PRISONS and PUBLIC ENEMIES #AWorldOfCrime

Wisconsin Reformatory

John Dillinger was named Public Enemy #1 by J. Edgar Hoover. Other public enemies on Hoover’s list were Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, and Baby Face Nelson. Gunned down in fire fights, Bonnie, Clyde, and Dillinger never served prison time.

During the years that Alcatraz, the federal prison known as “The Rock”, was in operation, many gangsters got to see the inside, including Public Enemies Al Capone and members of Ma Barker’s gang.

John Walsh’s Public Enemies describes how America’s Most Wanted assisted in capturing an accused terrorist who resurfaced twenty-five years later as a ‘soccer mom.’

According to Alcatraz Rules and Regulations, prisoners were entitled to “food, clothing, shelter and medical attention.” I guess they paid for everything else, one way or another.

Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison , Smith College alumna Piper Kerman’s book, tells of her incarceration at the “infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut” after she was caught delivering a suitcase of drug money.

Not only gangsters do prison time. Right now, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is learning that, along with the withholding of shoelaces, neckties and razor blades, the law also disallows hair dye.