On Doing Time

During his eighteen-plus years in prison, five of which were spent at U.S.P. Alcatraz in the middle of San Francisco Bay, Morton Sobell learned well the price of "doing time."

In 1951, during the dark days of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. Sobell was sentenced to thirty years in prison. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death and were later executed. The trial remains one of America's most controversial.

This is the story of what led up to the trial, to the conduct of the trial--including an account of justice subverted to political ends--and of one man's odyssey through Depression-era radicalism and the hard world of the United States prison system.

It is also the story of an intelligent man determined not to be broken, determined to achieve vindication.

As part of that effort, after he was released, the author obtained hundreds of previously classified FBI documents that graphically demonstrate the goverment's motives and methods during the Rosenberg-Sobell trial, and beyond. The most relevant of these documents are included on a CD (which comes with the book), giving the reader a rare opportunity to compare the author's original suppositions and his adversary's documentation of its strategy.

This is a reissue and update of the book originally published in 1974 by Charles Scribner's Sons. It includes photographs of Alcatraz not in the original volume as well as a hybrid (Windows/Mac/Linux) CD-ROM containing hundreds of FBI documents related to the investigation and monitoring of Morton Sobell, obtained by the author through the Freedom of Information Act.