Alcatraz was named after the island on which it was situated, a mile and quarter north of San Francisco. It opened in 1934 to hold prisoners considered problems elsewhere in the federal penitentiary system. The facility used solitary confinement to control inmates, if not “break” them, making it the prototype of the super-maximum (supermax) prison. It quickly became notorious.
Eldridge details the back-and-forth between an industry eager to capitalize on sensation (“see the secrets of Alcatraz exposed!” ran proposed ad copy from the 1930s) and a prison system eager to avoid attention to what was then an anomaly in that prison system.
The BOP largely got its way until the production of Birdman of Alcatraz, released in 1962. Directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Burt Lancaster, the movie came from Lancaster’s own Norma Productions, making it independent of the studio system.
Birdman of Alcatraz was a heavily fictionalized account of the life of murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud. Stroud was first sentenced to prison in 1909 for killing a bartender in Alaska. His sentence was extended for wounding a fellow prisoner. After being convicted of killing a prison guard at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in 1916, he was in for life.
Of the fifty-four years Stroud spent in prison, forty-two of them were in the isolation of solitary confinement. Stroud was actually the Birdman of Leavenworth, which is where he began his work with birds and wrote Stroud’s Digest of the Diseases of Birds and Diseases of Canaries. He also raised and sold (via his mother) canaries. When the BOP was formed in 1930, it prohibited inmates from running private businesses. This brought the ever-combative Stroud into conflict with authorities, as did his 1933 campaign to marry a canary breeder “on the outside.”
Eldridge writes that Stroud’s efforts to marry across the prison wall was “a stunt designed to reignite media interest and make himself ‘too noticeable’ for the bureau to move him to Alcatraz.” The transfer to Alcatraz eventually took place. Rules prevented him from keeping birds at Alcatraz.