty-year service as a federal prison, news reporters were prohibited from interviewing inmates and staff other than the warden. Even after a bloody escape attempt by six convicts in 1946, reporters from the wire services and San Francisco newspapers were allowed only a brief and restricted tour of the damaged cell house conducted by the warden. They were not permitted to interview any prisoner or guard, including those who were injured or taken hostage.
    For three decades, employees at Alcatraz followed the strict order laid down by four successive wardens: do not talk to reporters when you are on the mainland, and do not discuss events or personalities at the prison with family members or friends. The blood