I thought it may be of interest to some list members that
Jack Henry Abbott, author of "In the Belly of the Beast" died
a couple of days ago.For those who don't know who Abbott was,
he was a long time criminal
& recidivist prisoner who sent a series of letters to
Norman Mailer after Mailer had published "The Executioner's
Song". These letters were a combination of autobiographical
stuff about his life in prison & his confrontations with
prison authorities, & political rants that were a
self-educated man's combination of Nietzsche & Marx.
These letters so impressed Mailer that he had them edited
& published as "In the Belly of the Beast". He also
proceeded to agitate for Abbott's release & the efforts
of Mailer & other literary types, IIRC, eventually
succeeded in having Abbott released. Two weeks later, Abbott
got into a minor argument with a waiter in a restaurant &
stabbed him to death. When this happened, Mailer figuratively
threw his hands in the air, saying, in effect, "We was wrong.
The guy's an animal.Lock him up & throw away the key".
The sad irony here is the fact that anybody who read the book
& was awake at the time would not have been surprised.
The book says, over & over, that prisons train men to
become the very animals that society fears. To survive in
prison & keep your self-respect, & more importantly,
perhaps, from the point of view of survival, the respect of
other inmates, you have to be more brutal than the other
brutes. A man is systematically brutalised by the prison
& it's guards, by the other inmates for many years. Then
he is released & expected to adjust overnight to
civilised life. As I remember the book, Abbott as good as
warned the reader that he was no longer fit to live in the
civilised,
(more or less) world that most of us live in. Regardless of
your views on prison, etc, I think that Abbott's book is one
of the most significant works of prison literature available.
Abbott's writings were a major influence on the Australian
prison flick,
"Ghosts of the Civil Dead", which I would recommend despite
over-acting from Nick Cave, whose role is a fairly small one.
(Cave also wrote a song about Abbott, "Jack's Shadow"). I'm
not sure about this but I felt that a character in the prison
escape flick "Runaway Train" (co-scripted by Edward Bunker,
IIRC) may have been based on Abbott. The news about Abbott's
death said he had committed suicide in his cell by hanging
himself. There's nothing unusual about prisoners committing
suicide. On the other hand, it's also a method that has been
used by crooked jail warders (certainly in this country -
there was one very suspicious instance only a couple of years
ago, ruled as suicide) to murder troublesome inmates so there
will probably be a question mark over his death that may
never be resolved, particularly now that Abbott has lost his
erstwhile friends & allies in the literary set & in
effect probably nobody cares any more.
Rene
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