Alcatraz Island
 Milton Daniel Beacher, M.D.
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Pelican Island Publishing
  ISBN: 097103320X
Amazon's price is: $19.95

Memoirs of a Rock Doc. Edited by Dianne Beacher Perfit.

Dr. Beacher arrived on The Rock a naive & compassionate young doctor who left a year later, with a journal chronicling all the suicides, disciplinary problems, force feedings, prisoner strikes & generally deplorable conditions he found there. He also recorded conversations with famous inmates, first-person narratives & prisoner poetry.

Come into the grey, drab world of The Rock where “abandon all hope” should have been etched onto the landing dock for all to see, prisoners & guards alike.

With the unique perspective of a young doctor on his first assignment to one of the then newest & most unescapable penal colonies in the US, Dr. Beacher's memoir tells the history of Pelican Island from its discovery in the late 1770s to its use for military defense one hundred years later, to its last incarnation as a bleak, black hole. He also recounts the stories of the many inmates he cared for in this infamous correction center, where ruthlessness was the norm, both in the colorless, hopeless daily grind & in the unfettered behavior of the guards.

Of course, life in 1937-38 was a very different from today. Cruelty & ignorance was common, on both sides of the line. Prisoners' rights were unheard of, their welfare even less care about, & the caliber of the guards' characters barely a notch up from those they guarded.

Dr. Beacher recounts a seemingly endless cavalcade of prisoners “blowing their tops” in the din & inactivity of The Rock's daily life -- the constant surf crashing all around them on the rocks below, the unremittingly mournful moan of the foghorn, the dreadful thudding of guards' boots as they went about their check-up rounds, the ceaseless echoes of a community forbidden to talk, where every sound was magnified by their cold, stone home.

To say we have come a long way in the care of our criminals since then, is to state, obviously, that we no longer drive cars with solid rubber wheels. However, this memoir of a Rock Doc, opens up some heavily guarded cells, & while a little light is let in on the subject, the ugliness is all too apparent & lingering.

I can't say that Alcatraz Island is a good read. It is too full of dire, irreparable damage, offering not an iota of redemption. It is a suffocating read, so much so, that I had to do it in small doses, although when I was immersed in the narration, I was enthralled.

If history of prison life interests you, if how the doctors of that time treated their captive patients fascinates you, then Alcatraz Island will be a good read for you. It is a thought-provoking book that will linger long in your mind.

Alcatraz was decommissioned as a prison in 1963. In the late 1970s I was one of thousands of tourists who took the trip out into San Francisco Bay for a day on The Rock, still bleak, reeking, & dismal. To have had to call it “home” even for a year, even from the “right” side of the law, must have been immeasurably depressing.

Milton Daniel Beacher was born in 1912 & graduated from George Washington University in 1936. Working for the U.S. Public Health Service, he was sent to Alcatraz Island as a medical officer. After a year, he returned to Brooklyn & established a family practice. Later he became a dermatologist & psychiatrist.

Dr. Beacher tried to get his memoir of that year on The Rock published in the 1950s but found no one interested. 30 years later he signed over his manuscript to his daughter, Dianne Beacher Perfit, who eventually groomed it & set up her own publishing company to get her father's remarkable & unique memoir out before the public.

Webster's New World Dictionary lists under the definition of jail: prison, penitentiary, house of correction, penal institution, correctional facility, goal, cell, carcel, cage, guardhouse, guardroom, brig, pound, reformatory, stockade, detention camp, concentration camp, penal settlement, house of detention, dungeon, oubliette, debtor's prison, sponging house, slammer, cooler, lockup, stir, pen, clink, jug, can, big house, tank, hulks, limbo, death house, pokey, calaboose, coop, hoosegow. Some well-known jails & prison camps include: Sing Sing, Devils' Island, Attica, San Quentin, Leavenworth, Alcatraz or the Rock, Dartmoor or the Moor, Newgate, Bridewell, Tower of London, Fleet, Marshalsea, Wormwood Scrubs, Holloway, Dannemora, Broadmoor, the Bastille, Belsen, Botany Bay, Andaman Islands.
(01/19/03)

Rebecca