I stumbled upon this little bit of suppressed history in Wikipedia:
In 1965, aged twenty-one, Jack Abbott was serving a sentence for forgery in a Utah prison when he stabbed a fellow inmate to death. He was given a sentence of three to twenty years for this offense, and in 1971 his sentence was increased by a further nineteen years after he escaped and committed a bank robbery in Colorado. Behind bars he was troublesome and often refused to obey guards’ orders. He spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement.
In 1977 he read that author Norman Mailer was writing about convicted killer Gary Gilmore. Abbott wrote to Mailer and offered to write about his time behind bars and the conditions he was experiencing. Mailer agreed and helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book on life in the prison system consisting of Abbott’s letters to Mailer.
Mailer supported Abbott’s attempts to gain parole. Abbott also gained the support of such celebrities as Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon. Sarandon’s son, Jack Henry Robbins, is named after Abbott. Abbott was released on parole in June 1980. He went to New York City and was the toast of the literary scene for a short while.
On the morning of July 18, just six weeks after getting out of prison, Jack Abbott went to a small cafe called the Binibon in Manhattan. He clashed with 22-year-old Richard Adan, son-in-law of the restaurant’s owner, over Adan’s telling him the restroom was for staff only. The short-tempered Abbott stabbed Adan in the chest, killing him. The very next day, unaware of Abbott’s crime, the New York Times ran a positive review of The Belly of the Beast.
After some time on the run, Abbott was arrested and charged with murdering Richard Adan. At his trial in January 1982, he was convicted of manslaughter and given fifteen years to life.
Liberals always brag about their supposed achievements. Do they ever take responsibility for their errors, such as the widespread radical chic fad of the 1970s or the liberal contribution to the associated crime wave? Conservatives often are compelled to defend actions by distant ancestors because of our view that tradition is important. Will liberals ever defend the actions they undertook directly and within living memory?
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There is a similar parallel incident involving Edgar Smith and William F Buckley. I think Edgar Smith appeared once on Firing Line. Errors in judgement can occur on both sides of the political divide
I read “In the Belly of the Beast” a few years ago for a class I was teaching. The Wikipedia site linked to above offers a comment on Abbott’s second book which pretty much reflects my impression of ITBOTB:
“It (the book) contained a great deal of self-pity, but no remorse for his crimes. In fact, Abbott blamed his crimes on the prison system and the government and said he wanted an apology from society for the way he had been treated.”
That’s my overriding recollection as well.
Abbott described his childhood in various reform schools and juvenile detention centers, but curiously omitted any mention of what he had done to land there. I seem to recall that he considered it the height of injustice to have been incarcerated for check forgery, but said little about the killing he subsequently committed in prison. If he mentioned it, no doubt it was another injustice inflicted upon him by a cruel and deranged society. And on and on. I’ll say this for the guy, he knew something about film and literary celebrities, their self-rightous vanities, and he played them like violins.
But in his writing, never for a moment did he grapple with the question, “What is society to do with violent sociopaths?” After having taught the course – “Punishment and Prison in the Western World” – for which I read his book, my dispirited answer was that there are no cheery solutions to this question, and it probably comes down to either warehousing them in prisons or killling them outright. There are some people who are simply too dangerous to be allowed on the streets. I suppose incarceration is more humane than the alternative.