In the belly of the beast

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•-

— -» With an introduction by

$11.95

In the middle of writing The Executioner's

Norman

Mailer received a letter from a named Jack H. Abbott who wanted to warn him that very few people knew much about violence in prisons and who offered to clarify some aspects of Gary Gilmore's life. Mailer began to correspond Song,

federal prisoner

made

with Abbott, and

a startling literary dis-

covery: the convict's direct, intense prose

decidedly powerful; his

letters

was

were extraor-

dinary for their clarity, vividness and

ferocity.

Half Irish, half Chinese, Jack Abbott was born January 21, 1944, in Oscoda, Michigan. He spent his childhood in foster homes throughout the Midwest. At the age of twelve he was committed to a juvenile penal institution—the Utah State Industrial School for

Boys— for

"failure

adjust

to

homes," and was released

five

to

years

foster

later.

At

eighteen he was convicted of "issuing a check against

insufficient

carcerated in the

Utah

sentence of up to

and

was

in-

State Penitentiary

on a

funds,"

five years.

By

the age of

twenty-nine Abbott had killed an inmate and

wounded another escaped from

in a fight

Maximum

behind bars; had

Security;

had com-

mitted bank robbery as a fugitive; and had served time in such federal penitentiaries as

Leavenworth, Atlanta and Marion. Since the age of twelve Jack Abbott has been free a total of only nine and a half months; he has served a total of more than fourteen years in solitary confinement. In the Belly of the Beast brings together Ab-

and arranged background as a

bott's letters to Mailer, edited

according

to:

Abbott's

"state-raised" convict; the bizarre forms of

punishment practiced

in

American

prisons;

experience of long-term solitary confinement; the uses and abuses of sex and the

(continued on back flap)

I

i 'i 1

OF

«i

BELLY yrm'\

m THE BELLY OF THE BEAST Letters from Prison

JACK HENRY ABBOTT With an Introduction by Norman Mailer

Random House

£k

New

York

Copyright© 1981 by Jack Henry Abbott under International and Pan-American

All rights reserved

Copyright Conventions. Published

in

the United States by

Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Abbott, Jack Henry, 1944In the belly of the beast.

1.

Abbott, Jack Henry, 1944-

United States

— Biography.

ISBN

2.

Prisons

365'.44'0924

in

4

States.

[B]

80-6038

AACR2

0-394-51858-6

Manufactured

Prisoners-

— United

Title.

I.

HV9468.A22A37

3.

the United States of America

6

8

9

7

5

3

—

ACKNOWLEDGMENT. The

preparation and arrangement of the letters in this book

—

letters to Norman Mailer are the work of my Random House, Erroll McDonald. I am grateful to him. My sister saw me through everything described in this book, and has kept something alive in me that would otherwise have perished long ago. I am grateful to her.

fragmented

editor at

To Carl Panzram, William ("Whitey") Hurst, "Gypsy" Adams, La Count Bly, Sam Melville, George fackson, "Curly" McFee, George ("Sugar Bear") Lovell, Gary Gilmore

—

that they

may

rest in

peace

INTRODUCTION

sometime

the middle of working on The Executioner's

in

came from Morton Janklow, the

Song, a note

He was

sending on a letter that had been addressed to him for

forwarding to me.

He assumed

appeared together

in a story in

it

was because our names had

People magazine. In any event,

the communication was by a convict

and Janklow letter.

An

literary agent.

After

I

author

named

Jack H. Abbott,

there was something unusual in the fellow's

felt

knew why he thought so. receive as many as several hundred

read

will

it,

I

letters a

want something: will you read their work, or listen to a life-story and write it? This letter, on the contrary, offered instruction. Abbott had seen a newspaper account that stated I was doing a book on Gary Gilmore and violence in America. He wanted to warn me, Abbott said, that year from strangers. Usually they

very few people

knew much about

violence in prisons.

No

author he had ever read on the subject seemed to have a clue. It

was

his belief that

five years still

men who had been

knew next

to nothing

in prison as

on the

much

as

subject. It probably

took a decade behind bars for any real perception on the matter to

permeate your psychology and your

ested,

he

felt

he could

clarify

some

were

inter-

aspects of Gilmore's

life as

flesh.

If

I

a convict.

There are unhappy paradoxes to being successful as a For one thing, you don't have much opportunity to read good books (it's too demoralizing when you're at sea on your own work) and you also come to dread letter-writing. writer.

Perhaps ten times a year, a couple of days are

up on

mail,

and

there's little pleasure in

it.

You

lost

catching

are spending

INTRODUCTION

x

time that could have been given to more dedicated writing, and there are so many letters to answer! Few writers encourage correspondents.

My

reply to a good, thoughtful, even

generous communication from someone

I

do not know

is

often short and apologetic.

Abbott's letter, however, was intense, direct, unadorned, and detached an unusual combination. So I took him up. When you got down to it, I did not know much about violence in prisons, and I told him so and offered to read carefully what he had to say. A long letter came back. It was remarkable. I answered it, and another came. It was just as remarkable. I don't think two weeks went by before I was in the middle of a thoroughgoing correspondence. I felt all the awe one knows before a phenomenon. Abbott had his own voice. I had heard no other like it. At his best, when he knew exactly what he was writing about, he had an eye for the continuation of his thought that was like the line a racing-car driver takes around a turn. He wrote like a devil, which is to say (since none of us might recognize the truth if an angel told us) that he had a way of making you exclaim to yourself as you read, "Yes, he's right. My God, yes, it's true." Needless to say, what was true was also bottomless to contemplate. Reading Abbott's letters did not encourage sweet dreams. Hell was now clear to behold. It was Maximum

—

Security in a large penitentiary.

Now,

I

was not the most innocent of tourists on trips into I had, as I say, been working on The Execu-

these quarters. tioner's Song,

literature

and

also provided

which apart from

collateral reading in prison

trips to interview convicts

me

with Gilmore's

letters to

and wardens had Nicole in the

six

months between his incarceration and his death. Those letters had their own penetration into the depths and horrors of prison life. Gilmore had his literary talents, and they were far from nonexistent. Still, he could not supply me with what Abbott offered. Gilmore, seen as a writer, rather than as a murderer, was a romantic and a mystic ultimately, he saw

—

incarceration as a species of karma.

No

matter

how he might

Introduction

hate

he

it,

also

viewed

xi

had

as the given. Life

it

its

lights

and

shadows. Prison was the foul smell of the dark places, and

maybe he had earned

That was the grim find no happiness

his sojourn there.

now

equation. Gilmore believed he would this side of death.

Out

came an

of Abbott's letters, however,

radical, a potential leader, a

human

elevated

man

relations in a better world that revolution

could forge. His mind, at

its

wanted to speak from He was not interested

happiest,

his philosophical height across to yours. in

intellectual, a

obsessed with a vision of more

the particular, as Gilmore was, but only in the relevance of

the particular to the abstract. Prison, whatever

was not

a

dream whose

roots

would lead you

its

nightmares,

to eternity, but

an infernal machine of destruction, a design for the Dispose-All anus of a prodigiously diseased society.

The two men

could not be more different. Gilmore, while

always on the lookout to escape,

romantic solution

still

saw death

as a species of

—he and Nicole could be together on

the

other side; Abbott, in contrast, might be ready by his convict's

code to face death death.

It

in

any passing encounter, but he loathed

was the ultimate

society could visit

Nonetheless, and

Abbott, he

is

the

injustice, the final obscenity that

on him. it

first

is

one of those

to point out:

Gilmore and

prison that held

.

.

me and

bemuses you went into any

ironies that

".

if

asked for

prisoners with certain backgrounds, both in

all

of the

and out of

prison,

backgrounds that include observed and suspected behavior,

names, and

my

and name

you

will get a set of files, a list of

will

always be handed you along with Gilmore's ..."

file

morphology is close. Both were juveboth were incarcerated for most of their ado-

Yes. Superficially, the nile delinquents,

lescence in state-supported institutions in his early letters,

equal to relatives

both

men knew

—

as

Abbott explained

knew in the juvenile home were when you met them again in the pen and the kids you

very

spent eighteen of the

—

little

last

of liberty.

At

thirty-six,

twenty-two years of his

Gilmore had and

life in jail;

Abbott, while younger, had, proportionately, spent more. First

INTRODUCTION

xii

imprisoned at twelve, he was out once for nine months, then imprisoned again at the age of eighteen for cashing a check with insufficient funds.

He was

given a

—

maximum

of five years.

As he tells us in this work it is no ordinary description of murder he then killed a fellow convict and was given an indeterminate sentence up to nineteen years. He has been in

—

jail

when he escaped from Utah State Prison and was on the lam

ever since but for a six-week period

Maximum

Security in

He

America and Canada.

in

being the only

There are

a

man

has the high convict honors of

to escape from

few other

Max

similarities

in that penitentiary.

between Gilmore and

Abbott. Foremost, they are both convicts. They are by their logic the elite of a prison population, part of the convict estab-

lishment as seen by the convicts, not by the authority to say, they are hard-core.

They

see themselves as

—

that

men who

is

set

the code for this city-state, this prison, that is occupied by a warden and his security officers. Beneath that overarching au-

own

thority, convicts build their

tween themselves

as

is

ills

and

afflictions of

that not only the worst of the

the best

—

that

is,

deal be-

trials,

they

and from

it

the prison system.

It

a paradox at the core of penology,

derives the thousand is

They

on the code.

instruct the young, they pass

There

establishment.

contending forces, they hold

young are sent

to prison, but

the proudest, the bravest, the most daring,

the most enterprising, and the most undefeated of the poor. There starts the horror. The fundamental premise of incarceration which Abbott demonstrates to us, over and over, is that prison

is

equipped to grind down criminals who are cowards

into social submission, but can only break the spirit of brave

men who

are criminals, or anneal

than the

steel that encloses

society

(it is

very difficult

them

until they are harder

you can conceive of a these days) that is more concerned them.

If

with the creative potential of violent young

men

than with the

threat they pose to the suburbs, then a few solutions for future

may be there. Somewhere between the French Foreign Legion and some prodigious extension of Outward Bound may

prisons

lie

the answer, at least for

all

those juvenile delinquents

who

Introduction

xiii

—

drawn to crime as a positive experience because it is more more meaningful, more mysterious, more transcendental, more religious than any other experience they have known. For them, there is a conceivable dialogue. The authority can say: "Are you tough? Then show us you have the balls are

exciting,

to climb that rock wall."

hang-glide

—

Or

down

travel

dare your death in any

people into death. Whereas for

way

all

the rapids in a kayak,

that doesn't drag other

those petty criminals

who

are not fundamentally attached to such existential tests of

whom

courage and violence, for prison

is

crime

the wrong business,

is

They can move with

not a problem.

small friction

from minimum security to prisons-without-walls to halfway houses. For them, a two-year sentence can even be a highschool education. But the social practice of mixing these two

kinds of criminals together

become punks and

timid

when bold and

is

a disaster,

an explosion.

snitches, the brave turn cruel.

in

For

timid people are obliged to live together, cour-

age turns to brutality and timidity to treachery.

between

The

a brave

man and

A

marriage

woman may be exceeded union of a brave woman and

a fearful

matrimonial misery only by a

man. Prison systems perpetuate such relations. Abbott doesn't let us forget why. I cannot think, offhand, of any American writer who has detailed for us in equal ongoing a fearful

analysis

how prison

is

designed to gut and corrupt the timid, and

break or brutalize the brave. a brave

work

human being common

for the

soul out of

We

to surrender his or her bravery can ever

good.

It violates

the universal stuff of the

which great civilizations are built.

do not

lying horror

however,

live,

prison problems.

body

No system of punishment that asks

Even

may be

to

that

in a

world that

assume we do,

we

drenched

all

is

tries to solve its

Utopian.

The

under-

inhabit the swollen tissues of

bad conscience, so bad indeed that the laugh of the hyena reverberates from every TV set, and is in danger of becoming our true national anthem. We a

are

all

us to

politic that

is

so guilty at the

become more

in

way we have allowed the world around

ugly and tasteless every year that

der to terror and steep ourselves in

it.

we

surren-

The mugger becomes

the

INTRODUCTION

xiv

Golgotha and the middle

size of

class retires into walled cities

with armed guards. Here, the prisons have wall-to-wall carpet-

and the guards address the inmates as "Sir," and bow. But they are prisons. The measure of the progressive imprisonment of all society is to be found at the base in the state of the penitentiaries themselves. The bad conscience of society comes to focus in the burning lens of the penitentiary. That is why we do not speak of improving the prisons which is to say, taking them through some mighty transmogrifications but only of fortifying law and order. But that is no more feasible than the dream of remission in the cancer patient. To read this book is to live in the land of true and harsh perception we won't get law and order without a revolution in the prison ing,

—

—

—

—

system.

Let

me

take

it,

however, from another tack. At one point

these letters Abbott speaks of

how he

in

obtained his education

by reading books brought to him by his sister from a friendly bookstore outside. For five and a half years in Maximum Security he read, with an intensity he has carried over into his style, such authors as Niels Bohr and Hertz and Hegel, Russell and Whitehead, Carnap and Quine. Crucial to it all was Marx. We have the phenomenon of a juvenile delinquent brought up in

reform schools

when he

who stabs another prisoner to death,

can, reads books in

Maximum

takes drugs

Security for five years

he can hardly stand, and then, like Marx, tries to perceive the world with his mind and come back with a comprehensive until

vision of society.

The boldness

of the juvenile delinquent grows

Only by the must be like to live alone with so great a hunger and acquire the meat and bones of culture without the soup. Abbott looks to understand the world, he would dominate the world with his mind, yet in all his adult life he has spent six weeks in the world. He knows prison like the ferryman knows the crossing to Hades. But the world Abbott knows only through books. He is the noble equivalent of Jerzy Kosinskfs debased observer, Chauncey Gardner, who learns about the world through a TV set. Yet, what a into the audacity of the self-made intellectual.

tender retort of the heart can

we imagine what

it

xv

Introduction

prodigious meal Abbott has taken

in.

He

has torn the meat of

culture with his fingers, he has crushed the bones with his

So he has

teeth.

a

mind

like

no other

I

own

have encountered.

It

speaks from the nineteenth century as clearly as from the

There are moments when the voice that enters your Marx and Lenin untouched by

twentieth.

mind

is

the clear descendant of

any intervention of history. Indeed, Abbott,

who

is

half Irish

and half Chinese, even bears a small but definite resemblance to Lenin, and the tone of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov rises out of

some of these That offers

pages.

No

a certainty.

one who reads

agree with every one of Abbott's ideas.

one hand, he

is

It is

the pursuit of happiness. "

tice

He

insanity

Freedom and

even writes: "It has been

perhaps the only

is

behind

work

the

bars.

(if

"life,

oxygen to

my experience

that injus-

not merely the greatest) cause of

You'd be surprised

We know

and

liberty,

justice are

to learn

what

a little

old-fashioned oppression can do to anyone." Hear! Hear!

the devil's voice.

will

On

the livid survivor of the ultra-revolutionary

credo of the Declaration of Independence, Abbott.

this

impossible.

it is

true as soon as

we hear

It is

it.

Of

Abbott is also a Communist. What kind, I'm not clear. seems to hold to Mao, and to Stalin both, but vaguely. It

course,

He

is more clear that his real sympathies are with the Third World, with Cuba, Africa, and Arab revolutionaries. How long he would survive in a Communist country I don't know. It is obvious we would not agree on how long. We have written back and forth on this a little, but not a great deal. I no longer have the taste for polemic that he enjoys. Moreover, I have not

spent

my

life in jail.

I

can afford the sophisticated despair of

finding Russia altogether as abominable as

but then,

I

America and more,

have had the experience of meeting delegations of

Russian bureaucrats and they look

like prison

guards in prison

am free, so can afford the perception. But if had my young life in jail, and discovered the officers of my own land were my enemies, would find it very hard not to suits.

I

I

I

spent

I

believe that the officers of another land might be illumined by a

higher philosophy.

INTRODUCTION

xvi

and add that I am much more impressed by the measure of Abbott's writings on prison than by his overall analyses of foreign affairs and revolution. One is for me the meat and bones the other is the soup he has not had. Yet I

say this,

literary

—

do not sneer. He has forged his revolutionary ideas out of the pain and damage done to his flesh and nerves by a life in prison. I

It is

possible that

as much a revolutionary or more Or an altogether different kind of

he would be

after ten years of freedom.

hope we have the opportunity to find out. As I am writing these words, it looks like Abbott will be released on parole this summer. It is certainly the time for him to get out. There is a point past which any prisoner can get nothing more from prison, not even the preservation of his will, and Abbott, I think, has reached these years. Whereas, if he gets out, we man.

I

may yet have a new writer of the largest stature among us, for he has forged himself in a cauldron and still has half of the world to discover. There

is

greatness in young writers, that it

we

are right, but this

never,

when we speak

more than one chance

one chance

in

Abbott

reaffirms the very idea of literature itself as a

sion that will survive

all

obstacles.

I

love Jack

is

of possible

in a

hundred

so vivid that

human

Abbott

expres-

for surviv-

ing and for having learned to write as well as he does.

Norman Mailer March 1981

CONTENTS Introduction by

Norman Mailer

Foreword

xix

State-Raised Convict Varieties of

The

Punishment

23

65

Gods and Drugs Sides:

43

54

Prison Staff

The Inmates

Choosing

3

Hole: Solitary Confinement

The

ix

87

Communists and Marxism

American Violence/American

Justice:

The Legal System

Capital Punishment and Gary Gilmore

Racism

in

America and Behind Bars Foreign Affairs

Freedom 7

94

155 163

124 135

1

07

—

FOREWORD criticizing bourgeois economic laws based on the relationship

between Robinsoe Crusoe and

his servant Friday

—laws

still

taught to schoolchildren as routinely as the story of Jesus Christ

—Engels

writes in Anti-Diihring:

Herr Duhring developed

He

law.

argument in the field of morality and one man, and he said: "One man what is in effect the same, out of all

his

started originally with

conceived as being alone,

or,

man

connection with other men, can have no obligations; for such a

there can be no question of what he ought, but only what he wants

But what

to do!

is

this

man, conceived

obligations, but the fateful, primordial

he

without

is

commit any? ". .Adam .

sin

is

a second

simply because there

destined to

suddenly appears

—

not,

Adam. And

it

fall

being alone and without

Adam no

is

instantly

an Eve with rippling

Adam

where

in paradise,

him

possibility for

into sin. Alongside this

true,

is

as

Jew

Adam

to

there

tresses,

but

acquires obligations and

breaks them. Instead of treating his brother as having equal rights and clasping

makes

him

to his breast,

a slave of

Further on, Engels

Semetic

and

a

tribal legend,

woman

Duhring

will

to

be

original sin with

he subjects him to

his

domination, he

him."

says: "All

abandon the left

we can

say

according to which state of

is

that

it is

we

prefer the old a

man

to

Herr

worthwhile for

innocence

.

.

.

and that

the uncontested glory of having constructed his

two men."

I.e.,

the original sin

=

social intercourse.

N TIIK OF THE

BKLi; 1IEAJ

3W

STATE-RAISED CONVICT

I

—

ve wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations the of what it is to be seri-

atmospheric pressure, you might say

—

American prison. That sentence does not adequately say what I mean. I've wanted to convey to you what it means to be in prison after a childhood spent in penal institutions. To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there. So long, your fantasies of the free world are no longer easily distinguishable from what you "know" the free world is really like. So long, that being free is exactly identical to a free man's dreams of heaven. To die and go to the free world That part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world ously a long-term prisoner in an

.

as a horrible nightmare.

dreams. that

is

The one

I'm talking

that appears in

that journeys within

my

.

now about

my

both the subject and object of

The one

.

dreams all

life,

as

the

me

in

my

me. The one

those surreal symbols.

within me, on what

St.

— IN

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

John of the Cross viewed

When

with things

still

undone

experience of this

.

it is

.

nighttime quest for fulfillment.

as a

they talk of ghosts of the dead

they approximate

in life,

me

to try to escape.

out escape routes wherever

I

am

place to rest and be safe.

I

find

was

had been

my subjective

Too

for so

My

many

years now,

my

brain seek

eyes,

way another prisrefuge or a warm, quiet

often for

my

liking those eyes

me.

escaped one time. In 1971 I

the night

sent, the

oner's eyes, brain, seek friendliness,

and brains

in

life.

have been desperate to escape

I

routine for

weeks.

who wander

in a hotel

room

in

I

was

in the free

Montreal, Canada.

world for I

was

six

asleep.

I began waking in the had simply been dreaming of prison. When I was in prison, I must have pushed all fear aside until not fearing was habitual. But that part of me I call my subjective side did feel that fear every minute of every day. Now the loathing and stark terror suppressed within me were coming to the surface in dreams. One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free, I had escaped. I could not grasp where I was. I was in a nice bedroom with fancy furnishings. A window was open and the sunlight was shining in. There were no bars. The walls were papered in rich designs. My bed was large and comfortable. So much more. I must have sat there in bed reeling from shock and numbness for an hour while it all gradually came back to me that I had escaped. So we can all hold up like good soldiers and harden ourselves in prison. But if you do that for too long, you lose yourself. Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent something like an infant deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer. That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life. And I am not even I

a fugitive about three weeks.

night in a sweat from bad dreams.

—

I

State-Raised Convict

how my

conscious of I

cannot stop I

dissolution

coming about. Therefore,

is

it.

don't ever talk of these feelings.

write this.

When

I

find

now

glass

reflection,

hatred at such times.

crowd of

in a I

such

feel

these years

I

When

have

a confrontation.

in the corridor

it's all

I

I

feel

shame and

Paranoid.

I

can't help this anger. All

can control

it. I

have to intentionally gauge

I

and happen

can do to refrain from attack. I

it.

as

I'm forced by circumstances to be

such hatred,

felt

them

to look in a mirror.

get angry on impulse.

