53 pages • 1 hour read
Al Capone Does My Homework
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Themes
Moral Decision-Making in a Young Person’s Life
In the Alcatraz of Al Capone Does My Homework, with its world-famous felons and sea-swept isolation, temptation is always in the air, and not just for the inmates or guards. Young civilians who live on the island may fall under the spell of the glamor and craftiness of its storied prisoners, who are well-learned in corrupting the naïve, romantic, and penniless. To the young, Alcatraz may pose more of a moral danger than a physical one. The twenty-something Donny Caconi, deep in debt to a loan shark, falls into the machinations of a renowned thief and counterfeiter, Count Lustig. He also takes up smaller, cruder rackets, such as card-cheating, bet-fixing, and arson. In Alcatraz’s tiny, isolated world, where families live just a stone’s throw from the cellblock and often have their laundry and other chores done by convicts, children, too, can be drawn into illicit behavior.
The character arc of the warden’s daughter, Piper Williams, reveals how young people’s moral decision-making can be complicated by corrupt influences and the allure of financial and social status. As the titles of Choldenko’s Alcatraz novels suggest, the thought that a “celebrity” criminal might be handling one’s personal belongings can be intoxicating, especially to a child. Piper is starstruck by the island’s most infamous resident, Al Capone, whose cynical code of patronage she has borrowed for her own quest for personal “loyalty.” Rationalizing to herself that one of the cons “likes” her, Piper succumbs to Count Lustig’s scheme to circulate his counterfeit bills. However, as her warden father furiously tells her, she must have known, on some level, that what she was doing was illegal. In the end, it is Moose and Annie who compel her to confess to her father what she has done. Afterward, Moose feels some satisfaction that Piper has finally owned up to one of her misdeeds, which are many but have usually been small. Her journey across the novel underscores the interplay between youthful naiveté, criminal glamor, and moral accountability.
While Piper finds herself tempted by financial and social gain, Moose is motivated by friendship, familial bonds, and justice, demonstrating how young people can navigate ethical dilemmas in a morally ambiguous environment. As Moose tells Piper while urging her to confess, “Annie and Jimmy would never do this and neither would Natalie” (162). Though attracted by Piper’s “outsides,” Moose has never been a fan of her transactional notion of morality, such as her attempts to “buy” people’s loyalty with gifts and favors, as the island’s mobsters do. For role models, Moose and his sister, Natalie, have always looked to their parents, particularly their brave, kindhearted father, rather than Alcatraz’s criminal element. By demanding an audience with Warden Williams and helping Piper explain to him what she did, Moose replicates his father’s courage, honesty, and compassion and helps Piper out of her quandary. Likewise, Natalie shows her own moral fortitude when she rebuffs Donny’s attempts to flatter and corrupt her, stunning him with her prediction that he will be Alcatraz’s next prisoner. As Moose and Natalie embody the moral code they have learned from their parents, they not only resist the allure of criminality but also serve as models of youthful moral integrity for Piper. In Choldenko's exploration of moral complexity, the contrast between Piper and the Flanagan siblings underscores the power of role models in shaping young people’s moral choices.
The Pressures of an Unstable Home Life
In the 1930s, many American families buckled under the stresses of the Great Depression. Moose Flanagan’s home life is similarly turbulent. A year before the action of Al Capone Does My Homework, Moose was uprooted from his home, friends, and winning baseball team to be marooned in the bleak, isolated world of Alcatraz when his father took a job as an electrician at the prison. Merely having “Alcatraz” in their home address creates numerous problems for the family: Stores won’t honor Mrs. Flanagan’s checks, and Moose’s teachers punish him for “lying” about where he lives. As the novel begins, Moose has barely gotten used to his strange new life when his father’s promotion to associate warden upends his world again. The new position puts his father in constant danger—not only from the island’s notorious criminals, who will be targeting him to win prestige “points,” but also from prison guards such as Darby “Double Tough” Trixle, who “hankers” for his job. Indeed, the very night of Cam Flanagan’s first day as warden, the family’s apartment burns down, an act of arson connected with his new promotion. For the next few weeks, the Flanagans must reside in the bare rooms of the former associate warden, which is a long, steep climb from their usual environs. Worse, from Moose’s point of view, his father refuses to step down as associate warden, though it seems clear that he is being targeted. Moose believes his sensitive father is “too nice” to be a warden, and when he learns about a con “points game” that awards 5,000 points for the murder of a warden, his fears escalate, especially after a butcher knife goes missing from the prison kitchen. These growing tensions leave Moose feeling embattled and isolated, illustrating the emotional impact of these tumultuous circumstances on Moose's character development.
