From the WSJ Opinion Archives
The Liberation of Jack Henry Abbott
How come literary celebrities champion only guilty prisoners?
Guards at a New York correctional facility found prisoner Jack Henry Abbott hanging from a bed sheet last Sunday, an apparent suicide. Americans over 30 are likely to have no trouble remembering that once-famous name and the bleak satire, culminating in tragedy, forever associated with it.
Self-educated, a consumer of revolutionary philosophy--he was especially devoted to the works of Mao and Stalin--Abbott had spent most of his life incarcerated, his route having taken him from juvenile detention to prison, with hardly an interruption in between. In prison he murdered another inmate, for which crime he was serving a maximum sentence of 19 years when he began writing to Norman Mailer.
Having heard that Mr. Mailer was preparing a book on Utah convict Gary Gilmore, then on death row, Abbott offered to provide guidance on violence in prison--a subject in which he could claim some authority. The letters Abbott subsequently wrote moved him to feelings of awe, Mr. Mailer reported in a 1981 New York Review of Books piece--awe, and admiration at the prisoner's writing and thinking and moral vision. In Abbott's letters he had found, "a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations."
Hardly any wonder, then, that Abbott soon became the object of an effort by celebrated members of the literary establishment bent on springing him from prison. His patrons were moved by the certainty that they had stumbled on a visionary who must be freed to write and think, not just for his sake but, above all, for ours. A liberated Abbott could go about enriching our society and culture with his talents, which included, Mr. Mailer explained, a bold, and comprehensive vision of society. He had not yet fathomed the depths of this vision, the novelist wrote, for while Abbott held to Mao and to Stalin both, his sympathy for Third World revolutionaries was stronger.
A new world lay ahead for Abbott, that was clear--a world where intellectuals and artists sat brooding on the nuances in his political philosophy, all explicated in his Random House bestseller to come, titled "In the Belly of the Beast." In this collection of his prison letters to Mr. Mailer was to be found the novelist's introductory essay--a work invaluable for its capacity to call up the spirit of those times. Mr. Mailer wrote of our penal system, where "not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best--that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor."
In due course, Jack Henry Abbott won parole, thanks to Mr. Mailer, who instructed the Utah Board of Corrections in Abbott's talent and literary promise, as did an editor from Random House. Released to a halfway house in June 1981, Abbott was surrounded by influential admirers, guest of honor at celebratory dinners, subject of stories in People magazine, and "Good Morning America."
Roughly a month later, it all came to an end, along with the life of 22-year-old actor and writer Richard Adan. The newly married manager of his father-in-law's Manhattan restaurant had made the mistake of telling Abbott that the washroom was for the staff and not for customers. The thinker obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations proceeded to knife Adan to death in an argument over a toilet. Adan was left to die on the sidewalk.
The supporters who had helped liberate Abbott expressed grief and shock at this turn of events--shock perhaps not shared by the prison doctors who had warned that Abbott could be a dangerous man. With fine even-handedness, Mr. Mailer's wife, Norris Church Mailer, offered the view that this was a tragedy for all sides.
Causes célèbres of this sort--in which literary talent is advanced as the reason to free a violent felon--aren't likely to come around again anytime soon. Race and sex, not writing ability, are now likelier causes. It was not long ago, after all, that the then-governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, freed eight women who had murdered their husbands--the grounds for freedom being that they were battered wives.
For Gerald Amirault of Massachusetts, who got, for crimes that never took place, a prison sentence far longer than the one Abbott got for murdering a fellow prisoner, there are, of course, no hopes of a parade of celebrities urging his release. Neither a Maoist, nor a murderer, nor a writer who saw in prison a metaphor for the corrupt nature of American society, nor, above all, a criminal guilty of the charges against him, his is not a case likely to have commended itself to the attention of literary society, as Jack Abbott's did back in the 1980s. His sole revolutionary act was to refuse, as his similarly guiltless mother and sister did, to "take responsibility" for molesting minors, and go and sit in classes for sex offenders.
Literary society might, of course, if it were disposed, have found much of interest in Gerald Amirault, his prosecutors, and the corrupted Supreme Judicial Court that has kept him imprisoned. For those interested, we have the case of the state's current governor, Jane Swift. Six months after her own parole board unanimously called for commutation of his sentence--and pointed out, in a way unprecedented for such a body, the ludicrous charges, the grave doubts as to the justice of this prosecution--Gov. Swift has still been unable to bring herself to act one way or another.
A variety of reasons have been offered--one being that she had promised the accusing children and their families she would make no decision over the Christmas holidays, in order to avoid causing pain, whatever that decision might be. Then the governor was busy finding a willing running mate for the gubernatorial election in November--a grueling effort evidently, considering the number of her choices who decided it might be best to let the opportunity pass. Now there is talk that the scandal of child abuse charged to priests in Massachusetts could cause the governor to decide the political risk is too great to agree to commutation for Gerald.
In the belly of the beast that has devoured so much of his life, prisoner Gerald Amirault waits--his belief in ultimate justice not quite destroyed yet. Jack Henry Abbott would not have understood.