I

prisoners,

hostility,

window

much time

thinking of

and angering

painful

it

walk past a

my

to see

I

never spent

I

thinking of them. In fact, I'm only I

5

conversation to cover up the anger

I

feel,

never seek

my

voice in

the chaos and pain

beneath the surface of what we commonly recognize as

just

Paranoia

reality.

is

not the reason for

an

illness

my

sentences to reform school and prison.

I

contracted in institutions.

It is

the effect, not the cause.

It is

How

would you

like to

be forced

the days of your

all

life

to

beside a stinking, stupid wino every morning at breakfast?

sit

Or for some loud fool in his infinite moment able to say (slur) "Gimme a just look into his sleazy eyes

front of .

life,

.

.

God and

Imagine

a

ignorance to be at any cigarette,

and want

to

kill

I

everyone.

thousand more such daily intrusions

in

your

every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the

source of this paranoia, this anger that could

any

man!" And

his ass there in

moment

if I

consume me

lost control.

LIES It

does not matter what

The eyes have it. The mind's legislative Is

is

said

and done

faculty

unconcerned with appearances and words

Nothing

is

over and done with.

Nothing.

Not even your

malice.

at

— IN

6

—

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Especially your malice.

So do not apologize to me. have walked stooped beneath your heart,

I

That cold-blooded crown That holds the glinting jewel

Of

contradiction in your eyes.

think that

I

I

skull

And

them

crush

gouge them

shall

From your

my

in

fist

—Give you

a dog to see with Give you eyes that pant and salivate, Eyes that creep on all fours Eyes that cringe at the sound of my voice;

Lie to

me

Tell

life is

—When

all

me

then.

good to you

your memories are

distilled

Into the transformed image, the Idea,

Of

a

To

dig out your eyes.

mechanical hand reaching Lie to Lie to Lie to

This

is

a

poem

I

me me me

wrote

then.

then, Dog-eyes. then.

in the

arms of the prison muse

Paranoia here in the hole.

To be to

capable of writing something so mentally deranged

be able to write nothing

tion to life I

wrote

—

it

is

this

caged prisoners like there

I

else that expresses

my

social reac-

very perplexing to me.

morning amid the in single cells

—

infernal racket of a

hundred

racket of threats, race-talking

was no tomorrow.

was born January 21, 1944, on a military base in Oscoda, I was in and out of foster homes almost from the

Michigan.

7

State-Raised Convict

moment

my birth. My

of

formal education:

the sixth grade. At age nine

Utah State about

I

never completed

began serving long

At age twelve

juvenile detention quarters.

I

Industrial School for Boys.

stints in

was sent to the

I

was "paroled" once

I

then returned there. At age eighteen

sixty days,

months

released as an adult. Five or six

Utah State Penitentiary

for the

later

I

was sent to the

crime of "issuing

went

for

was

I

a

check

with an indeterminate

against insufficient funds."

I

sentence of up to

About three years later, having one inmate and wounded another

five years.

never been released, in a fight in

in

killed

I

the center

hall.

was

I

tried for the capital offense

under the old convict statute that requires either mandatory death

if

malice aforethought

three to twenty years.

determinate term"

what

is

found, or a sentence of from

is

received the latter sentence.

I

justifies

sets a

minimum and

a

stay in prison.

maximum

my

At age twenty-six

case.

I

A

as-

wrong

escaped for about

weeks.

six I I

in

The law

—the underlying

sumption being that no one serves the maximum. assumption

"in-

the concept of parole. Your

good behavior determines how long you merely

An

am

at this

moment

thirty-seven years old. Since age twelve

have been free the sum

served

many terms

total of

nine and a half months.

in solitary. In only three

over ten years there.

I

would estimate that

I

terms

I

I

have

have served

have served a good

fourteen or fifteen years in solitary.

The

have ever committed

was bank robbery during

the time

It

was

I

was a

It

the state was

ings that

It

stood about

Army back

still

had served

with two wings.

was constructed by the U.S. a territory. It

was one of several build-

as disciplinary barracks for the military.

These barracks had long ago passed into the hands and were part of a juvenile penal institution. In the

I

fugitive.

a big red-brick building

four stories high.

when

in free society

only serious crime

of the state

basement of the big red-brick building were rows of

IN

8

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

confinement

solitary

The basement was

cells.

entered from

outside the building only. I am about twelve or thirteen years old. It is winter. I am marching in a long double-file of boys. We are marching to the mess hall. There is a guard watching as we march toward him. There is a guard walking behind us as we march.

My testes shrink and the blood ache. My heart pounding and is

is I

rushing and

am

my eyes

burn,

trying hard to breath

slowly, to control myself. at the guards: in front and behind the line. beyond are plowed and covered with an icy blanket of snow. I do not know how far beyond those fields my freedom lies. Suddenly my confederate at the front of the line whirls and slugs the boy behind him. The front guard, like an attack dog, is on them both beating them into submission. Seconds later the guard at the back rushes forward, brushing me as he passes. I break away from the line, and run for my life. I stretch my legs as far as I can, and as quickly as I can, but the legs of a boy four feet six inches tall cannot stretch very far. The fields are before me, a still flatland of ice and snow, and the huge clods of frozen, plowed earth are to me formidable I

keep glancing

The

fields

—

obstacles. I

The

sky

is

"You! Stop!"

I

The

baby-blue, almost white.

when immediately know

haven't covered

fifty

yards

I

air is clear.

hear the pursuit begin: will

I

be caught, but

I

continue to run. I do not feel the blow of his fist. I'm in midair for a moment, and then I'm rolling in frozen clods of soil. I am pulled to my feet; one of my arms is twisted behind my back; my lungs are

burning with the cold

air;

my

trying to steel myself for the

The

nostrils are flared.

punishment

to

I

am

already

come.

line, flanked by do not respect them,

other inmates stand in a long straight

guards, and

I

because they

am will

dragged past them. not run

—

will

not try to escape.

too short to keep up with the guard,

my arm

twisted high up behind

humiliated.

I

try

I

my

who

is

back, so

hard to be dignified.

My legs

effortlessly I

are

holding

stumble along,

9

State-Raised Convict

basement of the red-brick building, and in good time. A snowflake hits my eye

see the door to the

I

we

are approaching

it

and melts. It is beginning, softly, to snow. At the top of the stairs to the basement, against a high black-steel door.

am

I

stand beside

I

it

flung

down

at attention as

the guard takes out a huge ring of keys and bangs on the door.

We are seen

The door yawns open and an

through a window.

old guard appears, gazing at

me

maliciously.

We enter. We are standing at the top of a

number

of

concrete steps that descend to the floor of the basement.

thrown down the

and

stairs,

my

bleeding and

is

I

lie

wide I

am

on the floor, waiting. My nose from blows to my skull.

ears are ringing

"Get up!" Immediately

am knocked down

I

again.

"Strip!" stand, shakily,

I

my

but

hair,

I

and shed

my clothing.

His hands are pulling

dare not move.

'Turn around!" I

turn.

"Bend I bend I

over!" over.

He

inspects

my

anus and

watch, anxiously, hoping with

me there. He orders me

We The

all

my

is

passage

is

narrow;

it is

might he does not hurt

only four or

body warmth

feel

I

He unlocks

He closes and locks the door, and he walks down the dark passageway.

In the

cell,

there

mesh-steel screen. existing

is

It

windowpanes

five feet

wide and

is

can smell nervous sweat

in the air.

said.

a barred is

level

it. I I

enter.

can hear his steps

window with an

ancient, heavy

are caked with decades of

peer, running free again in

Nothing

with the ground outside. soil,

The

and the

Through the broken ones my mind across the fields.

screen prevents cleaning them.

A

and

to follow him.

We stop at one of the doors. as

private parts,

enter a passageway between rows of heavy steel doors.

dimly lighted. As soon as we enter,

and

my

I

sheet of thick plywood, on iron legs bolted to the floor,

is

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

70

my bed. An

old-fashioned toilet bowl

A

a sink with cold running water.

in the corner, beside

is

dim

burns

light

in a dull

yellow glow behind the thick iron screening attached to the wall.

The

—

names and dates some of the They were scratched into the wall.

walls are covered with

dates go back twenty years.

There are ragged hearts pierced with arrows and pachuco crosses everywhere. Everywhere are the words: "mom," "love," "god" the walls sweat and are clammy and cold.

—

Because

am

I

allowed only

my

undershorts,

I

move about

to

keep warm.

When my

light

was turned out

at night,

would weep

I

uncontrollably. Sixty days in solitary was a long, long time in

those days for me.

When

the guard's key would hit the lock on

signal the serving of a "meal,"

if I

were not standing

tion in the far corner of the cell, facing

me

attack I

a

it,

door to at atten-

the guard would

with a ring of keys on a heavy chain.

was fed one-third of

one day

my

week

a regular

was taken from

I

meal three times a day. Only

my cell and ordered

to

shower

while the guard stood in the shower-room doorway and timed

me

for three minutes.

Locked

in

our

we could not see one another, and if we we were beaten. We tapped the they heard our taps, we were beaten

cells,

were caught shouting out messages, but entire

row of

if

cells,

cell-to-cell,

—

one child

at a time.

served five years in the big red-brick building, and alto-

I

two or three in solitary confinement. When I walked was considered an adult, subject to adult laws.

gether, out,

I

served so long because

I

and

tried to escape over

I

could not adjust to the institution

twenty times.

I

had been there for the homes."

juvenile "crime" of "failure to adjust to foster

.

.

.He who

age after he

—

is

learns over

is

state-raised

—reared by the

taken from what the state

and over and

all

state

calls a

the days of his

from an early

"broken home" life

that people

— State-Raised Convict

in society

can do anything to him and not be punished by the

Do anything

law.

11

to

him with the

full

force of the state behind

them.

As mess

a child, hall.

and one

he must march

He can own

in lock-step to his

pair of shoes.

People

in society

him. Everyone

come

in society

to

him through the

he comes

capacity employed by the state. society.

meals in a huge

only three shirts and two pair of trousers

He

in

He

state

contact with

and is

in

injure

some

learns to avoid people in

evades them at every step.

America someone who is state-raised can be dog by anyone, who has no "criminal record," with full impunity. I do not exaggerate this at all. It is a fact so ordinary in the minds of state-raised prisoners that it is a matter of common sense. If a prisoner were to show a In any state in

shot

down and

killed like a

skeptical attitude toward things of this nature, the rest of us would conclude that he is losing his mind. He is questioning what is self-evident to us: a practical fact of life.

.My mind keeps turning toward one

main aspects of prison that separates ordinary prisoners who, at some point in their lives, serve a few years and get out never to return or if they do, it is for another short period and never again and the convict who is "state-raised," i.e., the prisoner who grows up from boyhood to manhood in penal institutions. I have referred to it as a form of instability (mental, emotional, etc.). There is no doubt (let us say there is little doubt) that this instability is caused by a lifetime of incarceration. Long stretches of, say, from ages ten to seventeen or eighteen, and then from seventeen or eighteen to ages thirty and forty. You hear a lot about "arrested adolescence" nowadays, and I believe this concept touches the nub of the instability in .

.

of the

prisoners like myself.

Every society gives

men and women,

its

men and women

of adults.

Men

the prerogatives of

are given their dues. After a

certain age you are regarded as a

man by

society.

You

are

— THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

12

referred to as "sir";

no one

interferes in your affairs, slaps your

hands or ignores you. Society you.

You

shown

are

is

and serves judgment is tem-

solicitous in general

respect. Gradually your

pered because gradually you see that

it

has real effects;

it

impinges on the society, the world. Your experience mellows

move about anywhere, You can pursue any object of love, pleasure, danger, profit, etc. You are taught by the very terms of your social existence, by the objects that come and go from your intentions, the nature of your own emotions and you your emotions because you are free to

work and play

at anything.

—

learn about yourself, your tastes, your strengths nesses. It is

school,

You,

in

not so for the state-raised convict. As a boy in reform

he

is

punished for being a

punished for trying to be a

He is

and weak-

other words, mature emotionally.

man

little

boy. In prison, he

is

in the sense described above.

treated as an adolescent in prison. Just as an adolescent

is

denied the keys to the family car for any disobedience, any

mischief,

I

am

subjected to the hole for any disobedience, any

mischief.

I

will

go to the hole

a packet of sugar.

I

is

for

murder

as well as for stealing

out of the hole in either case, and different.

My

solely to avoid leaving evidence that will leave

me

the length of time object

will get

I

serve for either offense

is

no

open to prosecution out there in the world beyond these walls where a semblance of democracy is practiced. Prison regimes have prisoners making extreme decisions regarding moderate questions, decisions that only choice of either-or.

No

contradiction

is

fit

the logical

allowed openly. You are

not allowed to change. You are only allowed to submit; "agree-

ment" does not exist (it implies equality). You are the rebellious who must obey and submit to the judgment of

adolescent

"grownups'*

A

prisoner

"tyrants" they are called

who

is

when we speak of men.

not state-raised tolerates the situation

because of his social maturity prior to incarceration.

He knows

things are different outside prison. But the state-raised convict

has no conception of any difference.

hence, maturity. His judgment tions are impulsive, raw,

is

He

lacks experience and,

untempered,

unmellowed.

rash; his

emo-

IS

State-Raised Convict

—

—

whole spectrum of them that I know of only through words, through reading and my immature imagination. I can imagine I feel those emotions (know,

There are emotions

what they

therefore,

am

a

are),

but / do

barely a precocious child.

This thing

I

My

At age

hides from everyone

else.

The

There

high esteem

is

is

is

the hidden,

something

else.

It is

the

(moral, ethical,

the mantle of pride, integrity, honor.

we

I

foul underbelly everyone

—which concerns judgment, reason

cultural). It

thirty-seven

passions are those of a boy.

related above about emotions

dark side of state-raised convicts.

other half

not.

naturally have for violence, force. It

It is is

the

what

makes us effective, men whose judgment impinges on others, on the world: Dangerous killers who act alone and without emotion, who act with calculation and principles, to avenge themselves, establish and defend their principles with acts of murder that usually evade prosecution by law: this is the stateraised convicts' conception of manhood, in the highest sense. The model we emulate is a fanatically defiant and alienated individual who cannot imagine what forgiveness is, or mercy or tolerance, because he has no experience of such values. His emotions do not know what such values are, but he imagines

them

as so

many "weaknesses"

precisely because the unprinci-

pled offender appears to escape punishment through such

"weaknesses" on the part of society.

But if you behave like a man (a man such as yourself) you doomed; you are feared and hated. You are "crazy" by the

are

standards of the authorities

—by

their prejudices against pris-

on-behavior.

—

Can you imagine how I feel to be treated as a little boy and man? And when I was a little boy, I was treated as a man and can you imagine what that does to a boy? (I keep not as a

—

waiting for the years to give that has evaded So.

A

me in

a sense of

humor, but so

far

completely.)

guard frowns at

work?" Or: "Tuck

me

your

me and

says:

shirttail!"

Do

"Why this

are you not at and do that. The

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

14

way

a little

boy

spoken

is

to.

This

two

deal with not for a year or

And when

so far, eighteen years.

something

is

—nor even I

I

have had to

ten years

explode, then

myself by behaving like a contrite and unruly

—but

for,

have burnt

I

little

boy. So

I

have, in order to avoid that deeper humiliation, developed a

method

man

whole situation

of reversing the

chastising the

and not

little

boy. (Poor kid!)

terms of years

just in

cannot adjust to daily

I

been

years this has

true.

I

—and

become the

I

has cost

It

me

dearly,

in prison or in the hole.

life in

prison.

For almost twenty

have never gone a month

in prison

without incurring disciplinary action for violating "rules." Not in all these years.

Does

mean

this

must die

I

Does

in prison?

this

mean

I

cannot "adjust" to society outside prison?

The government not like prison.

it is I

answers yes I

— but

feel that

if

I

I

remember

would be back

I

within months.

in prison I

care about myself and

cannot adjust to freedom. Even in prison

and

ever did adjust to prison,

could by that alone never adjust to society.

Now,

society,

—because

to

me

I

cannot

if it

prison

is

let

it

happen that

means spending my

I

life

nothing but mutiny and

revolt.

.

.

.A round peg will not

me

they'll ever let

upon

my

fit

into a square

out of prison so long as

plate steel,

and

—

for

in those days

my

don't think

depends

my

cell

were made of

boiler-

would kick them all day every day, hollering, no apparent reason. I was so choked with rage

I

(about sixteen or seventeen years ago),

hardly talk, even

throw

I

release

"good adjustment to prison."

In the beginning the walls of

screaming

slot.

my

tray as

when

I

could

was calm: I stuttered badly. I used to casually as you would toss a balled-up scrap I

of paper in a trash can

IS

Convict

State- Raised

—but would do

it

with a tray

of food

full

at the face of a guard.

That

is

what

man who

by a

Hell,

if

mean by

I

a response to the prison experience

does not belong there.

never went to prison,

I

would have committed. I'm not don't belong in prison that

who knows what

at all saying that

for

punishment

—and

happen

I

to have gotten

men who

with most

like that

I I

should not have been sent there.

I

Theoretically, no one should belong in prison!

it is

"evil"

because

I

was sent there

it. I

do not think

are sent to prison. Everyone

hurts in prison, but not like that. still

I

cannot

corner and

when

am

talk to a guard,

giving

him the

have to address a guard

I

not unless

orders.

I

have his

I

still

stutter

ass in a

sometimes

—address him without breaking

can cuss one out very eloquently or insult him, but

rules.

I

that's

when

I've

broken

a rule or don't care

if I

do break one.

strange to contemplate: people with a stuttering defect in

It is

society can usually sing without stuttering; well,

without stuttering

It's

.

.

I

can cuss

.

impossible. I'm the kind of fool who, facing Caesar

his starving lions,

need only

scot-free but instead

Caesar

—knowing

full

all

away

cannot suppress saying "fuck you" to well the consequences.

/ refuse to be martyred;

and whine

retract a statement to walk

and

the way to

What

is

more,

don't accept the consequences,

I

my

death.

A

death,

it

seems, that

I

chose. If

I

It's

I

could please Caesar,

would,

I

a fucked-up world, but

have never accepted that

I

I

it's all I

gladly would. got.

did this to myself.

been successfully indoctrinated with that only reason

I

have been

belief.

I

have never

That

is

the

in prison this long.

Indoctrination begins the

moment someone

is

arrested. It

IN

16

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

becomes more thorough every step of the way, from the moment of arrest to incarceration. In prison, it finds its most profound expression.

Every minute suffering

is

you are forced to believe that your

for years

a result of your

"ill

behavior,'' that

it is

You

are indoctrinated to blindly accept anything

But

if

can

I

I

did

it

to myself. If

having violated a prison rule

example, shown insolence to a pig

.

evil

to you.

—

I

am thrown

—

for having,

can only believe

I

I

upon myself through indoctrination. .1 might have become indoctrinated were it not for the and ignorant quality of the men who are employed in

brought .

done

to the floor, only by indoctrination

be brought to believe

in the prison hole for

for

me

a guard knocks

self-inflicted.

this

prisons.

A

prisoner

resist,

is

taught that what

never contradict.

and accept

pigs

making

I

is

prisoner

guilt for things

have had guards

I

A

required of is

him

to never

is

taught to plead with the

he never

did.

have never seen before report

me

for

and arguing with them. I have been taken before disciplinary committees of guards for things I have never done, things they all knew I never did. And I have been threats

ordered to the hole for things they knew

My prison record has in

it

I

never did.

more violence reported by guards

than that of any of the 25,000 federal prisoners behind bars today,

and

I

am

not guilty of nine-tenths of the charges. Yet

at all I can do about it. were beaten to death tomorrow, my record would go before the coroner's jury before anyone who had the power to investigate and my "past record of violence" would vindi-

there If

is

nothing

I

—

—

cate

my

murderers. In fact, the prison regime can

atrocity against

me, and

my

The government shows court on a

civil suit

will acquit

that record to judges

against the prison or

on

commit any them. if

I

get into

a petition for writ

—

a

man

relishes any opportunity to prejudice himself against

pris-

of habeas corpus. It

who

"record"

is

designed to prejudice the judge

oners. .

.

.Responsibility?

I

am

not responsible for what the govern-

17

State-Raised Convict

ment

—

system of

its

justice, its prisons

—has done

to

me.

I

did

not do this to myself.

This

Why?

not easy to say;

is

Because

it is

not an easy point of view to hold.

has cost me, so

it

imprisonment. This

I

hold

is

far,

almost two decades of

the greater responsibility:

I

did

not do this to myself.

do not share

I

in

the sins of this guilty country;

together"!

"all in this

Who

we

are not

America today would dare take I and countless

in

the responsibility for himself and others that

other prisoners like

know you

me

have taken?

mean enough to think I'm trying to my own "corrupt self." Indeed I am not. I have only tried to indicate the opposite: that I demand responsibility for myself. And in so doing, I have come to .

.1

.

aren't

shift the responsibility for

understand the reasons for

it all.

I

myself can handle

it

quite

well. I

do not have the confidence of

wish to better myself

is

a sleepwalker,

and

so

my

in a spiritual sense a very conscious

wish.

The lives

Existentialists say they take

and the world upon

all

responsibility for their

their shoulders.

Who can

fault that?

at how "cruel" it is! (This is very funny And then, when the "chips are down" (Sartre's expression), Sartre, who has never gambled but is

The world

is

amazed

to think about!) favorite

enamored

of the terminology of a kind of daring that doesn't

involve getting his ass skinned, "martyrs" himself.

same kind

It is

the

anyone takes upon himself by submitting to your bad opinion of him by hanging his head and agreeing with all the accusations and then, when he has done of responsibility

—

that, forlornly tells

price of tea

cause he

To

is

you he

went up,

is

sorry

etc., etc.

truly at fault

and

is

it

He

rained

last night, sorry

the

won't defend himself, be-

too pathetic to be punished.

say you are not responsible for the

life

of

someone you

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

18

killed in self-defense,

not responsible for the circumstances

that brought you to prison (and kept you there for two decades)

—

to say

that in the face of your accusers, accusers

all

justify their

really responsible for

you

reject the accusations,

.