Moose’s only sibling, Natalie, adds to his worries since she is neurodivergent and requires constant care. In Alcatraz, the Flanagans no longer have an extended family to help care for her, so Moose takes on new pressures and responsibilities. After the fire, Natalie is particularly distraught, finding it almost impossible to sleep in the new lodgings. Moose must find new ways of calming her, as well as defending her from neighbors who stigmatize her disability and blame her for the fire. One of these neighbors, the wife of Darby Trixle, tries to have Natalie kicked out of her school, ostensibly because of the danger she poses as an arsonist. After Natalie bites him in an outburst, Moose explodes at her, wondering, “Why is it always me who tries? Me who worries? Me who does everything?” (143). As Moose grapples with the responsibilities of caretaking and understanding his sister amidst the harsh confines of Alcatraz, the narrative illustrates the impact of disability and societal prejudice on the broader family unit.
However, Moose learns that he doesn't have to carry all the responsibilities alone as his friends and family step up to help him, showing how the pressures of an unstable home life can be mitigated by community support. Like many children of the 1930s, Moose feels pressured to grow up very quickly to meet the challenges of his anomalous home life, which continually threatens to spiral out of control, especially after his father is injured in a near-fatal attack. Ultimately, he relies on the help of a few friends on Alcatraz, including Piper, the daughter of the prison warden, who gives him insider information at times. The mobster Al Capone also lends him crucial support, warning him about the imminent attack on his father. Eventually, his sister Natalie responds to his attempts to reach her, amazing the family with her determination and poise by going to the hospital by herself to visit her father. After Mr. Flanagan recovers, he tells Moose that he has perhaps put too much pressure on himself: “The whole world doesn’t rest on your shoulders, buddy” (195). Their family, he suggests, is stronger than Moose realizes, and he should not have worried so much about falling short. Moose, he says, should enjoy being a kid while he still can. While Moose faces unique pressures and responsibilities due to his unstable home life, the narrative suggests that with the support of friends and family, these burdens can be lightened, highlighting the importance of community in easing the challenges of adolescence.
Punishment Versus Rehabilitation
Late in Choldenko’s novel, Moose’s father explains to him the main cause of the friction between the head guard Darby Trixle and himself. It turns out to be less a case of envy or professional rivalry than a clash of philosophies: Darby believes that the role of Alcatraz, and the penal system in general, is to “punish” the cons and that Cam’s plans to “rehabilitate” them are “crazy at best, dangerous at worst” (199). Moose, worried about his father’s safety in his new job, fears that his father is “too nice” to be a prison warden, and Darby agrees, but for a different reason. Cam Flanagan’s liberal ideals, he thinks, will give the prisoners dangerous freedoms, putting guards and civilians at risk of deadly attacks or seduction into the convicts’ criminal schemes. Indiana’s near-fatal attack on Cam and the ease with which Count Lustig manages to lure both Donny Caconi and the warden’s own daughter into his counterfeiting plot exemplify these dangers. As befits his truculent personality, Darby subscribes to a purely punitive, vengeful notion of corrections, dealing out harsh punishments to the cons rather than seeking to make them better, more law-abiding people.
Cam, on the other hand, endorses a view that began to gain traction in the 1930s, one emphasizing rehabilitation (“History of Corrections—Punishment, Prevention, or Rehabilitation?” Information Plus Reference Series, 2005). According to this model, which took the phrase “house of corrections” at its word, prisoners would have access to education, job training, and psychological counseling. Mental health professionals, social workers, and other specialists would address the roots of convicts’ anger, mental illness, drug addictions, and other causes of criminal behavior, and educators would help prepare them for reintroduction into society as skilled workers. Wardens and the justice system would also use their discretion in giving parole or lenient sentences to offenders who seemed open to rehabilitation. Implicit in this model was the belief that a system emphasizing punishment and humiliation would only exacerbate mental illnesses and addictions, and make convicts more angry at society, making them more dangerous. Penal rehabilitation has always had its critics, many of whom, like Darby, believe it to be a waste of money and resources and that leniency and mercy will always be exploited by the criminal mind. After the 1950s, the American corrections system began to shift away from rehabilitation and toward harsh punishments again, due mostly to an alarming rise in crime. In Al Capone Does My Homework, however, there are signs that the good-hearted Cam has already begun to win over the hearts and consciences of the detainees: Al Capone, once “Public Enemy Number One,” goes out of his way to warn him about an impending attack. By contrast, the belligerent Darby Trixle is widely despised, and his zero-tolerance reprisals do not even serve as a deterrent—judging from how the convicts vandalize his clothes in the laundry.
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