Robert Franklin Stroud (January 28, 1890 – November 21, 1963), known as the "Birdman of Alcatraz", was a federal Americanprisoner, cited as one of the most notorious criminals in American history.[1][2][3] During his time at Leavenworth Penitentiary he reared and sold birds and became a respected ornithologist, but despite his nickname, he was not permitted to keep his birds at Alcatraz, where he was incarcerated from 1942.
Born in Seattle, Stroud ran away from his abusive father at the age of 13, and by the time he was 18 he had become a pimp in Alaska. In January 1909 he shot and killed a barman who had attacked one of his prostitutes, Kitty O’Brien, giving himself into the authorities. He was found guilty of manslaughter on August 23, 1909 and sentenced to 12 years in the federal penitentiary on Puget Sound'sMcNeil Island. Stroud gained a reputation as an extremely dangerous inmate who frequently had confrontations with fellow inmates and staff, and on March 26, 1916, he stabbed guard Andrew F. Turner to death in the cafeteria for stripping Stroud of his visitation privilege to meet his younger brother, whom he had not seen in eight years. Convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to execution byhanging, after several trials his sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.
Stroud began serving life in solitary confinement at Leavenworth, where in 1920, after discovering a nest with three injured sparrows in the prison yard, he began raising them and within a few years had acquired a collection of some 300 canaries. He began extensive research into them after being granted equipment by a radical prison-reforming warden, publishing Diseases of Canaries in 1933, which was smuggled out of Leavenworth and sold enmasse,[4] and a later edition, Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds (1943), with updated specific information. He made several important contributions to avian pathology, most notably a cure for the hemorrhagicsepticemia family of diseases, gaining much respect and some level of sympathy among ornithologists and farmers. Stroud ran a successful business from inside prison, but his birding activities infuriated the prison staff, and he was eventually transferred to Alcatraz in 1942 after it was discovered that Stroud has been secretly making alcohol using the some of the equipment in his cell.
Stroud began serving a 17-year term at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary on December 19, 1942, and became inmate #594. In 1943, he was assessed by psychiatrist Romney M. Ritchey, who diagnosed him as a psychopath, but with an I.Q. of 134. Stripped of his birds and equipment, he wrote a history of the penal system entitled Looking Outward: A History of the U.S. Prison System from Colonial Times to the Formation of the Bureau of Prisons. He spent six years in segregation and another 11 confined to the hospital wing there in ill health. In 1959, with his health failing, Stroud was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where he stayed until his death on November 21, 1963 at the age of 73, having been incarcerated for the last 54 years of his life, of which 42 were in solitary confinement. He had been studying French near the end of his life. Robert Stroud is buried in Metropolis,Illinois. Carl Sifakais considers Stroud to have been "possibly the best-known example of self-improvement and rehabilitation in the U.S. prison".
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