It is

be

—and nothing

for

for.

exercise the ability to think. I'm at age ten

also

to

you are held responsible further

only lately discovered that at age thirty

.I've

is

your words and deeds. Because every time

things you are not responsible

.

who

mistreatment of you by those accusations,

more

could stop

restless

me

I

began to

now than

I

was

then.

funny that some of us must not only get our bearings

but must also know

all

the details of the world before

we

Only now do I feel I know enough to live, but it is not funny that what I have learned may demand that I throw that life away from me. venture out into

.

.

I

it.

once served

Security,

and

anyone but

When

I

five

and

a half years in a cell in

for a period of over

two years

I

Maximum

did not speak to

my sister when she came to visit me twice a month. entered Maximum Security, was about five feet, I

nine inches

tall.

I

When

did not have a beard and did not

know

basic

emerged I could not walk without collapsing; I had a full beard and was six feet tall. I had a rudimentary understanding of mathematical theory and symbolic logic and had studied in all the theoretical sciences. I had read all but a very few of the world's classics, from prehistoric times up to this day. My vision was perfect when I was locked up; when arithmetic.

I

got out,

my

I

vision required glasses.

My

good fortune resided in the fact that at that prison, a prisoner was allowed to receive books directly from a bookstore so long as those books were not pornographic in any way. {Playboy magazine was punishable contraband in prison then.) Over the years, my sister had books sent to me from a single

—

bookstore, and the people

who owned it searched out titles they

19

State-Raised Convict

did not have in stock, free of extra charge, to send to me.

That

is

my

where

education began.

has not ended to this

It

day.

.

.

I

.There are not

many books

of philosophical importance

have not read. But knowledge comes from experience, and

books only help understand experience.

my

thorities: in

It

has been not only

personal observation but the experience of

the most dangerous prisoners

the "physical" sense

—

—and and

are "readers

In Maximum Security, my books and my balls and

I

I

prison au-

all

mean

that also

writers."

served years barefooted, with only

punishment set of white standard (five sizes too large) coveralls. Novels and dictionaries. And then philosophy, until it came out of my eyes and ears and finally, on occasion, my mouth: nine-tenths of my vocabulary I have never heard spoken. I remember the words "college" and "rhetoric." Small incidents of embarrassment when I discovered I had been pronouncing them wrong all my life. The word "guru" also and "a priori." I fell into all the sciences at one time or another so naive in my grasp that I grasped a

—

—

things only

—

someone

Bohr had. With me,

like

I

cannot learn

practical things until I've studied the subject in the purest

theoretical form.

I

about calculus until

on the

subject.

physics

is

I

studied Hertz and

A child's

—

of

all

I

first

people

things

— Hegel

primer would mystify me. Theoretical

simple to me, but applied physics leaves

with a gross feeling. Russell,

did not really understand the

me

can understand symbolic logic

Whitehead, Carnap, Quine,

etc.

—

stunned

— Frege,

—better then

school-

boy arithmetic. It all found expression and came together in the most elegant sense in the findings of Marx. And that is

—

which the world you and I live in conceals from us. It took great effort and imagination on my part to seek out and obtain truly great advancements in our

a world of science

and

culture that the world suppress.

literature

we

live in in

the

West

tries so

hard to

Having contacted that world and communicated

a degree, to that

degree

I

have become

free.

to

IN

20

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Books are dangerous where there time for

injustice.

is

been suband prejudice and the worst forms of discrimination because of the title of books I read. (Even a book with the word Plato on the cover can get you in trouble.) I've served

just requesting books. I've

jected to frame-ups

No

federal penitentiary (and there are only six top-level

peniteniaries; the rest are ordinary prisons) has a prison library.

The

we "misuse" our knowledge

authorities say

allowed to

if

educate ourselves according to our natural impulses. They say

we

make bombs, guns, from the information they impart. They say

use the Britannica encyclopedias to

acids, etc., etc.,

Marx

to us about our condition

lies

and makes us immoral and

craven and desperate.

That so

i.e.,

on the

why

is

we

they

now have "education programs"

learn only

what they want

fact that I've never

been

in prison,

us to learn. I pride myself

school

in a prison

You stumbled across the biggest sore-spot in the prison system when you asked why books are such touchy subjects to prison regimes. You have a problem understanding this be-

New

cause you are free and living in

men know enamored sue

it

of, or

—they

are

on the road to

deterioration you can imagine.

not unlike a taste of heroin "taste" that addicts you

all

for your

if

they ever

even curious about, a single idea rebellion.

lion" the bloodiest violence, the

They go

York. But oppressed

the value of books, because

mind

—

A

—

a

you'd

in prison

I

become

—and

mean by

pur-

"rebel-

most ruthless murder and taste of freedom in prison is taste that obsesses you:

kill

for

today

it

a

in a literal sense.

—where

before,

it

was

The stakes are much, much greater The most dangerous convicts in American prison hisare behind bars today. They kill quicker, more efficiently,

physical suffering.

today. tory

are

more

way.

I

liable to die for beliefs

— more

sophisticated in every

think you keep thinking of prison in terms of a mili-

tary barracks.

more with

There

is

no comparison.

It

compares much

a gladiator prison ("school") in ancient

ing the suppression of slaves and Christians.

We

Rome

dur-

are naturally

pitted against each other by degrees of stoicism (a kind of "class" system) through prison manipulation.

— State-Raised Convict

21

The books we have we hold almost by literally.

force of arms

We have no legal rights as prisoners,

only as citizens.

The only "rights" we have are those left to their "discretion." So we assert our rights the only way we can. It is a compromise, and in the end I greatly fear we as prisoners will lose but the

—

be

loss will

society's loss.

We are only a few steps removed from

comes you. Yes, it is frightening, but more frightening to me is the plain fact that society has dropped its guard and placed too much society. After us,

government.

trust in

That

is

why

write you. Because

I

am

I

very concerned about

these matters.

.

continue striving to learn to write. But

will

.1

.

swim on

learning to difficult for

me

It is as if

it.

land.

to take

I

were

it

I'll

much

learn as

as

I

it

is

like

can. It

is

seriously or to feel comfortable about

an audience listening to

sitting in

fine

gentlemen and scholars deliver speeches and discourses on

Then one

things of reverence to me.

of

them suddenly

across the numberless audience directly at

your turn, Jack.

Come up

me and

looks

says: "It's

here and say something."

—

imagine my embarrassment and my two emotions that create a kind of mixed confusion I do not know the word for. Gratitude is close. As I said, I'll try. isn't difficult to

It

delight:

.

to

.

Jam not an intellectual

me I

because

told

you long ago that

I

know no

even you (but you have come the a pathetic fact), has ever

better man.

what I

at

my thoughts are primarily

a predicate to action.

I

all. I

one.

I

am

you

at the

No

and that

held out a hand to help

doing

my

have to work with, which

told

to you.

No

other way.

closest,

beginning

I

is

best on

one, not

in itself

me

to

my own and

be

is

a

with

meager.

was, you might say, not likable

never tried to prettify anything.

I

never tried to appeal

IN

22 I've never

to you.

ence of

kept a diary, but the closest

My life

like that.

I

not a "saga" and

is

do not

life

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

pressed an interest in to the fullest of I

my

it. I

came was my

resent your using the term

meant

But to

accommodate

that interest

abilities.

never preached to you, nor tried to convert you.

would not allow futility of

debate

that. Besides, in

letters

I am caught in an expericommon dissertation. You ex-

feel "heroic."

not the subject of

I

I

I

such matters.

My respect

know more than most

the

VARIETIES

OF PUNISHMENT

A

ll torture aims at taking things out of you by

No

one has the

Abbott. Not I

my

force.

Abbott away from Jack what is being done to me. my needs and desires. And

right to take Jack soul.

Yet that

have become a stranger to

is

without meaning to sound conceited or to brag,

I

can hon-

I cannot imagine anyone with more moral stamina, more psychological endurance and more will power than I myself have. I have measured these things and I know. I

estly say

have seen ally,

seen

render

to the routine of prison, and I have much, much longer than others. So it is not am "weak" in those areas, but rather it demonstrates

resisted

that

I

men around me through the years fall apart morthem go mad in subtle ways and seen them sur-

their it

will

all

the immensity of the power, the greatness of the forces that are brought to bear to

change men, even though no

one (not the wardens or the pigs or the government) can control that power, that force, in such a

way

as to

change

a

IN

24

man

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

become what we consider a fair Man," i.e., the good citizen.

to

version

of

"Rehabilitated

.

.

.A great

number

to twenty years have

coming

of practices in prisons these last fifteen

been

legally abolished as cruel

to these "civilized times"

and unbe-

alleged that

is

it

we

live

in.

Some of us who have

prisoners

—not many; there only — product are

never been free

left

a

few of us

of prison condi-

are a

tions that are today recognized as "unconstitutional," indeed,

criminal.

What

we supposed

are

The same

us.

prisons.

pigs

Do they

This

is

—

or their stripe

"like"

wants ever to see

No

to do?

me

one has yet apologized to

—

preside over these

still

me? You would think

so;

none of them

free again.

part of the indoctrination.

am

I

supposed to be glad

they abolished methodical torture instruments in prison! Glad they "abolished" horsewhipping, corporeal punishment,

star-

vation.

But even

me?

I

if I

did feel "appreciation," what good would

it

do

have long ago been taken light-years away from any

ameliorating effect which punishment that aims at rehabilitation can possibly achieve.

It is called affirmative action. It is

to develop programs tices suffered I

can

easily

government is

and

policies

by minorities

in

will

I

a

at correcting past injus-

understand the justice of

illegal

been given

aimed

our society.

not apply

it

to

completely understood that

which are

applied by the government

men I

this doctrine

like

—but the

me, even though

and have never once from that time

chance to walk

free

it

survived prison conditions

from

to this

prison.

have gained a reputation among prison authorities that

extends from the time those

illegal

conditions existed, that

Varieties of

25

Punishment

stretches to this very day unbroken.

simply resisted those

I

conditions that today are "officially" abolished time, the law was not

.

.

.My

on

my

side.

me I

than anything else

suffered

prison.

I

in

my

at the

today.

knew any form

spiritual effect

childhood. for years

when

of suffering

more

from claustrophobia

never

it is

acquaintance with punitive long-term solitary

first

confinement had a more adverse and profound

on

—but

Any more than

I

first

went

horrible in

to

my

life.

The

air in

your

cell vanishes.

You

are smothering.

Your eyes

bulge out; you clutch at your throat; you scream like a banshee.

Your arms

flail

the

air in

your

You

cell.

reel

about the

cell,

falling.

Then you

The walls press you from all directions with an invisible force. You struggle to push it back. The oxygen makes you giddy with anxiety. You become hollow and empty. There is a vacuum in the pit of your stomach. You suffer cramps.

retch.

You are dying. Dying a hard death. One that lingers and

toys

with you.

The faces of The gate slides

guards, angry, are at the gate of your

The guards come into your

open.

that, the guards

attack you.

On

cell.

top of

all

and beat you to the

cell

floor.

Your mattress is thrown out. Your bedsheets are doubled. One end is run through a hole under the steel bunk that hangs from your cell wall. The other end is pulled through a hole at the opposite end of your bunk. Your ankles are handcuffed and so are your hands. The sheet runs through them and you are left hanging from a spit by your feet and your hands. Your back is suspended several inches above the

floor.

You

are smothering.

You

are being crushed to

death.

They

leave you like that

That

is

all

night.

how, over and over again,

I

was "cured" of the

IN

26

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

malady called claustrophobia.

took at least three or four

It

years.

I

was twenty or twenty-one years old when

the prison to an old county tried for killing I

jail

where

I

I

was taken from

was to be booked and

another prisoner in combat.

tried to escape

from the

jail.

The jailers reopened a cell that

had not been used in twenty-five years and placed me in it under prison discipline a starvation diet of a bowl of broth and a hard biscuit once a day. It was a blackout cell. I was given

—

mat and the door was closed on me. There sink-and-toilet combined in the corner, and other

a canvas sleeping

was an iron

than that, there was nothing except about two inches of dust on the floor. It was in total darkness. Not a crack of light entered that cell anywhere and I searched, in the days that followed, for such a crack along every inch of the door and the walls. The darkness was so absolute it was like being in ink.

—

There was an ingenious apparatus on the door. It was cylinand was hand-operated from outside the cell. The jailer would place the bowl and the biscuit on a platform in the cylindrical apparatus. Then he would bang the door twice with his keys and I could hear the mechanism creak. I would crawl to the door, feeling my way up to the apparatus. When my hands came into contact with the food, I would carefully take it out and consume it. Then I would return the bowl to the platform in the apparatus and he would revolve it so that it drical

returned to him outside the door.

was fed without a glimmer of light. Darkness muffles sound. The only sound I ever heard outside of my own movements and mutterings was the bang of the In this entire process,

I

—

—

keys and the creaking of the apparatus once a day.

The

only light

was before

When It is

saw was when

I

closed

my

eyes.

Then

there

me a vivid burst of brilliance, of color, like fireworks. my eyes it would vanish.

opened one thing I

I

to volunteer for an experiment

and intention-

consent to be plunged into darkness

ally

thing for

to

it

be forced on you,

My eyes hungered

if

from

me when

on

another

in light, in

showers of white

a fountain.

stirred in the cell, dust rose to

I

Insects crawled

is

be taken from you.

way someone's dry They became so sensitive if I

for saliva.

touched them; they exploded

Whenever

like this. It

for light to

for light, for color, the

mouth may hunger sparks shooting as

27

Punishment

Varieties of

I

my

was lying down and

nostrils.

became

I

a ball of tension. I

counted twenty-three days by the meals. Then once

thirsty, it

and

my

in

felt

right

my way to the sink. hand. closed my

felt

I

eyes for a

I

shower of red and blue rained on me.

With my

night darkness. sink.

I

pressed

cup under

it

my

hand

judged

I

lips

and

it

tilted

it

I

Then

rose,

I

grasped

moment and

a

to mid-

the button on the

trickle of water.

full.

I

opened them

felt for

I

and could hear the

until

it

carefully to

left

the cup and

I

I

held

raised the

my cup

back to drink.

many insects run up my face, and into my hair. I flung down the cup and brought my hands to my face in an electric reaction and my eyes closed and the fireworks went off again. I heard someone screaming far away and it was me. I fell against the wall, and as if it were a catapult, was hurled across the cell to the opposite wall. Back and forth I reeled, from the felt

I

the legs, the bodies of

my

over

eyes

door to the walls, screaming. Insane.

When

I

regained consciousness,

been removed from the blackout

I

was

cell.

in a regular cell.

Every inch of

I

had

my body

filth and my hair was completely matted. do not think blackout cells are in use in many prisons and

was black with I

today

jails

.

.

.

.

.

.They are

still

in use

today and they are not used for

"medical reasons." They are used for punishment. They are called strip-cells

times

and

—sometimes

There

is

no

for

I

have been thrown in strip-cells many months on end. This is prison justice.

facility for

running water

in

such a

cell.

The

— IN

28

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

minds that design these punishment cells chill me when I consider them. The idea behind this one is that a prisoner in a strip-cell must "request" water from a guard. I don't think it would tax your imagination to see that a prisoner diabolic

is

reduced to begging for water. It is a big square concrete box.

The

cell

has nothing on the

walls except for a single solid-steel door at the entrance. ceiling

is

The

vaulted about fifteen feet above the floor and there

lit, day and night. no way to discern the days in the cell except by counting the times you are served your food through a slot in the door. How do you connect this with what you have done to be placed there? The floor inclines from the walls inward to the center of the cell. It inclines gradually, like the bottom of a sink. A toilet bowl is more accurate. Then, in the center of the floor, there is a hole about two inches in diameter. It is flush with the concrete floor as flush as a hole on a golf course. At first its

is

a bare lightbulb that stays

In fact, there

is

—

purpose mystifies you. Stains of urine

and

fecal

matter radiate outward from the

The

hole to within a foot or so from the walls.

stench

is

ever-present.

There is no bed-rack or bunk. There is nothing but the smell of shit and piss, and the glare of the light out of reach which is never extinguished.

—

The

light

is

present even

trates the eyelids

when you

and enters your

white glow, so that you cannot in

close your eyes. It pene-

visual sensations in a grayish-

rest

your eyes.

It

throbs always

your mind. Usually you are given nothing to wear but a pair of under-

shorts,

and

if

you are lucky, you

will receive a sleeping

mat and

a bedsheet.

At

first

you move gingerly about the

wastes of prisoners

time

in the first

against a wall floor

which

cell

because of the body

who preceded you. You spend much

of your

long days squatting with your back defensively

—squatting on the

radiates

from the

outskirts of the filth

hole. Staring into

it.

on the were

If it

29

Punishment

Varieties of

desolation you were facing as you stare off in your

cell, it

would

probably inspire you in some small way. Poets have sung songs of scenes of desolation.

But what faces you

is

a cesspool

world of murk and slime;

a subterranean world of things that squirm and slide through piss. There is the and nervous sweat of bodies foreign to yours, so closing your eyes gives no relief. If you are in that cell for weeks that add up to months, you do not ignore all this and live "with it"; you enter it and

noxious sewage, piles of shit and vomit and smell of

unwashed

become

a part of

I

is

feet

it.

never suffered from

enough moisture

thirst.

in the

No one there does,

really.

food to hold that back. But

There I

have

mouth that I could not swallow, I could not talk, for weeks. You "ask" for water like this: "Wa? Wa?" This is the strip-cell. Not only do these cells still exist in every state in this country, even the architects of modern prison facilities include them in new institutions. been so dry

in the

Any sane man may wonder: What grievous crime would a man have to commit to be thus treated? The answer: In prison, anything at all. Any indiscretion. A contraband book. A murder.

A

purloined sandwich. This does not even square with the

savage's conception of justice:

.

.

An

eye for an eye.

.There was once a form of prison discipline called the

starvation diet. just barely

You were thrown

enough

in

the hole and fed once a day

minimum nourishment to exist the way the average man

to give you the

exist: to exist in the hole,

not to

does.

This was

still

being done only ten years ago.

gave you bread and water once a day

—

calculated by that strange brand of physicians

only as technicians of pain was ten days of off for at least

Some places maximum

but the

this.

I

can think of

Then you came

twenty-four hours of regular three meals served

you over that twenty-four-hour period. Then you were placed back on another ten-day stint of starvation

—

that

is, if

you had

IN

30

misbehaved

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

in the hole.

Otherwise, after ten days you were

let

out of the hole. All told,

I

served, in three years, the

starvation diet

That was when

I

sum

of one year on the

entered prison as a child

first

of eighteen.

The

longest stretch

I

ever pulled was about seventy consecu-

tive days.

At

maximum you

this prison, the

could obtain in a sentence

to the hole under starvation conditions

was twenty-nine

Usually the sentence never exceeded fourteen days

—

days.

or

two

weeks. That was for an average misdemeanor, a minor infraction of rules. I

my

went there once face.

My

for spitting

was taken there under tain's

back

at a pig

a twenty-nine-day sanction

spit in I

by the cap-

committee.

State custom permitted us these items

under starvation conditions 1)

who had

sentences were always the most severe, and so

in

when we were

living

No

other

the hole:

one Christian Bible or one Book of Mormon.

reading matter or religious matter allowed; 2)

one

set of

white coveralls

(the gun-tower guards

made

had orders

of white canvas material

to shoot

the yard in this disciplinary garb;

it

anyone they saw on

identified

you the way a

shaved head identified kids at the Industrial School for Boys

who were

rebellious);

3) one sleeping mat and a bedsheet. Nothing more. You could receive neither your mail nor any visits. This included legal mail from the courts as well as mail from your lawyer no lawyer could even visit you during this period of discipline. When your time was over, you were handed your back mail in a heap. I had been there for about two weeks, and one evening, just as the guard was exiting after making his rounds to count us, someone shouted: 'Tuck you!" The pig called down the range: "Okay, Abbott! That's another report!" Then he left. The inmate volunteered to confess he did it to save me from

—

Punishment

Varieties of

31

more time on starvation. In those days prisoners backed each and an injury to one was an injury to us all. I cited this code and told him I had to ride it out. other,

The

next day the guards escorted

me

to the captain's disci-

committee and I was sentenced nine-day stint, to be served after the one plinary

to another twentyI

was then halfway

through.

A little later on, it

I

my Bible in the toilet and wrapped from my bedsheet to form a hefty

soaked

tightly with strips of cloth

bludgeon. This was done because the day before, rousted by pigs

who pretended

When

beaten up in the process. day,

I

lured

making

him up

I

they were searching the guard

to the bars of

my

cell

had been

my cell and

came by the next hit him with it,

and

a gash across his forehead.

When

I

was taken before the captain's committee,

I

was

given another twenty-nine-day stint back-to-back with the

other two sanctions.

He

passed the

me and and bounced it

written on across the table to it

carefully into a ball

slip of I

paper the order was

picked

it

wadded

up,

off his chest.

was given yet another twenty-nine-day sanction. That

I

made

four of

After

my

them

first

had stint was I

meals (twenty-four hours).

to

do

over, I

—roughly I

was not taken

total of six

months.

It

off for three

caused a ruckus and received an-

other twenty-nine-day sanction and then,

A

four months.

finally,

another.

was, in fact, the death penalty.

I

was going to die if I remained on the starvation diet that long for sure. Every prisoner and guard knew this. The inmate who shouted 'Tuck you" to the pig was out of the hole and on the yard, but

he went to the captain and told him

shouted the obscenity at the guard and not save me. .

