Alcatraz was a sort of prison-within-a-prison, in a manner of speaking, in that it was reserved for “incorrigible” inmates who couldn’t do their time elsewhere because they were too violent, an escape risk, yada yada. Did anyone go directly to The Rock from their trial? Or did all of the inmates who served there begin their sentences somewhere else?
Sure.
Lots of others, but some of the “big” names were:
- Alvin “Creepy Karpis” Karpowicz and Arthur “Doc” Barker, members of the Barker-Karpis gang, were sentenced to Alcatraz for kidnapping.
- Ellsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson was convicted for selling drugs and sent to Alcatraz.
- Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen was sentenced to Alcatraz during the prison’s last years; he was the only inmate to ever be bailed out of Alcatraz.
According to this, “Men were never directly sentenced to Alcatraz and usually had to earn their way.”
This made me think of this movie:
The Warner Brothers film Murder in the First claims to be “inspired” by the true story of Alcatraz inmate Henry Young (his first name is also written “Henri”; this was apparently an alias). Although Henry Young was indeed an inmate at Alcatraz who was convicted in 1941 of involuntary manslaughter in the stabbing death of fellow inmate Rufus McCain, the events depicted in the motion picture are almost wholly fictional. In particular, the premise of the movie — that Young was a nonviolent inmate who was tortured on Alcatraz and was thereby driven to kill someone — is completely false.
Murder in the First claims that Young was a teenage orphan who was sentenced to Alcatraz for stealing $5 from a grocery store in order to feed his starving sister, and that he “never harmed or attempted to harm anyone” before entering Alcatraz. The true story is that he was a bank robber who had taken and brutalized a hostage on at least one occasion and committed murder in 1933–some 3 years before being incarcerated at Alcatraz. He had served time in State prisons in Montana and Washington before entering Federal prison for the first time in 1935 at the U.S. Penitentiary on McNeil Island, Washington (which is now a State prison).
All of the above were major crime figures who’d previously been convicted of other offenses (including murder) and done hard prison time, so it’s not as though they were first-time offenders lifted from the streets and sent to Alcatraz.
Yeah it would seem that I was mostly incorrect.