"Those Babies"

On the grim, tide-gnawed rock called Alcatraz just inside San Francisco's Golden Gate, the prisoners are counted every 30 minutes. They live in silence, permitted no talk except what is essential to their work, save on Saturdays when (if they have been good) they converse under guard for 2 1/2 hours. After the prisoners are locked in at night, the guards engage in rifle practice. They leave their targets (human-shaped dummies) sprawled along the walkway with bullet holes in vital spots for the prisoners to see in the morning. No convict has escaped alive from Alcatraz. A number have gone "stir crazy." The penal psychology there is to make big shots into little ones. The country's" most poisonous malefactors are sent there to prevent their infecting less dangerous inmates of other Federal prisons. Alcatraz, "The Rock," is one nightmare which the most hardened criminals, outside it as well as in, cannot laugh off. Alcatraz is a result of the Lindbergh kidnapping. It was the invention and pet project of Franklin Roosevelt's first Attorney General, rapier-nosed Homer Stille Cummings.

Last week Mr. Roosevelt's second Attorney General, gentle, pious Frank Murphy, having just returned from visits to Alcatraz and the contrasting U. S. prison farm at La Tuna, Tex., announced that he is against Alcatraz. "It is necessary to have a place like Alcatraz to break up a crowd that conspires to escape or kill or murder," he said. But he believed results equally good could be obtained in an escape-proof, walled farm, without quite such grim technique. "It is a great injustice to San Francisco," he said, "to have that place of horror on the doorstep of the city. . . ."

Homer Stille Cummings is still in Washington, practicing law privately. Harvey Bailey, "Machine Gun" Kelly, Harmon Waley and numerous other bottomnotchers are still in Alcatraz, where he put them. "Scarface Al" Capone, whose transfer from Atlanta Mr. Cummings personally supervised from a top floor of San Francisco's Mark Hopkins Hotel in 1934, got transferred out last winter, crazed as much by paresis as by confinement. Of Frank Murphy's view of Alcatraz, Homer Cummings did not think much. Said he: "Those babies wouldn't stay in a prison farm very long."

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