.

It

I,

it

was he who

in

an effort to

did no good.

.Have you ever experienced forced starvation?

even close to a diet or a

fast.

Those things

It is

not

are voluntarily

entertained.

When

the gate slides closed behind you in that

cell in

which

you are going to be subjected to methodical starvation, you face the fact that you have to survive the worst periods of

it

—the

last

days before

make down

You have

to preserve yourself, so you you must keep every motion you necessary minimum. You do the sanction lying

it is

cannot pace your in

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

32

to a

over.

cell; in fact,

your bunk.

Most

convicts, then,

when they entered

conditions, always gave their

first

these starvation

man who

once-a-day to the

had been there the longest and needed it more. Likewise, his last day he gives his once-a-day to the one who needed it more. The greater need was calculated by days and was mechanical. You suffer psychologically at first, That is why overweight men complained more. But when it gets down to physical survival, the suffering

learned a

I

protein.

Mash

and swallow it

it

real.

secret in this period.

little

years old passed

is

it

the day's catch like a big pill.

all I

convict over sixty

feels strange to

a source of

together in a piece of bread

went beyond

was over, included every bug

weird glow and

A

on to me: cockroaches are

and before

this,

could catch.

I

gives you a

It

your metabolism

when you

begin to starve.

You may have one bowel movement but never more then two under starvation conditions. Your stomach shrinks up into a tight ball. This is what causes hunger pangs. When it has shrunken completely, the hunger pangs are no more. You are no longer hungry, although the rest of your body begins to take over the pain and extend it. Your limbs express hunger when your muscle tissue begins to dissolve.

The need

to feel.

becomes

to eat

It is a

a

strange kind of pain

need to devour,

like

an

animal. If

you bloat yourself on water, you only prolong the pain

your stomach and

it

in

the other expressions of

will multiply

suffering starvation. I

once caught myself considering the arm of a

became

excited the way,

I

guess, a carnivorous beast

excited to see his dinner on the hoof.

It

was

as

if I

pig, and becomes

could smell

his blood. I

had completed

strike.

The

sixty days

when

pigs filled the hole to

there was an inmate work

maximum

capacity with

Punishment

Varieties of

strikers.

33

was no longer suffering stomach hunger pangs and

I

my muscles were all but dissolved by then. had again not been given my twenty-four-hour respite. recall just quit consuming my once-a-day and gave it to I

I

I

and even threw it out it from me. I had entered indifference, almost euphoria. Yet, they say I roamed the strikers in solidarity.

my

of

the

cell

when they

I

Looking,

floor, picking.

saw the gate to

is

one day

I

had heard shouting and

I

on

insisted

I

imagine, for

my cell open

I

found

all

this

my

in a

scuffling vaguely

out

bugs. All

I

recall

slow drowsy haze. all

The

that day.

demand my

prisoners tried to take a hostage to starvation.

it

refused to accept

release

from

later.

make out the few

blurred faces bobbing toward me as I lay in my bunk. One of them carried me in his arms to the infirmary. I have flashes of memory of being carried up the main corridor. About a week later I awoke in a hospital cell with a tube

could barely

I

down my

nasal passage to

my

stomach and there was

of clear liquid suspended upside

my

that ran into

When

down with

a bottle

a tube attached

arm.

they couldn't handle you in segregation or the Grade

—and you had be way-out on the C Cellhouse the death row — the death one was with "C-300." cube was the "gas tank" —where you were (Maximum

Security confinement)

—you were thrown

to

third floor of

in a special cell

old

office of

(in

cell called

of boiler-plate steel

a

It

row):

a

solid-steel door. It

tear-

gassed and there was no ventilation. There, they once did not feed I

me

for a week.

was kept chained to the

"Normally," I

They gave me only

I

a glass of water a day.

floor for periods of

was unchained. Once

I

one

to

two weeks.

was kept there

a year.

did a six-month stretch there another time. I

was

in that cell the

day

J.

F.

Kennedy was

(death row was cheering; they had heard I

was there the day

to spit in

my

face

a pig with a

when

wooden

it

assassinated

on the news).

leg (a pig

who

used

the outer steel door was opened)

IN

34

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

opened the outer door and declared: "Your mother died last night!" and then he slammed the door in my face. This is

—

how

learned of her death.

I

No

one has ever done the time I did in C-300. Nor has anyone served as long as five years from January 1966 to March 1971 in Maximum Security as I have. I had to escape

—

—

to get out.

.

am on

.1

.

meal.

the Grade.

my

on the back wall of

You

son-of-a-bitch!" It

going to die!" There

my

pacing

cell after

the evening

cell. It is is

saying "I'm gonna

a string of obscenities.

is

kill

you!

You

saying "Jack! Jack Abbott!

No one can

are

hear

except me.

this I

am

I

hear a voice whispering loudly through the ventilator

I

go to the vent

for a

moment,

quick rage:

in

I'm thinking

it is

"Who

"Fuck you!

then:

It's

the prisoner in the

There

it!?"

is

me, Abbott! cell

on the

He comes

to his vent.

He

me

tells

me!"

It's

tier

mine, on the other side of the plumbing pipe-run.

by name.

silence

is

opposite call

I

him

he doesn't know

what I'm talking about. He withdraws.

The

voice returns.

ventilator. I

I

shout at

and obscenities.

No by,

He

will

I

shout that I'm going to get

I

other prisoner heard him.

me.

to

peer carefully through a crack in the

I

hand move. It is a pig. him and he whispers loudly back

see a

throw

He comes The

My fight;

make

has to

by

a

his

I

tell

—

me threats even. He leaves. to

them what the

rounds to count.

When

pig did

he comes

cup of water on him.

—grinning

evilly at

me.

I

douse him.

trap slams closed. cell

door

slides

they leave.

open. Guards pour onto the

They had been waiting

for

me

to

tier.

We

throw the

water.

The

next day

I

am

taken before the captain's committee and

given a twenty-nine-day sentence to the hole on starvation diet. I

tell

calling

the captain the pig had been threatening

me names

through

my

ventilator.

me and

Punishment

Varieties of

A

me

psychiatrist sees

lucinating.

I

am

35

He

in the hole.

grams of Thorazine three times a day. At that time I was barely nineteen years the

first

am

I

old.

I

hal-

milli-

was one of

prisoners in this country subjected to drug therapy in

Now

prison.

me

tells

placed on injections of two hundred

it is

common.

I could fight no more. (Five or six and wrestled me to the floor three times a day and injected Thorazine into me.) I suffered severe physical side effects. At that time, there was not much known about I

fought every time, until

guards entered the

cell

the side effect called the "Parkinson's reaction. "

doctor thought

This gave

.

.

I

me my

.This letter

prison. It

is

The

prison

was feigning. first

psychiatric record.

about the

is

have

instability "crazies"

how we who

about

suffer

from

in

this prison-cul-

tivated disease are dealt with.

X

told

me

he once saw Gilmore

transfixed, frozen

nerve-endings of his central nervous system. die any

more from

happen.

You do not

on the always

crucifixion; the authorities try not to let that

I've myself

hundred times and more drugs that are for some sinister reason

been crucified

by those institutional

a

called "tranquilizers."

They

are phenothiazine drugs,

and include

Mellaril,

Thora-

zine, Stelazine, Haldol.

Prolixin

is

the worst I've ever experienced.

One

injection

two weeks. Every two weeks you receive an injection. These drugs, in this family, do not calm or sedate the nerves. They attack. They attack from so deep inside you, you cannot lasts for

locate the source of the pain.

upon

The

drugs turn your nerves in

yourself. Against your will, your resistance, your resolve

are directed at your

own

tissues,

your

own

muscles, reflexes, etc.

These drugs are designed

to render you so totally involved with

yourself physically that

you can do

all

is

concentrate your entire

being on holding yourself together. (Tying your shoes, for example.)

You cannot

cease trembling.

IN

36

From tion"

—

all

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

of these drugs you can get the

"

Parkinson's reac-

a physical reaction identical to Parkinson's disease.

The

muscles of your jawbone go berserk, so that you bite the inside

mouth and your jaw

of your

and the pain

locks

throbs.

For

hours every day this will occur. Your spinal column stiffens so

move your head

that you can hardly

or your neck

and some-

bow and you cannot

times your back bends backward like a stand up.

The

pain grinds into your

fiber;

cannot read. You ache with have to walk, to pace.

And in

is

then as soon as you

opposite occurs to you: you must

up and down you go

your vision

so blurred you

restlessness, so that

sit

and

rest

you

feel

start pacing,

Back and

you the

forth,

pain you cannot locate; in such

wretched anxiety you are overwhelmed, because you cannot get relief

even

in breathing.

inside you to the point

Sometimes a groan or whimper rises comes out involuntarily and people

it

look at you curiously, so you suppress the noise as

belch

—

sound that

this

You can see it. arms as we walk

We are us;

we

is

wrung out

if it

were a

of your soul.

We walk stiff-backed and we don't swing our .

.

.

not crazy, so

are dangerous.

why do

We

fear

they do

it?

Because they fear

nothing they can do to

us,

not

even the drugs, the crucifixion.

No doubt there are those who need these drugs; do not get me wrong. do not pretend to be a doctor. Those who need I

who are

the drugs,

know

this,

It is like

by

it.

ill,

it

it

the way

for

this to a

man who

medical reasons and

It is painful, a

it

is

we do. They

little trick.

electroshock treatment: there are those

But administer

require

do not experience

the prison regime knows this

who benefit

healthy and does not

becomes

a

nightmare. Fifteen years ago

form of it

torture.

was used to

punish prisoners.

When

the captain and the pigs cannot discipline you, can-

not intimidate and therefore hurt and punish you, control you,

you are handed over to a "psychiatrist,"

who

doesn't even look

at you and who orders you placed on one of these drugs. You see, there is something wrong with your mind if you defy the

37

Punishment

Varieties of

worst "official" punishment a prison regime can legally dish up.

That

their logic.

is

me

this cycle over and over Over and over. A pig pushes me, I instinctively push back, sometimes slug him. That starts it. Eventually I end up stammering like an idiot and staggering about usually for six months to a year at a time on the drugs, until finally I'm taken off the drugs and turned loose with the "normal" prisoners in the main prison population. I

For years they have put

through

again: captain-doctor-broken-rule.

—

—

go along there until the next "incident" that leads to "discipline,"

and once more the cycle begins,

like a

my

crazy

carousel, a big "merry-go-round."

They know what they are doing, even if they never admit They will not even admit it to me. No one expects me to become a better man in prison. So why not say it: The purpose is to ruin me, ruin me completely. The purpose is to it

to anyone.

mark me,

to

my

stamp across

face the

mark

of this beast they

call prison. .

write with

I

.

my

blood because

I

have nothing

because these things are excessively painful to

else

recall. It

—and drains

me. .

.There

.

believe that.

is

a saying:

The

once or twice and

The

cut

first it is

is

first

cut

the deepest

is

You can spit in You can take something away

nothing.

nothing.

Do not my face

me and I can learn to live without it. But you cannot spit in my face every day for ten thousand days; you cannot take all that belongs to me, one thing at a that belongs to

time, until you have gotten voice,

my

hands,

my

heart.

down to reaching for my eyes, my You cannot do this and say it is

nothing. I

have been made oversensitive

made

to suffer sensations

have been chopped to pieces by tions;

and by drugs

lies

have had

my mind

I

flesh

has been

never had before.

I

a life of deprivation of sensa-

am now a piece of meat and that attack my nervous system.

by beatings so frequent

bone; by

— my very

and longings

I

I

turned into steel by the endless smelter of

time in confinement.

IN

38

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

have been twisted by

I

twisted by love

Once

I

.

.

justice the

way other men can be

.

was taken from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to

the Butner, North Carolina, Federal Correctional Institution for psychological

experimentation

—the

result of

being

falsely

accused of involvement in an almost-fatal knife assault on a prison guard.

At Butner,

I

was told almost immediately upon

unnamed informer among

that an that

I

my

arrival

the inmates had reported

was planning to escape.

I

was taken by about twenty guards and other employees into

a special psychological observation cell.

Butner was built from

the ground up with architectural concepts almost futuristic in design.

It is

extremely modern and could easily be a set for a

space-age movie.

The

psychological observation cell

designed glass

like a fish

tank (an aquarium)

was unbreakable.

human

was taken into was

I

—

except, of course, the

impossible to see or hear another

It is

being, or to be seen or heard by anyone but the prison

staff.

The a

floor

was concrete and

round grating over

One

it,

such as

on iron

steel slab sat

in the center in a

shower

was a drain, with stall.

legs bolted to the floor.

the "bed," and there was nothing else in the a rubber

mat on

it

cell.

This was

There was

about an inch thick.

I was forced to lie on the steel slab. Each of my ankles was chained to a corner of the bed-structure, and my wrists were chained over my head to the other two I

was stripped nude.

corners, so

was chained down

I

in a

complete spread-eagle

position.

There were

Army

a

few females on the

personnel). This was in 1976

In order to urinate

would hang

I

had

to twist

staff

(most were also U.S.

—the my

latter part.

torso so that

my

in a general direction over the side of the

penis

bed-

J

— Varieties of

structure,

drain

I

and the urine would

cross the floor

and go down the

described above.

was hand-fed

I

39

Punishment

each meal.

at

The day after I was chained down,

several guards entered the

and beat me with their fists all over my face, chest and stomach. I was choked manually and brought to the point almost of strangulation, and then they would remove their hands. My throat was blue with bruises caused this way. I was chained now I mean iron chains, not "leather recell

—

straints"

—

—

in this

manner

for ten days,

and

I

was attacked three

times in this period. Finally the "medical technician" observed that the nerves in

my

—the

and elbows. So about twenty guards came again. They unchained me and dressed me in nylon coveralls. As I was dressing I glanced in the window at my reflection and my face was black and both eyes swollen. I was covered with bruises. They put me in handcuffs and leg-irons and took me to the regular segregation section. There only one of my hands was kept chained to the iron crossbar at the head of the bed. I could stand. It was at that time that I began writing you, in the hole, with one hand chained to my bed. I was kept chained by one hand until I was rushed to the federal medical center in Missouri. My gall bladder was removed. I had gallstones, but the beatings had agitated the condition, and I learned that the tissue of my gall bladder had broken due to the jolts of the stones pressed against the organ.

.

arms were dying

.

areas

between

wrists

.The guards form a loose gauntlet from your

shower

stall.

You must

cell to

the

cross the floor, a distance of about thirty

every

They look at you as if you are not there, but are alert move you make. They register your facial expression

see

you are anything but meek, humble. Anything

yards.

if

their hackles,

and

their

mouths turn down

they ball up their hands into

You

are nude.

The

floor

is

fists

to to

else raises

at the corners

and

at their sides.

wet from the prisoners before you

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

40

who

trailed

from the showers. There are

it

also spots of blood,

fresh.

You

stare at the floor.

drag your feet

when you

not too slowly. Your gait the

You must slump your shoulders and You must go slowly but must be timid. You must not slip on

—

take steps.

floor.

Fold your arms. Fold your arms behind your back. That the best way to assure

them you

are incapable of harm.

is

It is

one of the postures of the meekly insane. Try to make them laugh at you. Cringe; that should do

Do not

me you would

tell

be pounded to the

will

it.

not follow these instructions.

floor otherwise.

The

You

guards are hired

by the pound. They are Missouri rednecks from the Ozark regions. Alone with one or two, they are profoundly afraid of anyone. But

six

naked, can do.

or seven are afraid of nothing one prisoner, It

does not matter the least

dangerous the prisoner Everything

is

is.

Not

framed by a

into a vague fog.

Your mind

there

it

how

doesn't.

soft blur that radiates is

(or

a

outward

You

not working any longer.

have no questions, either for yourself or others. This

you are under the influence of

strong or

phenothiazene drug

is

because

—any one

combination) of ten or fifteen such drugs known by the

brand names. Mixed with terrorism,

They crasy. If testicles

all

it

equals living death.

accomplish the same, but each has

its little

idiosyn-

you have been on regular dosages of Mellaril, your if you can will not produce sperm. If you masturbate

somehow manage

— —you

to accomplish a fantasy erection

will

experience at orgasm every sensation of tension and ejaculation

you should experience, but with

this difference: absolutely

substance issues from the ejaculation

—no

fluid at

all, let

no

alone

semen. If

you do not know the cause of

you can

suffer

this, in

your drugged state

an anxiety, a terror not easy to describe.

It

feeds

your despair the fact that you have become sexually injured

somehow.

Do your

not

cell

tell

one of the two prison

door each morning.

who come by looms into view

psychiatrists

When

his face

Punishment

Varieties of

at the

window

man and

says

when he

of your door,

"How are you

this

41

smiles like a mechanical

morning?"

—

flee into yourself.

Smile cheerfully and blink your eyes when you say 'Tine, fine"

—

or he will double your dosage.

them,

can understand

I

They punish you

if

you bother

you report complications.

if

in prison

—only

how

in this

a man's mind can be turned to steel way can he be equal to the hardships

that surround him.

Ho

Uncle

wrote

this

poem

in prison:

Without the cold and desolation of winter There could not be the warmth and splendor of spring. Hardships have tempered and strengthened me,

And

turned

my mind

to steel

have never forgotten

I

this in

about thirteen or fourteen

years.

.When

I became poetic about a prisoner's mind turning meant to convey the idea of a will power "steeled" in trials and hardships so profound that the prisoner's mental resolution, his powers of "iron logic" have been enhanced and not weakened. An opposite effect of torture. I hardly meant the .

.

to steel,

I

own humanity. know how to live through anything they could

prisoner lost his I

up for me. I've been subjected been chained to the floor and

to strip-cells,

possibly dish

blackout

wall; I've lived

through the

beatings, of course; every drug science has invented to ify"

to

my behavior

me;

I

—

I

"mod-

have endured. Starvation was once natural

have no qualms about eating insects

my body

cells,

in

my cell or living

means survival. They've even armed in punishment cells with me to kill me, but I can control that. When they say "what doesn't destroy me makes me stronger," that is what they mean. But in

wastes

if it

psychopaths and put them

IN

42

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

a mistake to equate the results with being strong.

it's

extremely

flexible,

but I'm not strong. I'm weakened,

I'm

in fact.

I'm tenuous, shy, introspective, and suspicious of everyone. loud noise or a false in

me. But

very I

Vm

movement

not afraid

A

registers like a four-alarm fire

—and

that

is

strange, because

I

care

much about someday being set free and want to cry when I

think that Til never be free.

I've spent a lifetime with.

I

want

Someday

I

to cry for

will leave

my

brothers

them and never

return.

.

.

.And

after

it is all

done

to you, after you have

been robbed

completely of fear and nothing anyone can threaten you with

can constrain you

—what

point

is

served by keeping you in

prison? It is

no longer possible

to punish you.

ered unpunishable. Madness ing you in prison.

But

for

Or

is

old age.

some perverse reason

—

never been twisted into insanity. times

—have

in fact

I

I

do not know why

affair.

I

—

have come close to

entered insanity

was only an introductory I

You have been

rend-

the only possible point in keep-

—but

it

I

it

have

many

turns out that

it

always bounce back to sanity.

I can sense derangement most subtle expressions even in

have reached such a pass by now,

a long

men

way

off

—

I

can see

its

not considered insane.

were a pole of a magnet and insanity a like pole, this image would express the matter. I cannot be pulled by it, but If

I

I

know

it

by repulsion: by the force that repels

even conscious

it is

there.

me

before

I

am

THE HOLE: SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

TM

here

is

man

only one

in a cell in the hole for

it

to really

be "the hole." There are rows of cells on a tier, but in the hole the genuine hole no two prisoners are ever out of their cells

—

—

same time. There are always

at the

voices in the hole.

have seen wars take place take place in the hole.

I

in the hole.

have seen,

as a

It's I

a strange thing.

I

have seen sexual love

matter of

fact,

the most

impossible things happen under these conditions. Let us say a

kind of

movement

illustrate: to

that

is

not really

walk ten miles

in

movement

exists there.

To

an enclosed space of ten feet

is

not really movement. There are not ten miles of space, only time.

You do not go ten

words,

.

I

.

I

I

would have

miles.

To write about the hole, in other common places.

to explore such

have been dragged to the hole fighting back many times.

was once carried to the hole

in

Leavenworth by the security

H

IN

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

about

six feet

My

hands were cuffed behind me. A pig two inches who weighed about two hundred and

force (goon squad).

He was about forty-five, but he was had me face down on the concrete floor, punching and kicking me. It was exactly like a pack of dogs on me. The big one, the boss, ordered me to stand up. He motioned to the others to stand back and I swear to God, you won't believe this, he knocked my clothes off me with a few swipes of his hands. fifty

pounds was the

The

hard as a rock.

boss.

pigs

—

The

my

cloth tore

my

skin like knife cuts.

shoes (high tops) and knocked

All through this thing

and smiling.

I

I

tried to

keep

thought they were so

animals, which was true, but

the time they threw

me

I

them

hit the floor,

he

hit

my head by acting passive afraid of me it made them

couldn't calm them. That was

down

face

I

off (broke the laces).

in a

dungeon

cell.

They

me while one unhandcuffed me. The pig who knocked my clothes off was the last to leave the cell. heard them back out of the cell and rolled over onto my side. was stood on

I

I

I

hurting everywhere. Well, this pig,

emotional of them

who had seemed

the least

had his cock out and his face was wrinkled up in a grin and he kind of bounced up and down by bending his knees. He was pretending to jerk off. Then he zipped his fly and left the cell kind of chuckling.

.

.

