Free Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce

letters will bear an Alcatraz postmark (although the island lies within the city limits of San Francisco).
    All mail, outgoing and incoming, is censored. This prevents the hatching of plots but also tends to dampen a convict’s ardor to a girlfriend when he knows his protestations will first be read by the mail officer. Suspect portions of a letter to a convict are not snipped out with scissors; the missive itself is typed, and a carbon copy given the inmate, for a special reason: the original might be saturated with dope—a letter both to mull over and chew on.
    The limitation on correspondents is sometimes misunderstood by the public. During the regime of The Rock’s second warden, Edwin B. Swope, a special-delivery letter came for Robert Stroud, the celebrated authority on bird diseases, from a woman in Southern California, seeking advice regarding her sick canary. It was returned with a notation that regulations prevented its delivery to the prisoner. Not long afterward the warden received a package by express marked “Personal.” It contained a tiny coffin, and in the coffin the canary. He gave the bird a burial.
    The chief diversion of the convicts in the early years of The Rock was the two-hour recreation period outdoors, if the weather permitted. Blustery weather was a thing to dread, for it meant confinement to a cell with little to do from 5 P.M. Saturday until 6:30 A.M. Monday, a stretch of monotony broken only by treks to the mess hall and the hour in the chapel for the churchgoers. Those who prayed prayed often for a clear Sunday and a period in the yard, an area roughly the size of a football field, extending from the angle of the T-shaped prison looking toward San Francisco and the Golden Gate. Twelve concrete steps, serving as bleachers, rise against the mess hall, the stem of the T, and from the high steps the view can be spectacular, especially if rains or high winds whipping through the Gate during the night have swept the atmosphere clean. To the west the convict sees the majestic sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge, its towers orange-red against the azure sky, Sunday motorists streaming along its deck. A fresh breeze comes off the Pacific, just spanking enough to gratify the weekend skippers, their small craft, white sails full, skimming along the blue surface of the bay. Beyond rises the green patch of the Presidio of San Francisco. Pull the gaze to the left and San Francisco, dazzling in the cleansed air, seems unreal, a scene in a stereoscope. The apartment skyscrapers on Russian Hill, the streets like rows in a hillside vineyard, Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, the spatulate-fingered piers spreading out from the Embarcadero—all so startingly close. A cable car is clearly visible clambering up the Hyde Street hill. A mile and a half away? Why, you could ricochet a flat stone to the San Francisco shore!
    And then the convict looks near at hand, to the yard enclosing him. Along the top of its twenty-foot wall runs a gunway with parapet, and at the three corners squat gun boxes. A catwalk links the wall to the south gun tower, and another catwalk, like something built with an Erector set, extends to the gun tower atop the shop building. The convict looks again at the life teeming just beyond—on the bay, on the Gate span, on the hills of San Francisco—and the truth of the Rock saying jolts home: It take ten minutes to come over from San Francisco, ten years to get back.
    The wail of the wind in the ventilators at night may disturb the convicts’ sleep, but it gave many a military prisoner in the Army days the shudders. For there was a superstition then that the prison was haunted, a superstition that had a tragic basis. Back in the nineties, an apartment upstairs where the chapel now is located was occupied by an Army doctor, his pretty young wife, and their baby. One morning their Chinese houseboy found the baby sitting up in the crib, playing, and in the bedroom the wife murdered, the doctor a