Alcatraz Screw

Alcatraz Screw is a firsthand account from a prison guard’s perspective of some of the most storied years at the infamous U.S. Penitentiary at Alcatraz. George Gregory began his career as a guard for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1940. Following his training, he was sent to the federal prison at Sandstone, Minnesota. A few years later he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Badly wounded at Iwo Jima, he returned to Sandstone after a long rehabilitation. When the Bureau of Prisons closed Sandstone in 1947, Gregory was transferred to Alcatraz, which had been a federal penitentiary since 1934. For the next fifteen years, Gregory worked on “The Rock.” He takes the reader along on a correctional officer’s tour of duty, showing what it was like to pull a lonely, tedious night of sentry duty in the Road Tower, or witness illicit transactions in the clothing room, or forcibly quell a riot in the cell blocks. Gregory provides an insider’s account of the tenures of all four of Alcatraz’s wardens and their sometimes contradictory approaches to administering the institution. He knew and regularly interacted with such legendary inmates as Robert Stroud (the Birdman of Alcatraz) and George “Machine Gun” Kelly. Without glamorizing or demonizing either the staff or the convicts, Alcatraz Screw provides a candid portrayal of corruption, drug abuse, and sexual practices, as well as efforts at reform and unrecorded acts of kindness. Various incidents in the memoir convey the fear, hatred, frustration, boredom, and unavoidable tension of being incarcerated. With the inclusion of maps and diagrams of Alcatraz Island, as well as photographs of inmates, officers, and the prison itself, this book offers insight into life at the notorious Alcatraz from an unprecedented perspective.

What turns a building into an icon? What is it about some structures that makes their history and legend even more important than their original intended use, making them a part of American, and world, popular culture? Twenty four buildings and structures, including the Brooklyn Bridge, the White House, the Hotel del Coronado, and the Washington Monument are presented here, along with their roles in fiction, film, music, and the imagination of people worldwide. Approximately twenty five images are included in the set, along with sidebars featuring additional structures.

This Depression Era true crime biography chronicles the notorious gangster’s life, eventual capture by the FBI, and long stay in Alcatraz. Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, Alvin Karpis started his life of crime at age ten. By the early 1930s, he was a hardened criminal and leader of the Barker-Karpis Gang. He reportedly committed fifteen bank robberies, fourteen murders, three jailbreaks and two kidnappings. One of only four outlaws to be named Public Enemy No. 1, Karpis was the last—and the only one taken alive. His criminal career came to an end when J. Edgar Hoover and his famed G-Men apprehended him in New Orleans. From there, Karpis found himself confined on Alcatraz Island, where he spent nearly twenty-six years—more than any inmate in the prison's history. This riveting tale of his life takes readers from the rural Midwest to the bustling streets of the Big Easy and into the bleak innards of "the Rock."

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Criminal Psychology will be a modern, interdisciplinary resource aimed at students and professionals interested in the intersection of psychology (e.g., social, forensic, clinical), criminal justice, sociology, and criminology. The interdisciplinary study of human behavior in legal contexts includes numerous topics on criminal behavior, criminal justice policies and legal process, crime detection and prevention, eyewitness identification, prison life, offender assessment and rehabilitation, risk assessment and management, offender mental health, community reintegration, and juvenile offending. The study of these topics has been increasing continually since the late 1800s, with people trained in many legal professions such as policing, social work, law, academia, mental health, and corrections. This will be a comprehensive work that will provide the most current empirical information on those topics of greatest concern to students who desire to work in these fields. This encyclopedia is a unique reference work that looks at criminal behavior primarily through a scientific lens. With over 500 entries the book brings together top empirically driven researchers and clinicians across multiple fields—psychology, criminology, social work, and sociology—to explore the field.

From the bestselling authors of Black Mass comes the definitive biography of Whitey Bulger, the most brutal and sadistic crime boss since Al Capone. Drawing on a trove of sealed files and previously classified material, Whitey digs deep into the mind of James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the crime boss and killer who brought the FBI to its knees. He is an American original --a psychopath who fostered a following with a frightening mix of terror, deadly intimidation and the deft touch of a politician who often helped a family in need meet their monthly rent. But the history shows that despite the early false myths portraying him as a Robin Hood figure, Whitey was a supreme narcissist, and everything--every interaction with family and his politician brother Bill Bulger, with underworld cohorts, with law enforcement, with his South Boston neighbors, and with his victims--was always about him. In an Irish-American neighborhood where loyalty has always been rule one, the Bulger brand was loyalty to oneself. Whitey deconstructs Bulger's insatiable hunger for power and control. Building on their years of reporting and uncovering new Bulger family records, letters and prison files, Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill examine and reveal the factors and forces that created the monster. It's a deeply rendered portrait of evil that spans nearly a century, taking Whitey from the streets of his boyhood Southie in the 1940s to his cell in Alcatraz in the 1950s to his cunning, corrupt pact with the FBI in the 1970s and, finally, to Santa Monica, California where for fifteen years he was hiding in plain sight as one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. In a lifetime of crime and murder that ended with his arrest in June 2011, Whitey Bulger became one of the most powerful and deadly crime bosses of the twentieth century. This is his story.

What do we know first-hand about prisons? We have accounts from many top administrators. There is a large literature of convict reports and memoirs. But we have almost no personal accounts written by the people who were engaged in the day-to-day work of guarding and keeping prison inmates. In Prison Work, former California prisons corrections officer William Richard Wilkinson candidly tells what it was like to try to handle problems that can arise in prison, from furnishing three meals a day to quelling a riot. Constructed around a series of interviews with Wilkinson, this book recounts his extensive experience with discipline problems, wrong-headed administrators, contraband, and escapes. Wilkinson's story presents a blunt, unabashed view of daily life in prison, including fascinating discussions of racial and religious conflict, gangs, and prison violence as well as the institutional culture and more human side of life as experienced by a prison employee. The duration of Wilkinson's career (1951-1981) saw the greatest change in the American prison system. He was responsible for implementing change on the level of the prison block. At the California Institution for Men in Chino, he started out under the inspiring leadership of one of the most famous reform figures in penology. At the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, he participated in one of the great prison experiments when medical officials ran a maximum security prison. And at Soledad, he experienced the reaction to earlier liberal policies. Over the years, he accumulated much wisdom concerning how to handle convicts-wisdom that still has importance for corrections workers. Book jacket.

Written by scholars who have practical experience in corrections, the readable essays in this one-of-a-kind collection draw on real-world experiences to illustrate theoretical and methodological concepts and demonstrate approaches to corrections practice. Spanning the three general types of correctional environments—incarceration, community corrections, and juvenile corrections—the essays discuss working in prisons or prison systems, juvenile residential and community corrections, and probation and parole.