.You

sit in

not merely your ety, others, the

all,

solitary

confinement stewing

in nothingness,

own nothingness but the nothingness of sociworld. The lethargy of months that add up to

years in a cell, alone, entwines itself about every "physical" activity of the living

body and

strangles

it

slowly to death, the

horrible decay of truly living death. You no longer do push-ups or other physical exercises in your small cell; you no longer pace the four steps back and forth across your cell. You no longer masturbate; you can call forth no vision of eroticism in any form, and your genitals, like the limbs of your body, function only to keep your body alive. Time descends in your cell like the lid of a coffin in which

The lie

and watch

neither

move nor

you

45

Hole: Solitary Confinement

as

it

it

When

slowly closes over you.

think in your

cell,

you are awash

you pure

in

nothingness.

confinement

Solitary

makeup

.

I

.My

.

in

prison can alter the ontological

of a stone.

years in solitary confinement altered

care to admit, even to myself. But

I

me more

than the

will try to relate

experience, because you're understanding, and what you do not

understand

only what you cannot because you have not

is

experienced the hole for years.

You

and that

listen

is all

that

counts. It is

me

hard for

to begin. Beginnings are like that for

me

now.

But something happens down there like It

cannot take place

know them. Not many all

they served

understand

half

is

know who have been

lying,

five years

why

They do not six or

I

their lives will tell

Everyone

hole.

time and space the way

in

we

ordinarily

prisoners have experienced this event.

most prisoners

fails:

on

the hole, something

in

an event, but this event can only occur over a span of years.

you they have served

and

I

It

never

in prison off five years in

and the

do not know why they must say

Why

in the hole.

five

years?

that particular duration occurs to

all

I

cannot

of them.

— nor even

1 '

say "I served four years or three years

seven years.

It is

always

five years.

dozen who have indeed served

I

do know perhaps a

five years or six years,

but

they are so few and so far between.

At any

rate, let

in a cell ten feet

six

and

return to the point. Let us say you are

long and seven feet wide. That means seventy

feet of floor space.

and

me

But your bunk

a half feet long.

Your

is

just

over three feet wide

iron toilet

and sink combina-

tion covers a floor space of at least three feet tallied,

on the

by two

feet. All

you have approximately forty-seven square feet of space floor.

It

works out to a pathway seven feet long and

IN

46

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

—

about three feet wide the excess is taken up by odd spaces between your commode and wall, between the foot of the bunk and the wall. If

were an animal housed

I

dimensions, the

Humane

arrested for cruelty.

in a

zoo in quarters of these

Society would have the zookeeper

It is illegal

to house an animal in such

confines.

But

am

I

not an animal, so

I

do not

insist

on such

rights.

My body communicates with the cell. We exchange temperand

atures walls.

I

I

try to

keep

it

clean, to

year or two, then let

first

and leavings on the floor and wash away my evidence, for the

smells

air currents,

it

go at

that.

have experienced everything possible to experience time

in a short

—

a

day or so

if

in a cell

I'm active, a week or two

if

I'm

sluggish. I

must

from that point on, the routine, the monotony

fight,

me

am

must do

and do it without losing my mind. So I read, read anything and everything. So I mutter to myself sometimes; sometimes recite that will bury

alive

if I

not careful.

I

that,

poetry. I

my

have

memories.

I

have the good ones, the bad ones, the

ones that are neither of these. So I

speeds, I

I

have myself.

my seven-by-three-feet pathway, and pace, at various depending on my mood. think. remember. think.

have

I

I

I

I

remember.

Memory it

with

it.

Finally

facts

arrested in the hole.

is

membered

thing, study

others,

and

it

under

it

I

think about each

in detail, over

headings

for

and

how

changes and begins to tear

joins

my

imagination.

Someone

over.

I

feel

I

itself

free

said being

is

re-

unite

about

from

mem-

ory. It travels

what ory

is

is,

the terrain of time in a pure way, unfettered by

reckless of

what was, what

will

become

not enriched by any further experience.

of

It is

it.

Mem-

deprived

memory, memory deprived of every movement but the isolated body traveling thousands of miles in the confines of

my

prison

cell.

— The

47

Hole: Solitary Confinement

My body plays with my mind; my mind plays with my body; the further

I

go into that terrain of time, into

my

memories,

—

more they enter my imagination. The imagination bringing this memory into that, and that into this, every posreplaces further exsible permutation and combination perience, which would, if not enhance it, at least leave it the

—

intact. I remember well, with such clarity, I am blinded by the memory. It is as if I had forgotten but it is that I remember

—

so well, too well:

Why am

Because I needed the money? Or was it on the counter? What was it a theft? Or was by the pond in the flowery dress who smiled at I here?

—

the palmprint that girl

it

me

.?

.

.

Where was

I?

Every memory has an element of pain or disappointment. scolds a

It

little

and

own

in its

way. These elements are nor-

mally overshadowed by a

familiarity

we

The

happily forget the

a quality

we can

live

rest.

we can there

rest:

is

with

live

no

rest

—but

with in comfort, a degree of quie-

tude.

In the hole after a while the painful elements begin to throw

out shoots and sprout like brittle weeds in the garden of ory

—

until finally, after so long, they

mem-

choke to death everything

else in the garden.

You flinty

are left with a wild wasteland of scrubby

stone and dusty

It is

soil.

They

call

it

weeds and

psyche-pain.

the same with ideals. Everyone has a few: a touch of

idealism, a

little

of passion.

As

life in

the hole, in the pure

terrain of time, continues, your passions are aroused less less

and

with the help of memories and more and more by your

ideals.

Love, Hate, Equality, Justice, Freedom, War, Peace,

Beauty, Truth

empty

—they

all

abstract gods that

obedience. Little Hitlers

eventually

become

Idols,

pure and

demand your fealty, your undying come from every precious feeling,

every innocent notion you ever entertained, every thought

about yourself, your people, the world

—

all

become

so

many

IN

48

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST each other, that stridently dictate to you

idols, oblivious to

in

the prison hole.

You cannot

them up with your days, your years, for they try God, how you try. The wasteland that is your memory now comes under the empty

are

fill

too.

—

But you

absolute dictatorship of idols too terrible to envision.

They

are the hard, driving winds that torture the tum-

bleweeds across the prairie desert of

memory

—the

crazy, hard

winds that whip up smaller chaotic columns of dust that twist a

few feet

in

the

air like little

tornadoes.

They are the scorching

suns that wither the scrubby vegetation and torture the

shimmers

in

waves of suffocating heat that

rises

air

that

from the dead,

hard stone. They are the cold, merciless nights of the desert that offer surcease only to the fanged serpents: the punishment unfolds.

Don't go near

Then

yourself.

You

the mirages in the wasteland.

are far from insan-

you are only living through an experience, an event. The

ity;

mirages are real reflections of that pure terrain of time.

how

They

far

you have journeyed into

are real.

They bring

the

now

out-of-place things back into the desert that was once the felicitous

garden of your memory. There a cherished

woman

and you approach, draw close to her, and you touch her and she caresses you and then she vanishes passes into existence

in a shimmer to become and are is

reveal the

caressing

so

masturbating that you have

than

it

appeared,

wall

the

in

the

—and

it

its

beautiful flower

radiant wings in a

the dusty weeds.

More suddenly

disappears to reveal a dark splotch on

fetid,

the dusty pebbles

quench

among

A

tenderly.

seen at a small distance and opens

promise of spring

to

man

musky

cell.

of the wasteland,

as you turn,

it

A

brook bubbles over

promising to quench,

disappears in a flush of the

toilet.

Anything you can experience

and calls

after

an indecent

interval,

the old, nice quality of a

in the hole,

you do to yourself,

each occasional experience

memory which

lies

re-

fallow be-

The

49

Hole: Solitary Confinement

A

neath the wasteland.

word

tone

in a sentence; a

or sound; a fleeting essence in a taste or odor; a

in a voice

momentary and These can

texture in a tactile sensation, or a combination of motion

form and color caught by the revive a

good thing. Real

tail

of your visual field.

things: these are the mirages in the

desert.

The

world

real

out of place in the hole, but the hole

is

nonetheless really there.

ward

in

human

It is

experience.

time that no longer moves

You can

is

for-

walk, placing one foot

before the other, across eternity in time. All the space you need is

six or

seven

feet.

The

hole furnishes only that provision: you

are living a demonstration of the theory of the infinite within

the

finite;

the dream within the

But the hole quite

real.

is

not the

In fact,

it is

stuff of

so real

it

reality.

dreams, of fantasies:

it is all

haunts you.

Experience occurs seldom and only

in extremes: vividly in-

tense or drably monotonous. Surreal paintings have tried to

capture

—with some

that are very real in

To you

it is

success, life in

know

might add

—the

relationships

not a dream.

It is

not a dream. Your words and thoughts can only

reflect this condition of

not

I

the prison hole.

their plight.

your sensations, your feelings; they do

Few

thoughts in the hole are conscious

of their true grounds.

You become silent, contemplative, because you have become inverted. Your sense perception, having taken in everything, including yourself, within the finite confines of the hole,

passes through the side,

monotony and now

the infinite, to haunt you with

hole, at that

moment, would

call

up from the other Those outside the dream but you inside rises

reality.

—

a

it

the hole are in reality, not a dream:

What am awaken

I?

Do

to find this

I exist? is all

a

What is it like to like? What is it like

Does

dream?

devil?

be dead?

taste

to

would happen should legs?

Am

filthy

concrete floor?

I

I shit

homosexual?

What

a

on the is

floor? it

like

God?

Am

does

toilet

my

butt?

put a finger up

What

Will I

the world exist? Is there

Or to

piss

I the

water

What down my

sleep

on

this

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

SO

The mind

deprived of experience because of social sensory

deprivation in the hole conceives

its

be

intellectual faculty to

capable of putting to use a fictional apparatus in the brain.

somehow it can learn to move material things, to

It

will believe that

control this apparatus

and use

destroy or change or

to

it

create physically real things. Shorn of a gracious

God, the mind

surrenders to nothing, to Nothingness: // /

(Yes.

concentrated, could I melt or bend the bars of

Ommmm.)

Should I

scrap of dust on the floor? (Yes. it

move

The

my

cell?

move that move? (I saw

concentrate to

first try to

Ommmm.) Did it

just a hair.)

intelligence recedes,

cause knowledge outside world

it is

is

no more

a tool of learning

based on experience

deprived of knowing.

minds by telepathy;

it

—but

It tries

—

be-

a tool of the

to contact other

becomes the Ancestor. Words and

Numbers come to hold mystic significance: they were invented by some arcane magic older than man. The line between the word and the thing vanishes; the intervals of numbers in infinity collapse with infinity.

The mind now

crouches in fear and superstition before the

idols of the hole, terrified:

/ do not

want

to talk

of interest. I cannot

been kind

me. Everyone betrays me.

to

—

any more. There

is

nothing you can say

remember ever being happy.

No

No one has ever

one can possibly

You have not suffered what You call me names (homosexual). You do not understand. You mock me (screwball). This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release. But a kind of genius can come of this deprivation of sensation, of experience. It has been mistaken as naive intelligence, when in fact it is empty intelligence, pure intelligence. The understand

they are too ignorant.

I have endured.

composition of the mind disintegrated and it is

altered.

Its

previous cultivation

is

has greater access to the brain, the body:

Supersanity.

You have to start from the and work your way down. You must study mathematical

Learning top

it

is

is

turned inside out.

The

Hole: Solitary Confinement

SI

theory before simple arithmetic; theoretical physics before applied physics; anatomy, you might say, before you can walk.

You have

to study philosophy in depth before you can un-

the

derstand

language or

simplest in

assumed

differences

categorical

in

any simple commonplace moral or ethical

maxim. Indeed,

almost a rule that the more simple and com-

it is

monplace something

the more difficult to understand

is,

it.

You have come the full circle; experienced that single event down there in the prison hole. How long does it

that happens take? Years.

.

in

I

.They

.

would say

name on what I have The first few

put a

finally

sensory

solitary:

out,

felt

I

me, dazzled

struck

All colors dazzled feel,

its

its

I

me

texture.

with

A

steel.

The a

prisoners walking about,

beauty

piece of

and

going in different directions

When

let

never

they

the

things,

had.

me

their multitude of voices

—bewildered me. —but beneath

by

many

—

all

was slow

I

the

surface

raged. I

I

was

fascinated

and slack-jawed and confused I

I

dull prison-blue shirts

wood The movements of

me.

I

saw only three or four

only concrete and

could not orient myself.

I

suffered

times

deprivation.

served a couple of years like that,

drab colors.

more.

five years or

how wasted

can guess

am no

have become now by the fact that

longer disoriented by solitary confinement.

wormed

finally

I

its

way

into

my

heart:

I

It

has

cannot measure

my

deprivation any longer.

Let us say

I

can no longer measure

my

feelings.

I

can draw

the proportions mentally, however.

.

the

.

I

explained to you the other day that the

moods

of the body.

The mind

cell regulates

does not regulate

its

— IN

52

own

Mental depression,

condition.

only seems that there

it

for example,

mind caused by the body.

the

of

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST a state

In a cell in the hole

a separation of

is

is

mind and body

in fact, the body's condition (of deprivations of sensations;

experiences,

and

functions,

mind more than

of the

so

on)

moods

the

controls

any other situation

in

can think

I

of.

William James described

become

sad because

because

we

That

are sad.

when he said we we do not shed tears

this relationship

we shed

tears:

our original condition as living

is

beings.

A

long time ago in the hole,

was on the

floor lying

elbows propping I

me

when

my stomach

on

So

up.

I

I

first

entered prison,

writing a letter, with

I

my

was bent directly over the page

was writing on.

My mood a

was "normal" the hole.

prisoner in

writing,

spots

little

touched them with

non

—when

my

child. it

I

I mean the normal mood of remember I noticed, as I was

water appearing on

of

a finger

suddenly

was the

then.

—

I

first

and wondered

realized

and immediately

eyes,

bly. It

I

I

tears

the

were

paper.

I

phenome-

at the

falling

from

began to weep uncontrolla-

and only time

I

have wept since

I

was

a

do not know why now, nor did I know the cause of I must have been weeping over everything, all of

it.

.

.

.A

man

is

taken away from his experience of society, taken

away from the experience of

when he

A man

a living planet of living things,

sent to prison.

is is

taken away from other prisoners, from his experi-

ence of other people, when he

confinement

in

is

locked away in solitary

the hole.

Every step of the way removes him from experience and narrows

There

it is

down

to only the experience of himself.

a thing called

death and

we have all seen

it.

It

brings

The to

an end

a life,

Hole: Solitary Confinement

an individual living thing.

S3

When

life

ends, the

living thing ceases to experience.

The

concept of death

is

simple:

it is

when

a living thing

no

longer entertains experience.

So when

a

experience, he

man is

is

taken farther and farther away from

being taken to his death.

THE PRISON STAFF

TM

he

pigs in the state

judicial

system

ine a time

I

—

treat

.

I

federal prisons

so violently,

I

can't begin to

were weaker by a

hair,

especially in the

tell

you what they do

they would destroy me.

.You asked about the way violence

.

—

cannot possibly imag-

I

could ever have anything but the deepest, aching,

searing hatred for them. to me. If

and

me

is

inculcated in prison-

ers. I

have never come into bodily contact with another

being

in

human

almost twenty years except in combat; in acts of

struggle, of violence.

How

do otherwise? Contact sports are not have been in. .Can you envision what it is to be a victim of terrorism in the hole? At any moment the cell door can be flung open and guards can enter and beat you to the floor, even as you sleep. At any hour of any day. is it

possible to

allowed in any prison .

.

I

The

55

Prison Staff

In the so-called closed psychiatric wards of the federal medical center for prisoners

No

when

I

was there,

was done

it

routinely.

prisoner had to say a word or do anything to bring on the

terror.

The

guards do not speak to you.

faculty of reason.

I

You

are cattle, without the

have been pointed

in the direction of a

place across the floor or the exercise cage to get

me

and given

to walk there because the guards, in their

a

push

contempt,

not acknowledge that a prisoner can understand rea-

will

son. .

.The guards there at that time took

.

it

upon themselves

to prescribe injections of phenothiazene drugs as potent as

Prolixin

— and every one

not

you, but

kill

will

of these drugs

is

dangerous.

They

most certainly cripple you. They

will

in effect

lobotomize you.

was so constantly and

I

after a while

my

all-pervading that

attack and exit

arbitrarily attacked in

desire for physical relief

my

when cell,

my

cell there,

was so powerful and

the guards finally would leave off the I

would sometimes achieve an erection

out of despair and pain.

have

I

those conditions had to masturbate to relieve

in

myself, but not masturbate with any vision in

imagination.

The pure

my

mind,

my

physical act of caressing the penis after

numberless exposures to attack

is

enough.

It is

entirely a physi-

cal thing, entirely involuntary.

Were I

I

an ordinary

man

with ordinary misunderstandings,

could easily have misunderstood what was happening inside

me.

I

could have misunderstood to the point of becoming a

sexual masochist, or a sadist. this act of release

been twisted by

How many .

.

and

I

could very easily have confused

with a sexual act of love, could have easily

this thing.

prisoners have been?

.Prisoners are inculcated detailed, so

thorough and

by

acts of violence so constant

relentless, as to

develop a kind

of defensive automatic suspicion of everyone. This suspicion

has been called paranoic. It

stems more from the indoctrinated belief prisoners come

to have that every injury to

them, they bring upon themselves.

IN

56

They end up

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

doing, almost consciously, suicidal violence to

themselves, both mental and physical. .Free will: this

.

when

it

inflicted

the doctrine of the American judiciary

is

blame

insists prisoners are to

upon them by

for

whatever harm

is

prisons.

This legal insistence indoctrinates even the

minds

finest

in

this country.

And has

yet a prisoner has

less

no

to injure himself, so long as faculties

—

free will, or at least, let us say,

No man

than other men.

free will

especially

he

if

he

is

in

is

ever chooses

own

in possession of his

possession

of

"free

his

will." If

I

seize hold of a

him and want him

like

he

policeman

me

of the judiciary, sent

to

Ah,

blame yes!

He

has,

under the auspices

to leave

me

alone and

tell

I

I

do not

him

so,

is

an injury he sustains from me?

for

has no "free will"

the government!

who

to the prison hole because

That

is

—he

is

an impersonal tool of

the way this twisted logic of American

justice proceeds.

have never seen an indifferent

I

unconcerned

The

pigs,

pig.

have seen lazy and

I

but never an objective and indifferent

lazy ones are like

magnanimous kings who

carelessly over-

look "slights" and arbitrarily pass out "mercies," but

whim, suddenly everyone to

rise

up angry and take

it all

pig.

will, at a

back, relegating

hell.

Always, always every guard in prison

is

a tyrant,

and

prison-

ers are his subjects. Is

that the right of

.

.In

.

San Quentin

government founded by

—and many other

a gun-rail or in a gun-tower sees

he

will shoot

exercise yard,

you down with

he

will shoot

his

prisons

free

—

if

men?

a guard

on

you touch another prisoner,

rifle. If

he

sees

you run

in the

you down. In the process, "stray"

down other prisoners. If the guards come to your cell to search it and before they can enter your cell you make a move toward your toilet, you

bullets always strike

— The

be shot down

will

in

your

contraband down the

That

cell.

They

are "afraid" you will flush

toilet.

why San Quentin

is

57

Prison Staff

has the very best hospital for

traumatic medicine in America.

Army

come

doctors even

there

to learn.

Now, you to

.

me who

the fuck deserves to be subjected

.A prison warden or guard

.

prison

walk

who is

"arrogant." There

is

a

way

that's a challenge to a pig.

by,

supreme

pig a

any authority

—hates one thing worse than anything

a prisoner just

just tell

this as a matter of justice?*

all

insult just

A

in a

else,

jail

and

a convict

or

that's

can walk,

convict can give a

by standing and answering the pig

without saying or doing anything you can put your finger on.

way

them

There

is

fiance.

(They used to throw you

a

they called

of looking at

that they interpret as de-

in the hole for looking

wrong;

"eyeballing.")

it

haven't been on the main line (the yard) in any peniten-

I

tiary in

which

warden) and

The

have caught the attention of a pig (especially a

I

haven't been stripped and searched on the spot

violence between guard and prisoner

and you see with

I

a lot of prisoners

is

open, naked,

defending themselves

in fistfights

pigs.

have never seen one pig whip one inmate. Not even two

I

pigs can

whip an average

fistfighting pigs

—

I

mean

prisoner.

that

When

I

speak of a prisoner

literally: at least five

or six pigs

at a time.

.

.

.The pigs

so? Well,

you

tell

see:

the public they are at a disadvantage.

when they

How

are in a fight with a convict, they

say they can only apply "necessary force"; they cannot beat

him up

— because, you

prisoner

is

see, the

not so restrained.

law "forbids"

it.

Whereas

a

IN

58

Not once

in

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

the judicial history of this country has the "law"

forbade beating a prisoner in a fight beating

him

The law

How can anyone prove

only convicts witness

No which

one

I

mean

does forbid the methodical use of torture and cor-

poreal punishment.

when

—by "beating"

to death. Never.

in this

such practices

exist

it?

country can cite for

me

a single instance in

and unusual punishment

a prisoner's complaint of cruel

has ever at any time been affirmed as true either by the govern-

ment it

in general or the prison

regime

in particular.

Never has

happened.

Why does no one believe the word of a word of the prison authorities? I would like to know, because in every single instance in which a prisoner is lucky enough to air his complaint in a courtroom in one of those civil rights lawsuits he always has been vindicated. Always proven to have told the truth. Never, not a single time, has a prisoner been shown in court to have been lying in his complaints of cruel and unusual So

tell

me

this:

prisoner over the

—

—

punishment. I

who

think that this country has an excessive take pride

— openly

or secretly

—

number

of people

in the fact that their

government is so inhumane, so evil; take pride in the fact that their government so thoroughly crushes men they consider "enemies" ("public enemies"). And those who do not have this kind of pride in their government, only sneer at those who do. And do nothing more.

