Alcatraz by David Ward Page A

temperature was always the same. 24
    In the basement Berta had the company of several other prisoners. John Messamore was confined from December 2 to 14, 1934, for “writing a letter . . . inferring an escape plot.” Clyde Hicks’s brief stay, from December 3 to 4, 1934, came as a consequence of being caught conveying a note from one prisoner to another while working as a cell house orderly. After eleven days, Berta was brought back up to an A block isolation cell where he spent another nine days before he was returned to the general population.
    Maurice Ordway, who started work as a guard in October 1934 and during his many years on the island was promoted to lieutenant, described the process by which a prisoner ended up in the basement:
    When we first opened up we used lower solitary—we never called it the dungeon. I’ll tell you exactly how it worked. You’d have these characters raising hell—this would always happen at night—and Captain Miller would come in the cell house and sit down at his desk and say, “Bring that clown down here.” A couple of officers would get the guy out of his cell and Miller would ask him, “What’s going on?” And of course the guy would be cussing him out, so he’d say, “throw him downstairs.” Nine times out of ten that guy never walked down those stairs; that guy would slide down those stairs and hit that steel door—then you’d open the door and lock him up. 25
    George Boatman, who also rose to the rank of lieutenant during his career at Alcatraz, remembered Berta’s confinement in the dungeon.
    The dungeons were a kind of a cell. We had to put a padlock and chain [around the bars of the gate] to lock the door. They weren’t very good security . . . there wasn’t a thing inside—just a pail. When I first went there they handcuffed Charlie Berta to the bars . . . they had to stand up all day that way. The [solitary] cells on the third tier of A block had a toilet and washbasin in them. The [dungeon] cells had absolutely nothing. They were like the strip cell now in D block except they didn’t even have a hole in the floor. They had a bucket [for a toilet in lower solitary]. You had to feed them a square meal every third day—bread and water was their regularration. The doctor had to visit them . . . you had to call him if a prisoner said he was sick. It was dark down there. Unless the officer went down there you turned the lights out. You let the inmate out to empty his [slop] bucket and get some water. They had no mattress [compared to solitary cells in A block]. . . . [Bureau of Prisons’ assistant director] Bixby was quite unhappy [about the use of the dungeons] because we had Charlie Berta chained up to the door when he came out. Washington didn’t like the use of them. I suppose Johnston authorized it but [deputy warden] Shuttleworth gave the orders to put the strike leaders down in the dungeon. 26
    Boatman was right—BOP headquarters was concerned when word reached Washington, D.C., that several prisoners had been chained up. On a trip to McNeil Island Penitentiary in July 1931 after Director Bates found a prisoner standing with his arms attached to an iron ring, he wrote to the warden expressing his displeasure:
    I don’t know whether it was understood at the time I left your institution but this letter will confirm my understanding that the iron ring formerly used to secure men undergoing punishment in standing position is to be removed. Please advise me when this is done. 27
    Thus when Bates’s representative reported that during an inspection of Alcatraz he “found two or three men in the ‘dungeons’ . . . in chains,” the director immediately informed Warden Johnston:
    The use of chains in this manner is specifically and definitely disapproved. We have provided Alcatraz with every practicable scientific device to make it secure, and I cannot bring myself to believe that it is necessary to resort to the antiquated practice of chaining men.
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