What I Do:
Jim Breeden, Alcatraz Interpreter
Alcatraz “interpreter” is happy to pass along the island prison’s history, chapter and verse.
The federal prison on Alcatraz Island was open for just 29 years, from 1934 until March 1963. Studying that legacy — escape attempts, murders, famous inmates including Al Capone and Robert “Birdman” Stroud — is the business of Jim Breeden.
Breeden, 58, is an interpreter, meaning he studies Alcatraz history and leads tours. In one, he discusses the ways Hollywood portrays the prison. In another, he reviews the “convict code” of prison etiquette and inmate solidarity.
Also an artist, Breeden recently completed a 23-panel comic strip on restorative justice that’s on exhibit through August in the cell house at Alcatraz. A native of Grand Blanc, Mich., he moved to San Francisco in 1983.
At Alcatraz we all sort of cringe at the term “tour guide.” It speaks of canned scripts that you’re supposed to recite verbatim.
There’s a certain amount of pride in doing our own research, writing our own stories, composing our own tours and presenting them to the public. There is no
standard book of Alcatraz tours.
For my research, I go to the National Archives and Records Administration in San Bruno. They have all the inmate files on Alcatraz, plus prisoner identification photographs.
I interpret history, and history can have multiple viewpoints. I used to fantasize about the Joe Bowers incident (inmate Bowers was fatally shot by a guard in 1936 during an alleged escape attempt). I would think, “If only I could get in a time machine, go back and see what really happened.”
Witnesses’ perceptions
And then I realized that’s no guarantee I would see what really happened. I’d just be another witness. It’s like the Japanese movie “Rashomon.” You can have eyewitnesses to a crime who see the same event differently.
I do a Hollywood tour. I talk about the first movie ever made about Alcatraz, “The Last Gangster” (1937) with Edward G. Robinson. Another, “Seven Miles From Alcatraz” (1942), takes place during World War II and tells about two escaped inmates who manage to foil a nazi spy ring.
“The Rock” (1996), with Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery, is the most popular movie ever made about Alcatraz. “Murder in the First” (1995) is probably the most notoriously inaccurate. And Clint Eastwood’s “Escape From Alcatraz” (1979) takes liberties in terms of history, but really gets most of the details about day-today activities at Alcatraz exactly right.
Alcatraz was a prototype for super-max prisons. Alcatraz reduced a man to his basic needs: food, shelter, clothing, medical attention. Everything else, even work, was considered a privilege. There was one guard for every three inmates.
Losing bookstore job
That philosophy was new with Alcatraz. And that’s the philosophy of super-maxes today and how solitary confinement is run in America.
Before I started here, I’d been out of work 2½ years. I was the merchandising manager at Stacey’s bookstore downtown. When I got laid off, I was completely lost. I couldn’t find work at bookstores: They were going the way of the dinosaurs.
But then a friend saw an ad online about a position in the bookstore on Alcatraz. They hired me, so I worked in the bookstore and folded a lot of Tshirts. Within six months or so, there was a position that opened up for an interpreter.
The exhibit on restorative justice was my idea. I had no idea until I started this job what’s been going on in prison the past 20 years. I was horrified by what I read about the boom in prison construction in the 1980s. Then I came across an article in the New Yorker about solitary confinement. That piece radicalized me about prisons, and I became convinced that America’s prisons are corrosive to this country, to our families and communities.
Many of us believe Alcatraz can be more than entertainment for visitors. It can be a place where we have conversations about what’s going on currently in American prisons — because it’s an important subject.