.An ex-cop was committed to prison. He had arrested someone I once knew. He was one of those typical belligerent pigs. I guess he was about thirty-five. Someone pulled up on him on the yard and told him what he knew of him. The cop begged him to keep it quiet. The man agreed. He set him up to get into debt with some prisoners I knew. When the cop ran out of money to pay them, he bought the debt. That meant he had purchased the cop. The cop was standing there big-eyed and .

.

The scared shitless

him and

when

it

59

Prison Staff

happened. Later the one who bought

several of his partners

were standing talking to

me

in

the corridor. The cop was walking by. The one he owed him over to us. He just looked at him and said, "I just sold your debt. You owe me nothing. You owe him." He indicated this man, who walked him all over the joint, making him get things called

on

credit

from

a

himself a few days

dozen different prisoners. The cop later.

killed

For some reason he wouldn't ask

lock-up protection. That's what they wanted

him

to do.

for

They

want to kill him. This pig was so typical a dirty pig, he could have passed for the Georgian highway patrolman in the car commercial. Outside he used brutality to force information from people. I think he got his dues. It is unusual to see an ex-cop in a real penitentiary. Why this one made it there, I still am baffled. Someone high must have been very angry at him! didn't

I doubt if there is today a single agency in the federal government that does not have its own little police force. Of course, this could be my "problem of perception." But I know the policeman mentality much, much better than that mentality is capable of knowing mine. They use the old filing-system trick. They collect and intentionally manufacture so much bullshit about the citizenry so much "top-secret" and "confidential" shit they actually

—

—

who

alarm those Bible-thumping, plastic-man politicians into office leading brass

before the rows of things,

tion

was

which,

if

files

bands and kissing

and stacks of

ass that

get

they shrink

dossiers of people

and

they were true, half of the American popula-

—

would be under indictment and if even a fraction of it they would be indicted. So it is suppressed from

false,

public view.

Policemen do not have to "worry" about not

elections.

That

is

how they get into office. They hire one another. They make

absolutely certain the job

is

so "complicated"

—with

checks and counterchecks, their codes and signals,

etc.

their

—no

— IN

60

one can do

it

but them. They do

all

the "investigating" of each

phony cover-ups, gagging

other: all the

.

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

—murders. my

.You said one of the weaknesses of

.

give anyone but prisoners character. If it is a

"weakness/'

it is

You

play

is

that

I

don't

are absolutely correct.

the weakness of a prisoner writing

about prison.

The

guards do not have anything but "cold" characters.

When they step out of being "cold characters," they inevitably become obscenities. And I could never portray them otherwise. Not in truth. I mean everyday empirical fact. Yours as well as mine.

That was the flaw in Cheever's book on prison. It is what me at bottom Cheever is extremely vain. To be so sure of the nature of the essential relationship between guards and their prisoners is pure foolishness. That is one of the things I tells

You never extended such tempting

like in you.

The People

real relations are disturbing to like

Cheever

like to tell

themselves guards and prisoners

The

have points of congeniality.

presumptions.

the calm social mind.

truly horrifying thing

is

that

they do not.

.

.

.Among

selves,

themselves, the guards are human.

relationship

is

not human.

subjective reflection

consciousness.

It is

is

it is

animalistic.

What

I

am

saying

is

say that evil exists

that the prisoner is

is

common

sharing a

—not

demonic.

in

I

It is

is

It is

the

life.

But

not humanistic;

closer to

humanity

deprived by the guard. That

is

the prisoner, but in the guard.

Intentions play none but an illusory

His society

in reflection

that

than the guard: because he

evil.

Only

common consciousness? we belong to a common species of is

not the consciousness of society.

this

I

animal.

—do they acknowledge

What

consciousness that

why

Among them-

the prisoners are human. Yet between these two the

role.

don't care

In if

fact,

he

the guard

likes

is

the same

The food

61

Prison Staff

—

do or the same music or whatever: this is the illusory Animals can enjoy the same music or food

I

role intentions play.

we do. Our

actions define us.

Among

themselves, these pigs are evil to the point of bore-

them among themselves;

dom.

I've seen

They

are extremely venal. Extremely devoid of any trace of

I've

heard their

talk.

spirituality.

Their dullness approaches the mentally defective.

It is fascist

The

an irony, but

very symbol of injustice.

it is

not: prisoners

they are. Neither does society in general.

way .

.

of

.It is

be

state does. It

arbitrary

—

—

for a prisoner to hurt or kill a

guard to hurt or

kill

a prisoner.

are severe to a hellish degree.

(if

to

be what

life.

ing quality

It

The

to

power over prisoners. They embrace it as That is the source of their evil. much more difficult and therefore it has a moraliz-

them

gives

a

would seem

It

do not make guards

has been

my

guard than for a

The consequences

A

to a prisoner

guard gets a medal for

experience that injustice

is

it!

perhaps the only

not merely the greatest) cause of insanity behind bars. You'd

be surprised to learn what

a little old-fashioned oppression

can

do to anyone. Here is how the average man views it: He finds exceptions, and instead of acknowledging that these exceptions prove the rule, he substitutes the extremes, one for the other, and tells himself the exception is evil and not the rule: that guards are like anyone else at bottom, in spite of the brutal, evil few. It is

not true. Formal, temporal war

reflects a is

deeper historical truth.

such a thing as a relentless

requires eradication society: the

All

And

enemy

(i.e.,

the

phenomenon)

that truth in

human

is

that there

society that

and cannot ever be reconciled with human

policeman mentality.

human

societies in history

throughout the world have

recognized this in the primitive (religious) consciousness of

man's inhumanity to man.

Do you "sense" a common humanity in someone like Hitler? Or Himmler?

If so,

you are deluding yourself. They are not

— IN

62

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

men" behind

"family

They

the scenes.

are not "ordinary peo-

ple" in any aspect of their existence with others. Theirs was a

A

revolution of policemen.

That

revolution of the government.

a hard truth to bear.

is

When Marx capital, this

says the capitalist

is

what he understands.

is

the living incarnation of

We

are

hold the opposite view: the State.

The

am

I

human

ultimate citizen

is

—

and that

it

will

citizen of the

the Policeman.

not saying this state of society

what we do and like Hegel

The idealists official human is a

our thoughts reflect our actions.

has always been with

affairs

always be with

human society. now fully

Evil emerged with the beginning of History and has

—

emerged into view. You can look at it, touch it speak to it. It belongs to us to wipe it out. All religions reflect that struggle with

evil.

All this content lies

munist revolutionary. task

is

beneath the conscious intent of a com-

It is

not foremost in his mind because his

not perceived as religious

—but economic,

political.

He

has not the luxury, the time, to delve into the religious meaning

now.

But

in prison so long,

I,

have found the time. This

movement

the communist

is

why

has been haphazardly compared

with a religious movement.

.

in

.

.If

I

wrote of a guard's

domination of

women and

"home

life," it

children. Their

would be

a study

women and

chil-

dren do not love them; they worship them.

The

only time they appear

at their throats.

The

human

instant you

is

when you have

remove

it,

they

fall

a knife

back into

animality. Obscenity.

You side"

think

—but

They obey

just see

I

as

I

when there is They obey it in

violence.

animals.

A

"one side" of them? They have

said, only

prisoner does not.

a

"good

a knife at their throats: their hearts, as

do

all

The

63

Prison Staff

A prisoner rebels even with the knife at his throat at this time he

today.

He

This

is

That

why

is

the essence of being a prisoner

It is

cannot be subdued. Only murdered. true in spite of himself.

is

Those who less

a prisoner.

are neither guards nor prisoners are neverthe-

There

oppressed or oppressors.

either

"mixture" of these two terms. There

is

not a

true

always a principled

is

contradiction.

There

a "gray area" inhabited

is

industrial societies. It

that will spread

is

like

by most people

in

European

the dry foliage that surrounds a

and consume

it.

Everything

in the

fire

world

is

no matter our wishes. and kick in your door, that "gray area" of your existence will be no more. You will join

committed

When

in

to the flame,

they

come

in their jackboots

our struggles in spite of yourself.

The

"gray area" deludes

itself.

resolve itself peacefully, or that

You may

call it "laziness"

and "apathy."

as usual"

a whirlwind,

to

will.

it

not

real.

—

others have called

you were caught

You would know

whole countryside

tear the

it is

in

it

"business

the eye of

perhaps you could look out for miles across a

peaceful countryside.

that

If

Tells itself the conflict can

Someone

apart.

the whirlwind would

Know

for certain.

may be

in the countryside

Know

oblivious

it.

That

is

how

I

know

a great conflagration

And

tear the

whole world

and not

fool ourselves that they are

apart.

is

time to

it is

coming that

fight our

will

enemies

not "really" enemies.

It is

time to join the conflagration to make certain our enemies do not prevail.

The

industrial countries will enter

an off-on switch. But

They

all

it

with the emergency of

the other countries in the world are

and the fire is growing. It will consume the world. There is no point in pretending our lifetimes will not in the end culminate in a world revolution. That is the way I see it. That is how I look at tomorrow.

already in

it.

are burning

IN

64 I

wish

it

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

were otherwise, but nothing would convince

me

it

isn't.

.

.

.There are wardens and prison guards in

the very notion that tion

Call

A

I

should forgive them

my life

is

for

whom

insane. Retribu-

is

a great part of the subjective condition for revolution.

it

vengence

if

you want.

warden, a President Nixon, a Fiihrer Hitler

one of

us.

History

could never

the revolution

They must

demands

live side

this,

not

just

the

human

by side with such monsters

—on equal

pay. Because

terms.

we

That

is

will

never be

heart.

—the day

We

after

asking for too much.

are not machines.

Because we are not machines, we cannot wait long enough for the so-called

*

'economic development of the objective con-

ditions" or "withering

There

will

away" of the bourgeoisie.

be a "day

after the revolution."

ni i

wwalking into

new Maximum Security units is exactly room lined with animal cages. Any prisoner

the

walking into a

like

has a

full

view of any other prisoner

is

in his cell.

arguments and threats hollered

All day there are place. It

inmates

not too different,

really,

all

over the

than the "monkey houses"

or the zoo. If

one of the prisoners wants

insults

and threats

silencing him.

at

to,

he can taunt you with

any time, and you have no chance of

So you have to be careful not to get one of

these punks running his

mouth

at

you

(for

weeks on end

sometimes). So you have to be friendly and "converse" with

him about any fucked-up

subject he wants.

shout the loudest over the longest period this situation. in

which

a

It

is

the only situation

scurrying coward can

I

It is who can who dominates

have knowledge of

impose himself

directly

upon other men.

The

vileness of such

men

is

in

no other case

so exposed to

IN

66

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

There are not that many such men, but they dominate relations between men in cages.

view.

All day, from breakfast to suppertime about four or five

broken up by guards, and each death-row opened onto the tier one at a time. At that time you can shower, sweep out your cell and pace the tier in front of the cells of others. Jonathan is demanding as a child. He will reach into your cell and shake you awake to talk excitedly about the Lone Ranger show, or some such. Nothing you can say to him will get him off your back. Next Thomas comes out. He hangs around your cell, smiling "meaningfully" and watching alternately your lower body and your eyes. He'll bring you his cigarettes and candy just to open a conversation. He'll o'clock, the time

prisoner's door

is

is

ask you real nice to put your cock out through the bars to him.

He won't be

put

off.

He'll

hound

can do but try to ignore him.

you, and there

You

can't grab

is

nothing you

him and

rattle his

you can't reach anyone. Stephen isn't like that; he is introverted. Joseph paces and bumps into everything. You try

teeth;

to read,

and

The

hours.

The

find you've

noise level

all

been reading the same paragraph high.

for

can't think or concentrate. is

this:

you

will yourself

day through most of the disturbances. After each

meal you curl up,

pull the blankets over you, put your pillow

over your ears and sleep. three years

You

you come to adjusting

closest

to sleep

is

I

It's

a

drugged

sleep.

Once

for

about

slept like that sixteen hours a day.

When the lights go out you lie there, and relief comes only between midnight and breakfast. You stay up all night enjoying the tremendous relief. The noise which literally vibrates your brain

is

gone.

The

distractions disappear.

not in front of your

dawn,

cell.

You

The

freaks' faces are

are with yourself again. Until

at least.

But you can't read, you can't write. You can't listen to a radio. All you hear is the pigs making their rounds. You hear keys, chains, the dogs they bring in on the count. You hear the sleeping sounds of the prisoners. Every night there is at least

The Inmates

67

one screaming out in his sleep. You pass the night thinking, remembering your life. You go back to your earliest memories, your first childhood memory, and advance to today. You've masturbated yourself to the point of

months

total sexual uninterest

You fantasize a lot. You you know can never exist.

(years?) ago.

future, a future

That's no way to

alone

exist, let

live.

think of your

You're exhausted from

when dawn and breakfast come. You eat and fall The gate to your cell bangs open before you know it.

thinking, asleep.

You You is

stagger out of bed, go through the motions of showering. fall

into

served.

bed

You

again.

pick at

it,

No

sooner are you asleep than lunch

half asleep.

You

finally tell

the others

away from your cell front and not to speak to you. You threaten to throw a cup of urine on them, knowing you are taking a chance they'll do the same to you. If you're lucky, they'll keep their intrusions on you to a minimum. But you can't stop them completely. The tension wraps in

no uncertain terms

around your brain

itself

To into

to stay

live in

"peace"

like a steel vise.

such circumstances can change you

in

one of those damned

men who

will

do anything to

live,

to exist biologically. It is

only a matter of time,

if

you love

life

too

much

or fear

much, before you become a thing, no longer a man. You can end up scurrying about like a rodent, lending yourself to every conceivable low, evil, degrading act anyone tells you to do either pigs or prisoners. There is a boundary in each man. He can eat crow and violence too

—

brown-nose to an extent.

He

can shuck the

become a good "actor." But when a man goes beyond the

last essential

alters his ontology, so to speak. It's like starts a landslide

no one can

stop.

you've betrayed yourself.

be

free of violence so terribly,

after

you

start across that

order you around. You'd alive yourself. You'll

let

wallow

you

for a while,

boundary,

it

the small pebble that

You can

You want

lo,

man

betray the pigs until,

to survive so badly, to

will literally

do anything

boundary. You'll allow anyone to your ma, wife, kids die in

just to stay

the gutter of man's soul to

live.

IN

68

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

You'll suck every cock in the cell house to "get along." is

There

nothing you won't do.

Most

Those who do never committing it to survive

convicts don't cross that line.

You accept

return again.

violence,

morally as well as biologically. You're not a "psycho," a

That doesn't mean you won't acts of violence. It

hard to bring yourself to these

is

acts,

but

what you must do, even though you are scared stiff and sick to your

you take a deep breath, look

and you do

killer.

you won't do mind-boggling

kill,

it

intelligently at

stomach.

.

.Myself and

.

was one of

my

fellow prisoners lived a hard code, but

survival. Survival of dignity

and

we would truly be broken completely. The only thing a convict respects strength.

man

any

That

is all it

takes to

kill

only for his ability to

a

sanity. If

in

man.

another

it

we

didn't,

is

moral

don't fear or respect

I

harm another, and no convict

does.

But

many broken men.

in prison there are

wince when a pig walks by. stuttering so

bad they can't

I've seen them them break down to seen them go from day

I've seen

talk. I've

to day existing entirely with only the need, fulfilled daily, of

constant oral copulation. These are the ones so demeaned and

broken by the violence of things, there

do short

is

nothing they won't

of any act involving violence. If they

violence, they

would not have

lost their

were unafraid of

humanity.

bottom to best the man, the pig. To do what he can to get his time done and get out of prison. There are some things he can't do and still be a man (a convict). At that point, he rebels. He has no .

.

.The "working code" of a convict

is

at

"revolutionary ideology," true. But eventually he'll run into

me

in the hole

and

I'll

tell

him

things that will clear this

confusion and give his rebellion a cause. over the country now.

It's

a

new breed

It's

happening

of convict.

all

And when

69

The Inmates

he rebels alone, yard

if

I

the hole,

or in

see I

him

brothers under the skin. His fight highest price for helping

my

is

him and he

later

We

in.

fight.

If

pay the

I

cops out,

are

it

doesn't

done right and I have no bad feelings for got no one but each other, and I learned that a long

bother me. him.

on the

fighting a squad of pigs

never hesitate to dive

will

We

I've

time ago.

.

.

.The murder of a pig

in prison

is

worse by

assassination of the President of the U.S.A.

have the hope of walking the prison yard.

and ever walks

a prison yard again.

He

is

At

No

far

than the

least

then you

one

kills a

guard

never released from

the hole.

had

I

a friend

we

He murdered

called Striker.

Murdered him

front of everyone.

right in the

a

guard in

main run

in the

big cell house.

A

lot of things

he had been

conspired to bring

in prison for

only forty years of age.

him

to that. First of

all,

twenty-three solid years. But he was

The day

previous his mother had died;

had, as they say, "expired" quietly in her sleep of old age.

was

all

he had

He was main run

a

left

It

outside prison.

poor poker player.

in the cell

He

was playing poker

house with several others.

in the

A new

pig

walked past and stopped and ordered them to break up the

game. Poker

is

against the rules, but the pigs let

as they see that all the as

no "weak" inmates are

did not

know

it

go on

poker players are "regulars," sitting at the table.

i.e.,

as long as long

The new guard

this.

had been drinking pruno, and when he does this he always without fail becomes belligerent. He argued with the pig, but the pig insisted and threatened to throw him in the Striker

hole. Striker tried to recruit the other players to

keep on play-

ing to defy the pig, but since he was the only loser, they quit playing.

Someone kill

the pig?

he was so angry, why not just was half-joking when he told Striker this, but

told Striker that since

He

IN

70

Striker grabbed at

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST it

and vowed that he would

kill

the pig

except that he had no knife.

The his hair

prisoner,

more

to get rid of Striker, to get

more than anything, gave him

about fourteen inches

in length,

him out

of

was

overall

double-edged and a

lethal-

a knife. It

looking thing.

The

pig was standing in the run with another pig in the

midst of teeming inmates going to and beside the pig and

fro.

hung about ten inches

Striker pulled

up

of that knife into his

and gutted him. The other pig spun around to face Striker and was hit in the stomach several times as he ran backward to get away. Then Striker turned back to the other pig and stabbed him again with long deep thrusts in the chest area. The pig was now flat on his back, bleeding like a fountain. Everyone stood in arrested movements, watching. Striker knew what he had done and he looked about him wildly for help, and then he was seen to smile. He went to his knees and began belly

speaking to the dying pig.

He sunk the knife into the "How do you like that?" as he

middle of

his chest

and

said,

twisted the knife from side to

Then he pulled it out and began sawing off the pig's head. By then there were about fifty guards on the scene, and so Striker did as he was told and dropped the knife and walked off, with them escorting him to the hole. They were all in a side.

worse state of shock than Striker even. Striker received a life sentence

hole at another

Maximum

and was transferred

to the

Security penitentiary.

Shortly thereafter, in the middle of the night, he was found

There are stories that the guards lynched him, but Striker told me he would have to kill himself, and if he could have cried, he would have when he told me that. Because I agreed with him. Mercy is sometimes the hardest thing in the world because real mercy requires an act of personal atonement. He was thoughtless enough to have done it: killed a pig in such a way that he had to be caught at it. There was another act of mercy I was party to once. There was a convict, about fifty-five years old, named X. He had a hanged

in his cell.

The Inmates

and the

series of heart attacks,

paralyzed except for one eyelid.

71

him

last stroke left

He was

serving a

life

totally

sentence.

was with someone when he went to the infirmary to

I

his friend

I

did

himself in prison.

he wanted him,

if

and then

him,

attention on them.

was frozen

It

we

like stone, like a

death

stood watching X's eyes. Finally

X

attention from I

my

riveted

I

looked at X's face.

my

as his friend, to kill

a

the misery of not being able to care for

mask. For a long time pulled

visit

once

to flick his eyelid

for no.

Then he asked X to put him out of I

X

They communicated like that for not pay much attention to what transpired.

and twice

for yes

while.

X. At that time he asked

I

and glanced away momentarily,

looked back.

Then it flicked back open again, and I watched carefully, in great suspense, for the other flick of the eyelid which would mean no. I did not know if that was the second flick of his eyelid, or the first. In any case, it was the His eye was closed.

last.

He

just stared, as always, at

the ceiling, as

were a big

if it

screen that held the projection of scenes from Hell.

we

did wink his eye again, and

He

left.

usually talks a lot, but after that

something to say because

bed and smothered was the

gist of his

X

I

said

nothing to

somehow

got turned over in his

to death with his face in his pillow.

the eyes, looked at

"Yes." Is

And

killed

Since then,

I

and then. There

X

he

if

me

killed

That

at

it

me

took.

hard

with icy eyes, and in a cold voice said

it.

tied

somehow

recall seeing is

risk

X, and he looked

He walked away. man who handed Striker

that was

the fate of the

man who

man.

death report.

even asked him once

in

never

he only spoke when he had

His friend killed him out of mercy in spite of the I

He this

those two

something

the knife and the

to that of Striker's

in their

men

and X's?

at a distance

now

bearing that indicates a

conscious effort not to ever vacillate, not to ever have doubts

about what they do.

Some

not easy for a

It is

people say this

is

man

to

kill

his brother.

being "unreasonable," but they

to understand that the past

is

fail

never dead, never over and done

IN

72

What

with. is

not

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

happens

static, fixed.

in the past

Human

is

reality

the future, and so the past is

like that.

The

and out

decisions in a personal history slide in

events and

of perspective,

on new meanings, just as the person does. For this very reason, there is no absolute personal good or evil. They sometimes pause and stand next to me, and always take

they are looking everywhere but at

happening, Jack?"

Only

in greeting.

after saying this

their eyes at mine.

Eye

me when

'

Maybe once

do they turn to eye,

they say 'What's

I

every year or

their face to

am

so.

me and level

studied carefully.

