conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Escape from Alcatraz about Alcatraz, Rock, Mobster with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, True Crime.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Mobster Al "Scarface" Capone, "Machine Gun" Kelly, Robert Stroud aka the Birdman: only the most violent, desperate criminals went to Alcatraz Island, called "The Rock" and known for its harsh conditions. This gripping true crime classic, originally written in 1963 and newly reissued, tells the story of life on The Rock and of fourteen ingenious escape attempts by the prisoners. Most notable perhaps was Frank Morris, whose daring plan of escape was the basis for the memorable 1979 Clint Eastwood movie Escape from Alcatraz.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Escape from Alcatraz
  Not until that night was official word of the escape released—from the other side of the continent, by James V. Bennett, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington. Not until then were law enforcement agencies of the Bay Area notified, and roadblocks set up. San Francisco police prowled the shoreline opposite the island. Coast Guard cutters halted and boarded all small craft.
  The fog lifted the next day. San Franciscans, alerted by press and radio, were understandably tense. An escape from Alcatraz! The phrase had a fearful ring—Alcatraz felons at large. Bank managers were alerted for a possible holdup. Police stopped all cars with Oklahoma license plates. FBI agents swarmed over Fisherman's Wharf crab boats. Alcatraz guards poked cautiously into water-line caves that honeycomb the cliffs on the windward side. Patrol boats searched for bodies or clues.
  Did they survive? At the time they struck out, an ebb tide was racing past Alcatraz and out the Golden Gate at seven knots, about eight miles an hour. "Small boats could not have bucked that current," said Lloyd C. Whaley, a San Francisco city engineer. "A strong swimmer starting at Alcatraz would have found himself going out the Gate in the fog before he had expended sufficient energy to reach shore in still water."
  Thus the first breach of The Rock's security stirred its hour of intense excitement. It shook the prison people, but their dismay quickly turned to new determination. Bennett, the top man, announced: "We intend to make Alcatraz as nearly impregnable as the mind of man can conceive." This assurance served both to shore up his own, and Warden Johnston's, shattered faith in Alcatraz and to allay the revived fears of San Francisco that it might expect an invasion of cutthroats any night. San Francisco women's clubs had raised a shocked outcry when the Department of Justice first disclosed that it was going to crowd the nation's toughest killers, robbers, and rapists onto the little island. No need for anxiety, the Department replied in effect; nature itself had supplied perfect security: no man could conquer the vicious rip tides that swirl around The Rock.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: University of California Extension has had a contract with Alcatraz since the thirties but in the past several years, for reasons unexplained, very few Rock inmates have enrolled, or been permitted to enroll. Some attribute the decline in Extension courses, once quite popular at Alcatraz, to the competition of radio, but the drop in enrollment has been fairly recent. University officials privately wonder about this in view of the great, continued success of their program at San Quentin where inmate students have gone forth, upon parole, to pursue careers that in many cases have won them distinction.
  With the easing of restrictions came a lengthening of visits convicts could enjoy with a relative or now even a close friend—almost two hours a month. (To some, this is still a punitive limitation, as a relative may have to travel thousands of miles.)
  Warden Madigan inspired a new kind of bloodletting at Alcatraz. In April of 1959 fifty inmates each donated a pint of blood to the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in San Francisco, credited to the account of the U.S. Public Health Service, whose medical staff at the Marine Hospital, San Francisco, is on call for emergencies. The blood donors enjoyed an equally rare social hour in the prison hospital, with sandwiches, coffee, lemonade, and cakes.
  For some years the inmates had received a Christmas booty of six candy bars and two pounds of jawbreakers. Madigan added six cigars in 1957, two years later made another concession: any convict with two dollars in his account could buy a two-pound box of chocolates. He also created a new holiday spirit by providing special menus on Christmas and Thanksgiving, except for those in D Block.
  Blacks were now segregated in the dining room by the simple process of ringing out inside B Block as a group. Racial segregation was even extended to the showers: whites first on Tuesdays, blacks first on Saturdays, the order reversed each week. At the movies, the black prisoners were directed to sit in the back rows.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. End with the sentence '
  A guard looks at the hole in the vent of a prison cell dug out with a modified mess hall spoon, 1962.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Among the more notable proposals: a Statue of Liberty West; an anchor for a bridge to the north; a pleasure park after Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens; a gambling casino; a cathedral; a college; an observatory; a round Parthenon, fifty feet high, with shops and restaurants in a wing-like roof; a refuge for seagulls (from the school children of Bird City, Kansas, pop. 678); a Sin City (no minors ashore); give it back to the pelicans (the pelicans weren't interested); a "nudist metropolis"; let tourists be "a convict for a day," for a fee (a Walt Disney thought); a 364-foot tower, Apollon, honoring the space program; an 800-foot parabolic arch of stainless steel, honoring the peoples of the world; a great globe of the world, 250 feet in diameter, circled by an olive wreath and resting on a pedestal of highrise buildings (by Buckminster Fuller of the geodesic dome); a vast hotel shaped like a horseshoe; a vaster hotel and convention center accommodating 12,000 people; a shopping center. And the inevitable wag: "I think it'd make a good federal prison."
  The Commission recommended a monument to commemorate the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco, which would serve "untold generations as an ennobling inspiration..." (They would raze the prison, though not as one person proposed; gradually, by the falling water of a jet roaring 500 feet above the fog.)
  The studies, in the American bureaucratic tradition, went into the archives. Left to brood in its summer fogs, this isle of infamy, this American Devil's Island held ever greater fascination for sightseers, feeding dimes into binoculars at Fisherman's Wharf and up on Telegraph Hill. Then, last year, Congress created the 36,000-acre Golden Gate National Recreation Area—its smallest playground.
  When Alcatraz was a pet project of the Department of Justice, people were threatened with machine-gun fire if they came too near. Now the National Park Service is in charge, and they can take a walking tour of the island, then a gawking tour of the silent cellhouse—even step into a cell of the Dark Hole, pull the steel door shut, and feel the skin prickle in the blackness.
  A guard looks at the hole in the vent of a prison cell dug out with a modified mess hall spoon, 1962.