Then

they soften and put the look of a friend in their eyes and say,

with genuine concern: "Is everything

all

right?"

Sometimes I just nod or I say "Yeah." Then they look away and they walk off again. It is as if they were just checking to see if, or how much, the past has changed since they were there last. I try not to change too much.

no "camaraderie" among prisoners as a whole is a system, a network of ties between all the tips (prison cliques) in the prisons, and it's this that resembles "comradeship" in general. Most prisoners fear almost every other prisoner around them. .

.

.There

is

any more; there

.

.As long as I've been in the penitentiary

.

the

all

You

fistfights I've

(jails

seen can almost be counted on one hand.

never see violence in the open and

it's

always with a knife

or a piece of pipe (lately, here they use gasoline

enemy and

are different)

—dousing the

igniting him). This, of course, refers only to the

violence of prisoner against prisoner.

form of art which partakes of the elements of the auto-da-fe and the drama. Barbarian civilization invented it first as a way to make of punishment a specta.

.

.It is,

tor's sport

as a spectacle, a

and

it

developed

its

fullest expression in

the gladiator

The Inmates

Then

games.

the emergence of the

down and could have no room So, you see, the bullfight

does not even see

he

doing.

is

way

A

it

as

an

art form,

and he

will

demands

bullring

be

great control.

the bull to bring out

The

situation

is

its

The

it is

loses;

it is

not a bullfight

It is

—

when he

it is

situation in the

must torment and heighten them.

easier for a bullfighter to

brave bull than a cowardly bull. If the bull

ors himself

more:

is

the bull will

bullfighter

fighting qualities

such that

but there

maimed. The

killed or

almost the

drama.

risks his life to kill,

he does not acquit himself with honor, he

prevail

such

in society for

it

barbarities.

by no means a sport. The matador way, unless he is confused as to what

a professional actor pursues

man

nation-states broke

civil

is

bullfighter pursues

In a bullfight a if

this

it

73

a slaughter,

is

kill

a

cowardly, then

and the matador dishon-

stoops to the role of a butcher.

not a sport because

it

brings into play esthetic, sublime

which move men to contemplate moral elements of way drama does in theatre. The bullfighter retains, from the historical origins of bullfighting, a gladiatorial aspect but what normal man would pursue such a thing!? The answer is this: men from qualities

the spectacle, the

—

men; men

near-penniless social classes; powerless bullfighting

is

for

whom

a path to social attainments otherwise unattain-

able.

The

qualities that are

respect

(at

heightened

—these matador

in

combat with an

qualities is

brought out

in the bull

—

bravery,

bottom, honor), intelligence (animal cunning

and more are emulated by the human male. So the

in a sense fighting

intelligent adversary),

another

man

to the death. It

is

a surrogate gladiator conflict.

A

great matador

is

like

an ingenious maestro

who can

bring

out excellence in the most inexperienced of musicians by sheer dint of the talent he sees in them.

When

the matador brings the bull to

its

highest grandeur,

the animal becomes ideally ennobled, and in a truth bull

—because

ideally at that juncture the

become equal

— the matador

pierces

its

moment

of

matador and the heart.

— IN

74

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

It is no accident that convicts speak of penal institutions for young men as gladiator schools. In such places, circumstances teach men how to kill one another. They are taught the way the bull is taught through torment When a bull is brought to the bullring, he is brought directly from the fields of a ranch. He has no prior experience of the

—

cape, of the play of a matador, nor even of a corral.

It is a totally

alien experience.

Every phase of the matador, he

a bullfight

is

sharp spears (pics)

is

a test. Before the bull confronts

met with peons, and he whirls on them and are imbedded in his neck muscles. He does

and hide; he ignores the pain, if he is brave, and attacks. Then men on horseback surround him and torment him, and he charges at them, again and again. His rage is blind. If he is a good bull, he has passed all the tests. The banderilleros, the men on horseback, withdraw and the matador beckons from the center of the ring. With his manner and his cape he draws the bull out into the center of the ring, and the bull is manipulated until his rage not

flee

has reached such a peak that

it

is

transformed into glory

enlightened by the figure of the matador.

The

farther

becomes;

he

is

his confusion

the

driven, is

more

he

self-contained

transformed by the combat into a

kind of intelligence crowned with valor.

What

an experience for the

bull!

It

must be of greater he could never

intensity than a religious experience. After this,

return to the herd from which he was taken.

again live as he did before.

He would

He

could never

carry within him,

all

his

days, the arena, the bullring. If

—he

he wins

—and the chances

will face bullfighters until

Convicts

who have been

are almost nil that

one

kills

he

will

win

him.

trained in gladiator schools acquit

themselves with the honor of the tormented

—with the honor

with which the bull behaves in the bullring.

The

only real difference

is

that the bull sinks into the dust

a fragrant

stands.

shower of roses that

float

down

to

—

Olef amid him from the

of the bullring in a sea of voices chanting 'Bravo!

The Inmates

The

75

shame amid contemptuous and

prisoner dies in

scorn-

ing men.

Sometimes

a prisoner

who happens

tional

The

dream

of the typical warden.

big prisoners

been led

who

be physically big

to

is

That is the tradihierarchy he can control.

encouraged to run the other prisoners'

A

lives.

believe this are usually fools

who have

sheep to the slaughter) to believe that because

(like

they can overpower with their hands the average man, every-

one

will

the

little

throws a wrench into

all

of this

and

affect a prisoner a prisoner

outer, that govern ordinary

is

The

skinny kid with a knife or some other weapon.

restraints, inner

To

What

obey them.

men do

not

bent on protecting himself. it is

an

hand-to-hand with

insult to grapple

someone ever strikes him with his hand (another kill him with a knife. If he doesn't, he will be fistfighting with him every day. He might be killed. anyone.

If

he has to

prisoner),

we

In prison respect.

are

all

polite to each other: formal in our

We are serving years.

If

I

have a verbal disagreement

with someone, and I'm in the wrong, sincerely.

But

he knows

it, I

to

me,

kill

what

I

if

I'm

have to see his

have to see him day

leads to killing

the violence in prison

can't have

my

apologies are given

and some asshole is wrong and face every day. If he threatened

in the right

him over is

someone with

a

in,

day out for

seemingly

years.

trivial

geared for murder, nothing ill

feelings for

This

is

matter. All else.

You

you walking around.

He

could drop a knife in you any day.

You

learn to "smile"

friendliness.

to conceal

it,

You have

him

into position.

So when you are raging inside

To

disarm him with

at anyone,

you learn

to smile or feign cowardice.

to

move

into total activity from a totally inactive

posture to sink a knife in as close to his heart as possible. this that also unsettles a

man's mind

intimate weapon. Very personal.

you are not

one

It

someone

steals

knife

is

an

mind because

killing someMoral self-defense. something from your cell. You

killing in physical self-defense.

in order to live respectably in prison.

Let's say

A

in prison.

unsettles the

It is

You're

IN

76

catch

him

cold.

loud with you.

with him.

If

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Maybe he

What

stole a carton of cigarettes.

you must do next

is

he took your property, there

to

is

become

no

telling

He

gets

friendly

what he

may try to take next. It's possible that he would even try to fuck you if you let him steal from you. In prison society you are expected to put a knife in him. You might have to walk the yard with him for a week to take him off guard, to get him alone to

kill

him.

Here

is

how

it

You

is:

are both alone in his

cell.

You've

slipped out a knife (eight- to ten-inch blade, double-edged).

You're holding is

it

beside your leg so he can't see

it.

smiling and chattering away about something.

The enemy You see his

He thinks you're his

fool; he trusts you. between the second and third button on his shirt. As you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot to the side to step across his right-side body length. A light pivot toward him with your right shoulder and the world turns upside down: you have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest. Slowly he begins to struggle for his life. As he sinks, you have to kill him fast or get caught. He will say "Why?" Or "No!" Nothing else. You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes

eyes: green-blue, liquid.

You

see the spot.

It's

a target

you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act

pumped the knife in several times without it. You go to the floor with him to finish him. It is like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all. They always whisper one thing at the end: "Please." You get the odd of murder. You've

even being aware of

is not imploring you not to harm him, but to do he says your name, it softens your resolve. You go into a mechanical stupor of sorts. Things register in slow motion because all of your senses are drawn to a new height. You leave him in the blood, staring with dead eyes. You strip in your cell and destroy your clothing, flushing it down the toilet. You throw the knife away. You jump under the showers. Your

impression he it

right. If

clarity returns.

could.

Most

There

but whenever you see laugh.

You

no doubt you did the only thing you know you did it. No one questions, one, he may embrace you, pat your back, is

of the regulars

just

downed

a rat everyone hates. In the big prisons,

The Inmates

77

such murders are not even investigated at I

all.

In

,

when

was there, between thirty and forty bodies were found

stabbed to death. There was only one conviction, and even then,

was because the

it

killer

turned himself

in

and pleaded

guilty to ten years.

I'm not a professional writer, so things without sounding like a callous

it

is

hard to write these

punk with

a faulty imagi-

and hold him

nation.

But you want to stop

in

so tight

you can force

his life

back into him and save him. But

you can't turn around

in the

middle of

violence, this time in favor of act

—the same

.

I

.

it is

only that,

life,

the unreason of

that tries to stop you in the

which brought you

force

It's

it.

it

to this act.

I was there! But I have seen it enough times common. He could have protected himself. Not have seen him move and I know he could have defended himself. The one stabbing him was a

you

tell

know

to

the middle of

I

successfully

coward.

He had only been his right shoulder.

your arms!"

arms

slashed

But

—not deeply—

He

shouted a command: "Drop him bewildered and dropped his him his chest; actually filled his

his assailant

—and he looked

to his sides.

and

across the belly

at

offered

lungs, almost like a sigh of relief, pushing his chest out. Totally

undefended. gave .

.

them all

The man wasted no time

taking his heart.

He did not even try to flee for it to him. He all but said: "Here is my life, .1 have seen men stand as though frozen and

man

the

kill

strain

him.

and

try to fight their

way out

of their

his

take I

own

He

life:

let

He

it!"

have seen passivity,

the while they are being cut down. All this just to be able

to confront

and overcome the violence which

is

already taking

their lives.

When

they

always too

late.

about them, to

finally

They

do

(if

they do) begin to fight back,

are mortally

wounded. They begin

try to appraise their attacker

—but

it is

to

too

it is

flail

late.

I'm not speaking of the shock of surprise. I'm not speaking of a

moment's

hesitation.

their death at the

I

am

saying they accept too easily

hands of another. God,

it

sometimes even

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

78

becomes

a conscious acceptance, at

some point

with themselves to overcome their

.

own

in their struggle

passivity.

.You can become so consumed with impotent hatred, so

.

enraged at someone or something

you must mastur-

in prison,

bate to the violence taking place in your mind, because

cannot contain a

you may

little,

days in a

You

.

somehow,

it

you

—

by speaking out, loudly and end your screaming, raging froth from which there is no return. world berserk.

.You relate the notion that violence

sexuality. It .. .It is

for a

if

you loosen the grip on yourself

start

will leave this

.

if

is

an absurdity, but

I

an absurd contradiction

man

is

associated with

agree to an extent.

in (at least)

American

society

to see the sexual penetration of his wife (or female

companion)

as a consecration

and expression of love

—and

then to see this same act of penetration, but of another male, as just the opposite: a desecration

contempt.

It is

so profoundly

One of

the

and expression of the deepest

because of this contradiction that sexuality

wed first

is

to violence.

things that takes place in a prison riot

is

this:

guards are sexually dominated, usually sodomized. I'm not pre-

tending

I

do not "understand"

several points that this

sexual aggression

fit

is

this;

we

all

do.

"natural" and that

all

I

disagree on

overt acts of

the concept of violence, because violence

There are those who entertain such acts out of love. But what is clear is that when a man sodomizes another to express his contempt, it demonstrates only his contempt for woman, not man. The normal attitude among men in society is that it is a great shame and dishonor to have experienced what it feels like to be a woman. I think such a radical attitude is

destructive.

reflects strong feelings in

.

.

.1

was sent to prison

was executed: arrogance.

the matter.

for the

same reason Caryl Chessman

The Inmates

The

judge sentenced

79

me to the main penitentiary for the me raped by prisoners and reduced

express purpose of having to a

homosexual

—

this "version"

being a punk. There was

no other reason. At that time, there was not even

absolutely

a pretense of rehabilitation or a caseworker staff in prison.

The

prison was entirely presided over by old-school prison guards.

There were no "rehabilitation" programs. I was even told by the pigs who transported me to the prison that I was being sent there to be reduced to a punk, to be shorn of my manhood. They had felt I would be less arrogant once I had been turned into a cocksucker. If I was afraid, I was never aware of it. It is certain that I was consumed with rage, the anger of deep insult. I arrived in that emotional and mental condition. You could say I was

my place. New prisoners were placed in quarantine for about six weeks.

paranoid: bloodthirsty to establish

Quarantine was called reform school slipped

fish-tier.

me

a

Someone

boning knife

knew from the when I arrived on I

fish-tier.

The with

prisoner

first

fuck me,

my

I

drew

my

—

a

middle-aged convict

knife on.

knife at his throat,

I

forced

him

—who

tried to

to his knees,

made him perform

fellatio

on

and

my

flaccid penis in front of three of his partners.

the way

If you are a man, you must either on anyone who propositions you with threats of force. It is the custom among young prisoners. In so doing, it becomes known to all that you are a man, regardless

This

kill

is

it is

done.

or turn the tables

of your youth.

had been trained from a youth spent in gladiator school was inevitable then that a youth in an adult penitentiary at some point will have to attack and kill, or else he most certainly will become a punk even though it may not be well known he is a punk. If he cannot protect himself, someone else I

for this. It

—

will.

Before prisoners I

I was twenty-one years old I had killed one of the and wounded another. I never did get out of prison.

was never

To

a punk.

the authorities, there

is

nothing seriously wrong with

IN

80

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

anyone getting raped in excites them; they enjoy In prison,

if I

take a punk, she

a chattel slave. It directly.

He

is

is

cleans

the contrary, the idea

is

mine.

He

is

like a slave,

the custom that no one addresses her

my

my

cell,

clothing and runs errands for

—

him to do, he must do exactly the way perceived in some marriages even today. But I can sell

me. Anything a wife

On

prison. it.

I

tell

her or lend her out or give her away at any time. Another prisoner can take her from

.

.

me

.The majority of prisoners

ninety percent

—

if

he can dominate me.

have known

I

hesitate to call this

—

as

own

like

sex.

I

"homosexual" because American society

recognizes only the passive homosexual

the female role

—something

express sexual interest in their

—the one who

being a "homosexual." So

it is

plays

really the

same outside as in prison, but open in prison. So you can see already how this distorts a lot of meanings and can fuel a lot of violence, both physical and psychological. Because no prisoner really respects a homosexual, and yet as I said almost all have these desires themselves. It is the same

—

—

as in the society of

Also, in

all

men

outside prison.

the penitentiaries

I

have been transferred

to, in

each one there were only at most half a dozen "known" homosexuals

among

Only once

men

prisoners.

or twice in

my

life

have

I

seen in any prison two

demonstrate sexual affection by kissing or otherwise

touching each other. The open homosexual plays the role of a woman and is usually the wife of a prisoner respected on the yard. He gives her the security and protection he would a woman outside prison. But to be a punk is surpassed in con-

tempt only by being

a snitch. Prison regimes respect these

relationships. In reality they

encourage them.

When a bull is selected from the herds that occupy the fields of a ranch for the bullring, care

must be taken

to observe

how

The Inmates

81

relates to other bulls in the herd.

he

A

who

bull

displays

confusion around other bulls at homosexual tendencies in himself

is

already defeated by males, by other bulls.

in spite

He

ance.

He

passive,

is

of exhibiting the greatest outward masculine appearis

not

just

unsure of himself, his heart

is

subjugated

by the male.

men,

In

warfare

—

this

is

the prime reason that in regular positional

European warfare

particularly, classical

discovered to be homosexual

exempt from conscription

Gerard

fell

—

—the

soldier

executed. Homosexuals are

is

at least

from the

to his knees before the bars of

battlefield.

my

and he

cell

pleaded with me, pleaded tearfully and with an anguished brow: "I can't stand

it!

Put

in

it

my

mouth! Please,

please,

please ..."

He

had, in the

last

and, for the most part, had been rebuffed.

tier

accommodated him fellatio I

few months, been to every

through the bars of the

was surprised, not

as

if

A

at

commit

from boredom

cells.

what he was doing

—when

to himself but that

become weary,

I I

on the

few had

in these supplications of his to

he had even called upon me.

—

cell

am

actually drowsy

personally confronted with

such things. Gerard was not a cocksucker, no matter what he

thought of himself. I

must have shook

me.

know

I

my

head slowly

that at the point

where

take complete control of him,

command him

I

all

the while he implored

his frenzy threatened to

became

impatient.

I

had

to

to stand up, to get off his knees.

"Get away from me! Go on! Leave!" He became sober and went away. I knew him years ago; knew him when he was whole, when he was strong and dignified. I look at him now and I search for that man I knew so long ago. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the old Gerard and it is I

as

told him:

if

he were hoodwinking,

saying: I'm just seeing

what

will

IN

82

happen

do

if I

stay loyal to

this;

once

I'm only fooling everyone, to see

who

will

me.

Gerard had a itself

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

sly

humor

sense of

But he

in a while.

is

before

and

it still

shows

not joking, not trying to fool

anyone.

And

it

was not

that long ago that he was the Gerard

all

I

knew. Just a few years ago; no more than five. He is not insane, nor has his resistance to the prison regime ever flagged. It

he

almost seems as

will

he

if

is

us back as quickly as he will the pigs.

madman who

is

Yet that look

not insane, but I

it is

I

is

understand

try to

this

difficult.

catch in his eyes, the look

evidence of deception,

They

now, although

rebelling against us

not attack any of us unless in self-defense. He'll fight

I

could take as

me

something that makes

shudder.

say they see tombstones in his eyes.

In his writings Nietzsche speaks of the "glance of eternity,''

but

I

never paid

much

attention to the phrase, as

if it

were one

of his magnificent poetic flights.

When

I

see Gerard's face,

it

jogs

my memories and

that

phrase always bubbles up: the glance of eternity.

Free

will

—the

will to personal

boundaries of either

men

or

God

power that recognizes no

—

is

shrouded with death.

Anyone could kill Gerard in retaliation and everyone else would protect his killer. Guard or prisoner. He is one of those people who tempt everything evil in men, and yet by human measure he is honest and his intent is never to harm. It is as if the veil that protects us all from ourselves as well as one another had been pulled aside for Gerard so that he

—

—

could see the actuality of everything.

He

cannot be deceived;

you can hide no feeling or thought from him.

He

understands

reality.

—

That is why he will someday be murdered and he knows he cannot escape it. I do not know how this change in him came about. It must have been gradual. I only know I noticed one day that he had gone to pieces. He used to clown around quite a bit. As I said, one of the things that marked him was his ability to laugh at everything; more often than not, himself.

The Inmates

He had been him

placed

83

and out of the

so often in

on the pay-him-no-mind

Can you imagine half a lifetime You are stopped by guards anywhere

list

I

hole, the guards

spoke to you about.

of prison regimentation?

any time and searched. Your cell is searched almost daily and any little odd-or-end you happen to have, anything that is neither issued to all inmates nor explicitly allowed in a pathetic list of half a dozen items, is confiscated, and if it is in any way an object that could threaten security, you are thrown in the hole for it. You are stopped and questioned about the reasons for your presence in any area outside your cell. There are a million such things of at

—

nature you are subject to daily.

this

Then

suddenly, one day,

of the guards can see you.

it is

as

if

you were

a ghost.

None

You walk anywhere, and not

only

do the guards not stop you, no one sees you. I saw Gerard actually climb the inside perimeter fence and sit atop the rolls of concertina wire and wave to the guards in the gun-towers.

He

sat there for a half-hour

finally a

and no one bothered him,

until

couple of guards walked up to the fence and very

and absurdly asked him to please come back down. He did, and they left him wandering around in confusion.

politely finally

They never threw him

men who

believe

I

more

in the hole.

take things seriously

seriously than anything else

—

—take themselves

are the only ones

who

sur-

vive the pay-him-no-mind list. I have always grown dangerous and been taken off the list, although it has been tried with me

many

times.

.There have been times

when

have begun the process and they pass the word. They place you on the pay-him-no-mind list. You are allowed to roam the prison and do and say anything you care to and .

.

of dissolution.

The

the guards overlook

Only

if

pigs can sense

it;

ignore you as

I

it

if

you were not even there.

you commit an act of violence do they pounce and drag

you to the hole.

The

idea

is

to

watch you and hope that

in

your state you

will

cause the other prisoners to dislike you, with the idea that one

IN

84

may

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

—

you or that you go on so long you lapse into that lumbering insanity which results from the derangement of your kill

prison-senses. Prison

You can do

is

abstracted from your sensuous existence.

what you want. The place

or say

handed over

is

to you, in essence.

used to stagger sometimes into the mess hall barefooted

I

except for rubber shower-flops and none of the guards stopped

would walk around the prisoner queues and roam around behind the serving counters, picking up whatever I wanted to eat. The pigs would stand off, looking sideways at me and grinning. They would nudge one another in the ribs and wink. me.

I

in the kitchen

I'd

march out with

a

bowl of food

in

one hand and

a loaf

on would glaring at any

of bread in the other, in that crazy, directionless defiance

the approaches to insanity.

I

march up the prison corridor pig

who

looked

my

insisted

to

on

my

freedom.

my cell like that,

I

way.

.Do you know what is so odd about this? I would be almost ready to kill myself. I wanted to be free so badly. Always I burned, truly burned, with the need to leave prison, to be free: to get away from this thing that was destroying my life irrevocably. I would sell my soul for freedom from prison, but I won't give an honest day's labor or "behave" myself for an instant for that same thing. Is that not strange? My poor soul! What a state it must be in to be bought so cheaply .

.

.

.

.

.It isn't

in prison. It's

prisoners

who work

.

.

out their petty relationships

the prison system in America that drives

them

on one another. We are not to blame. We are not animals, but we are herded like animals. We are torn by the system of parole that rewards everything base and vile in to outrages

man. If we betray our poor comrades, we are rewarded. If we compete for the good graces of our jailers, we are rewarded. If we refuse to defend outselves, we are rewarded. If a man lets himself be used by the prison staff to catch ana

other prisoner, he

is

rewarded.

If

he sucks your cock

to get

The Inmates

you to

talk to

him, he

85

rewarded for the information and

is

congratulated for his method. There

no mistake made who spend all

is

when

prison staffs are regarded as brutal sadists

their

working time creating and influencing prison intrigues

most

of the

They

vile sort.

say that people

who

live

together gradually begin to

look alike. Married couples begin to "look" like one another

because their

an agreement about

facial expressions reflect

things around them, because their mannerisms sies

—

have become

that the lover

We

have.

all

lovers to

They

similar.

say

it is

and idiosyncra-

a sign of

and the beloved grow into one.

We

become

all

know

it

I

genuine love

have seen

"look-alikes."

Something deep within me, however, turns over each time

been

I

notice that

I

in

my

my

look like

in prison all their lives.

change

appearance.

I

It

both declassed and decultured.

is

this

who have

"brothers"

the cast of an outlaw, the face of

It is

Men who

outcasts, while existing in society, it,

in its grave

have over the years studied the

"outlander" (to use the archaic term).

loathe

it.

takes years of living together for

have

have become

this

an

men social

physiognomy.

I

lumpenproletarian cast of the criminal; this prod-

uct of a war of nerves no one declared but which

is

forced upon

us!

After ten or fifteen years, the sun never sets nor

There are no seasons: no wind or rain There are no children to give you a

prison. hair.

women

to comfort your soul.

I

rises in a

or sunlight in your vision of

life,

no

have never walked beneath the

sky at nighttime on prison grounds.

Your needs

are transformed into creatures that stalk you

with reflections of every flaw in your personal existence. There is

nothing so superfluous as the personal need to

needs, and those needs

fulfill

personal

become magnified and kaleidoscoped

into such intense images

and

objects, they lose

what

little

IN

86 reality

they had until you, yourself, are no longer able to accept

reality as easily as

You

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

try only to

—

you once may have.

keep yourself together because others

—other

You don't comfort one another; you humor one another. You extend that confusion about this reality of one another by lying to one another. You can't stand the sight of each other and yet you are doomed to stand and face one another every moment of every day for years without end. You must bathe together, defecate and urinate together, prisoners

eat

are with you.

and sleep together,

The

talk together,

work together.

manifestation of the slightest flaw

is

world-shattering in

you very discreetly passed wind

huge stadium and suddenly the thousands of people grow silent and look at you in condemnation. That is what prisoners do to each its

enormity.

other.

It is as if

in a

GODS AND DRUGS

vM

ogis starve their needs to death.

them about

asleep, but they always like a

civilized

man,

awaken again and

puppet on their like

to

God, the

in

our breasts that

you and

all

feed mine dreams.

I

strings.

I

white men.

am

a

try to

God

put

move me

white man, a

The need

to live close

necessity, in other words, that breeds the certainty

God

exists,

has been washed from our genes

through history. Unlike you and most white men, of

I

drives

me

from even the

because, unlike others,

I

do not

ritual feel

my

despair

conventions of religion,

the necessity within

me

modern God, my despair does

of social conventions that respect the dead. Unlike

white men, philosophers, not drive

me

despair of

to the existential act of belief.

God, not because I do not want to but do not believe in religious ethics because cannot, and the same goes for all of my "beliefs." And for I

do not believe

because / cannot. I

who

in

I

IN

88

my

"feelings."

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST cannot choose what

I

envy, hate, love or

I

believed the death penalty to be absolutely "im-

desire. If

I

moral/

would not hesitate to save anyone from execution. my conscience would haunt me. Is all this a psycho-

'

I

Otherwise,

logical aberration? Is

it

"idealism"?

I

do not think

But

so.

I

modern existentialist philosophy unconsciously aims finding a way for a man to live with a guilty conscience, a

think at

all

He

ple.

would seen

loves

too,

if

Man

and simlife too much. He fears others too much. And I I could, but I cannot live with a lie. But I have

conscience that haunts him.

men who

is

a coward, plain

are such facile liars they can stick to their story

for decades.

...

It just

be rooted

in

occurred to

some

society (mankind) in

of

parallel

and

me

that any brand of theism

brand of "faith." Displaced

beings always results in faith

in personal

some metaphysical world. Faith is a a phenomenon. Existential faith for

in the distinction

between one's

ass

hell of a concept, a hell

Sartre

and

For strange reasons too

(rather literally).

he actually said that

must

faith in

meant

faith only

a hole in the trite to

loss of faith (i.e., fear;

ground

go into here,

phobia) in a hole

mean that also literally) results (by displacement) in the phenomenon known as homosexuality. He really said that to(I

ward the

last

two hundred pages of Being and Nothingness.

read that thirteen years ago and

anyone (even he) could be so thing

—even

when

if

it

still I

I

have trouble believing

crass, so stupid, as to say

such a

were, in a way, true. Idealists are so naive

they talk about material

reality.

human element in all religions very beautiful and touching. Religious ideas move me very much, almost as much as the people who hold those beliefs. am moved by the .

.

find the

I

I

knowledge that you find consolation I

wish / could.

You

are a very lucky

Kierkegaard, Buber and Jasper spired I

feel

and changed me. I

owe

in religious existentialism.

What

—

to

little

man.

name

My

three

readings of

—

left

emotional maturity

me I

in-

have

to Soren Kierkegaard's works (after Nietzsche's

childish ravings).

89

Gods and Drugs

want consolation more than anything in this world. I it if I have not been consoled by God, by a vision of the true Glory of God. I mean this with all my heart. Science is not consolation to me, any more than any abstract knowledge I

cannot help

be

of the world can

The

a consolation.

truth of religious existentialism

My

than the truth of science.

because for some perverse reason, I

is

problem

my

of a different nature to live with both,

is

life

has been such that

just one of those. what Marxism has all

cannot be happy, cannot be consoled, with

The two must be

reconciled,

and that

is

the indication of possibly doing.

.

so

.

.God, I need a

now.

fix

It is

the only respite possible after

many years. Next month I begin working on my seventeenth

year behind bars.

To

the glow that begins like a

feel

my

up through

thing nothing else can give me.

with

my belly and rises my temples, is someme what need to live

fire in

nerves and organs, up to gives

It

I

all this.

The

this. You do not becomes necessary out

other gods are nothing compared to

have to believe

in anything.

of despair to believe in

you can

live

believing

When

it

God, you have cheated oppression when mind into

beside the beast without twisting your

it is

God.

Someone said that if there was no God, men would invent The man who invented opium must have been the most

one.

rebellious.

I

believe the word, in this religious context,

is

damned.

Have you noticed how, into revolutionary matters tip of I

is

true clear to the

South America.

sometimes think

sphere" capitalist

is

mushroom,

it is

our antidote to the

devil.

The "atmo-

most powerful monolithic I do not "need" what the few drugs (a little marijuana,

so stifling in this the

empire

in

devil alone can give

I

hemisphere, drugs are tied

in this

somehow? This

the entire world.

me

if I

have a

hash).

wish revolution

in this

country were as simple as that

in

IN

90

underdeveloped countries.

industrially

my

life in

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST would otherwise end

I

the act of murdering a pig in the prison corridor.

when

Especially nowadays,

much

prisons are so

"easier"

(i.e.,

American communist). I long without respites once in a while. These

psychologically an inferno for an

would not

last

respites are only available

through drugs.

Ole!

What if am only justifying myself unconsciously with these I

words and they are I

silly

but not as

realize,

excuses to be an asshole?

fully as

should, that

I

about myself are only expressions of

my

all

these doubts

isolation.

Given the

material freedom to act, to organize and develop situations and ties,

remember

to

my mind. would laugh of my "reflections on my

no such self-doubt would enter these (present) days

I

reflections"!

A

comrade

arrived here the other day from another prison.

He thinks of discipline no drugs, no punks,

in

terms of physical health (no smoking,

etc.).

In terms of calisthenics almost. This

attitude expresses an ultra-leftist tendency

degrees; so far to the

He came first

time

left, it is

to prison with a natural life sentence. This

in prison.

Although he has been

years now, a lot of circumstances have,

him from many

protect ers

—and,

He means

it

is

his

in prison five or six

seems, conspired to

of the realities of prison: other prison-

therefore, himself.

does not understand

bourgeois,

which has come 180

identical to the right.

i.e.,

vice.

He

has the conscience of a

he has an obviously bad conscience, which

guilty feelings.

He

wants to stand aloof from the predicament of prisoners and yet he is one of them. Naturally, he has felt a few of their

most pressing needs graceful needs). to enjoy

He

(to

him

very humiliating, shameful, dis-

denies to himself he feels

them and seems

denouncing anyone who does not deny such needs

in

himself.

He

does not understand that

men who

are deprived of the

Gods and Drugs

97

most basic forms of happiness will always find that happiness in other forms. Happiness is a serious need: a need as final, as

human

inevitable, to the support of

life as sleep.

As long as he is a part of a people who can only find happiness in what people in other parts of the world call vices, he must feel the need for indulgence in those vices. There are several escape routes out of it. There is insanity (I mean lumbering, slobbering insanity). There is suicide. There is co-existence, and by this I mean becoming a tool of

who govern us in prison. None of these routes can get you away

those

in

one

piece. All of

them stem from fear of yourself, uncertainty about yourself. I told him once: "You cannot as a communist revolutionary bring your spick-and-span ass into a Peruvian bohio and de-

nounce the peasant-serfs for chewing the cocoa leaves for the cocaine and order them to first stop eating cocaine and wasting their bodies before they can organize for revolution." It is

one of the only forms of happiness possible

To demand

such a thing

is

to

their oppressors, their patrons

.

I

.

them.

for

demand they join forces with who make the same demands.

—

started taking heroin a long time ago in prison.

I

had

knocked back three years in the hole, solitary confinement. skin and bones, a nervous wreck (as usually occurs).

just

came out

I

My

friends sent a kid to

about

me and

eager.

I

my

cell for a present.

He was

excited

broke up the whole thing and sent him

away and cooked up a fix. I used for emotional reasons, I guess. We all need emotional security. It's the only way I can get it, so I do it. It's practical and most convicts serving long sentences use heroin for that purpose.

.

.

.There

is

a kind of marijuana that

and expensive.

A

It is

It is

is

therapeutic.

very good, very potent

the leaves of a sex-starved cannabis plant.

female cannabis plant

is

placed to grow

among male

surrounded by male plants. Pins are inserted

plants,

at various points

IN

92

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

of

its

stems to prevent the seeds from passing along the

to

be

fertilized

They say They say at actually

this plant, after several

night,

move.

when

It pulls its

arms about

its

by the males. She begins to quiver and

its

body

for

stalks suffer.

weeks, contorts in pain.

the sun goes down, you can see

it

though wrapping

leaves into itself as

warmth. The idea of tragedy

in plant

created by man.

life is

Everywhere

see suffering,

I

I

see

someone who

derives pleas-

ure from the fruits of suffering.

.

.Some people get sloppy and ignorant; some go numb sly and paranoid when they fuck with

.

—

and dead; some get dope

in prison.

myself until

I

get philosophical.

lately.

narcotic wave,

When

I

I'm alone

never realized this about

my

in

cell floating in a

begin to think about philosophical matters,

I

and things have such

clarity

almost

it is

the experience of

like

satori.

Today, on hashish (behind Benzedrine),

my bed and

by

to me. It I

is

I

felt

kept a notebook

important that occurred

fragmented but coherent.

discovered there

pearance and

reality;

than the other.

my

wrote whatever

I

I

is

only a relative difference between ap-

the one

is

intrinsically of

no more value

related this line to other things,

and here are

notes, verbatim:

The seem

interior

can induce exterior change. Vice versa:

We

always

to accept the appearance of things as being of less value than

Why? Men like me do not calculate value. This is why we fail to be stingy,

the "reality" of things.

fail

to

be properly clever

in

exchanging values with others.

Instead of calculating value, determining

its

refuse by a kind of built-in reflex to put a price

that

we have no

There But

is

as

Price

on

values ourselves, but in reality

worth, it.

It

we

instead

then appears

we have no

price.

a difference. I

and

said above, value.

is more "worthy" than the other? no more "moral" or real than the other.

which

The one

is

Gods and Drugs It is a

vicious circle

93

something chasing

itself,

its

own

tail in

pursuit

of something other.

After the abrogation of negation, there will be no contradiction

between such things

as "price

not the contradictions.

How

above the

tion of our species; a step It is

thing.

as

I

Even my

moment I

though could

The

is

will exist

Homo

sapiens. It

pleasures.

Even when

my

I

I

am

so

It is this

that

nism, Marxism.

Marxism. wish the

I

it

pass away.

greatest happiness.

my consolation. common people sense

Marxism

is

happy

have an appetite to see

me

anguish,

in the doctrines of

commu-

notion of spiritual existence in any form causes

despair.

but

a step higher in the evolu-

were weathering everything in this world. Every-

last forever, still

weather even

and value." The things

strange. It

is

It is this

they identify with the forces of Satan.

(A man with no apparent values who

feels distress to

the point of

anguish over the idea of a spiritual existence.)

Men And we

like

me mean the death of god even before god is conceived. God perish from the world and everyone can also

can make

"sense" this in Marxism.

CHOOSING SIDES: COMMUNISTS

AND MARXISM

TM

he better part of my conscious life has over the years become deeply enmeshed in a political outlook. It is one of the inevitable products of suffering in prison

"true" or "false" reflection of us in

all

my

is

—whether

beside the point.

It is

it

me.

is

a

It is

shoes.

is the truth told from a certain viewpoint meaning of a thing from that viewpoint. It is not quite the same as relative judgment. When one says one man s T freedom fighter is another man s terrorist, one understands what .

It

.

.Propaganda

defines the

propaganda

The

is.

opposite of propaganda

occurred that did not occur,

I

is

falsehood.

am

lying.

I

If

am

I

say something

not engaging

in

propaganda.

When Christianity was still establishing itself in Catholic Church, there was an agency

in

the

Roman

the Vatican called

Choosing

The

Sides:

Communists and Marxism

Office of Propaganda. Its mission was to teach priests

Church

how

officials

propagate

was not established to

but an outlook on the world.

lies,

Obviously, from a certain point of view,

men

and

from the point of view

to interpret events

of the Christian religious doctrines. It

is

95

in prison are things prisoners

all

the

ills

that befall

bring upon themselves. This

propaganda.

From where self

—and one

I

stand,

no prisoner brings these

of the simplest reasons

lies in

ills

upon him-

the fact he

is

a

prisoner and does not have the freedom to do anything to himself. is

free

But is

if

he did have his freedom, one of the proofs he

that he will never injure himself,

himself. This, too,

Whose

I

is

do violence

to

propaganda.

point of view you side with and support

have seen what "blind justice" has done

is

up

to you.

in all its horrors

and I have seen physical torture beyond belief committed by prison authorities on prisoners. This is all bourgeois punishment.

The

prisoners with the strongest will rebel.

enough

ligent

to read

and understand

a little,

If

they are

intel-

they rehabilitate

themselves as men, not through religion or prison regimentation or physical torture or

"Thoughts on Capital Punishment," of, and the discipline that

but through the comprehension attends,

communism.

The government

tells

everyone that

taught through torture and that

it

communism

has to be

imprisons and poisons men's

minds, taking their "freedom of thought" away.

wing in society pressured the government, communist literature was absolutely forbidden in assure you, until the left

I

any prison population here

in

America.

and others have risked serious disciplinary punishment obtaining and guarding communist literature. I

.

.

.No one can

strong

will.

My

(or ever has)

I.Q.

accused

jumped from 127

me

of not having a

to 138 over

two years

of

%

IN

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

intense study of the works of

1969. This was

.

to

Marx and Lenin between 1 966 and

documented by

a prison psychologist himself.

.If anyone wants to know why prisoners are so attracted communist, subversive literature, the answer is simple: the .

communist press always prison and in describing

tells

the truth in reporting events in

prison conditions.

Is

that so difficult

to understand?

Prisoners

They do

come into contact with communists out of need. when they have no choice. They can write and

so only

appeal to senators, congressmen,

news media, the courts

civil

rights attorneys, the

—and on and on —

all

day long and not

receive the slightest attention, seldom even a

And what

thy.

word of sympa-

are they complaining about? Torture at the

hands of guards; frame-ups

for crimes inside prison they never

committed; lack of medical attention; capricious and arbitrary discrimination; the destruction of their mail; the interrogation of their friends

and

endless but

long, longer than any

it

is

relatives outside prison list

prisoners in other countries can present.

—the

list

Communists

prisoners attorneys so that the courts cannot so easily

people to

not

give

make

Commu-

confetti out of their petitions in the clerks' offices. nists inquire

is

of grievances that

about prisoners and go into the streets among the

stir

up concern

for prisoners.

Communists conduct

campaigns to governments (state, city, federal, demanding an end to the maltreatment of prisoners.

letterwriting etc.),

They do everything legally and

to rescue prisoners

possible to help reform these prisons

from

insanity, injury, death.

They do

this for all prisoners.

No one else does a thing. The and clergy are worse than anyone there

is

little

they can do, etc.

liberals, else.

the humanitarians

They

are "too busy";

They stand around

talking to

one another about their experiences with prisoners; they seek to be "recognized" as authorities and "spokespersons" for prisoners. And never once have they ever as a group or as individuals

effectuated a single reform or helped a single prisoner

Choosing

Sides.

Communists

tortured in prison.

use them, their names,

The FBI

accomplish behind the scenes prison reform.

assuming

rect in

this

97

Communists and Marxism

—but everyone denies

Communists always behave

as

is

to

cor-

out of vanity.

it

anyone would expect

real

people in a real society to respond to one another. Communists, not

leftists.

If

had not come under

I

their influence,

have gotten out of prison long ago. But over and over again.

dope

who

fiend

I

would have been

I

I

probably would

would have returned,

a thief or a jive-talking

has no idea of anything else in

singing the blues and paying his dues in prison.

life

Why?

except

Because

what the government, the state reared me from childhood to be; that is what adjusting to prison does to a man. that

I

is

am

still

very ignorant, but

important lesson

that

is

I

I

My

can remake myself.

will betray

most

anyone and anything

in

my beliefs, and I know mere "friendship," mere "blood," is but a sentiment. Anything, any tie I might have, that is based on a sentiment, is in danger of betrayal by me. I never do it easily; nothing is more extreme situations. Everything except

painful to

me

than to betray a sentiment either

in

myself or

done it only once or twice in my life, but in my heart I have done it a million times. I consider it a weakness now to be loyal to any sentiment. In that way I am loyal to my

others,

heart, I

and

I've

my "human

have chosen

weakness."

and

sides,

in so

doing

I

have won.

I

have

learned to always choose sides and attack the other side as ruthlessly as possible.

Perhaps

this

is

something

a

Castro could

easily

understand

but a Sartre could never grasp.

When

Dostoevsky pointed out that we are not generalized

men, abstract men, the the opposite: that shit, etc.

we

He meant

ideal

are

that

"man," he did not mean

all

all

to imply

ignoble, sensuous, weak, full of

of us, the ones "full of shit" (like

myself), weak, sensuous, ignoble, etc., are all capable of dying for a just cause, a "beautiful idea," a principle.

In short, that

— IN

98

we

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

are all capable of honor, not just the

He meant

human

that the

heart

is

"Noble Classes."

by no means

a

weakness. Quite the contrary. Nothing that touches the heart

absurd, because the Absurd

is

and the heart chooses

tion

to the exclusion of the other.

at

bottom

a contradic-

you

if

insoluable contradiction

will, is

a

A paradox titillates the human heart, does not burden

paradox. it

An

is

defends a term,

sides,

human human

with despair of absurd, meaningless existence. Half the prob-

lem with Sartre and Camus and their ilk is that the bourgeoisie have forgotten how to laugh from the heart but not the belly. This

.

another thing a Castro can understand, but not a Sartre.

is

.When

.

a

man

takes a position opposed to another

refuses to discuss the matter

the truth of his position

man

next

feels that

a feeling in his heart that the

does not have, he has taken an anti-human stand

against humanity. This

common

achieve a

on the grounds that he

lies in

and

we

correct, since

because

is

(social)

the aim of humanity to

it is

agreement.

Any

fool

can see

this

is

are social beings.

In reality, only equals can reach agreements. So long as classes are not equal, I

men

are not equal,

and there

particularly since these

over

us.

his life

words.

A man who is

in

"disagrees" that

no position

deeds

If

enemies hold the power of

will solve

someone

else

is

my

can reach any agreements with the enemies of

life

no way class

or death

should take

to restrict this "disagreement" to

the "disagreement," they are as valid

as words.

Sentiment today

it

is

is

not the source of

human weakness

although

the tool of that weakness.

Some (Spinoza, for example) say: Love is that weakness, but when I speak of the human heart I speak of something imbued with love.

Today I think human weakness springs from social Today I think human weakness stems from the

human

nature

In short,

is still

very

much incomplete

human weakness

lies in

divisions.

fact that

in its evolution.

the fact that no one

is

Choosing

perfect because

no society

of this that pardons

Communists and Marxism

Sides:

perfect. It

is

men from

not the consciousness

is

choosing

99

Only ignorance

sides.

pardons.

Being conscious that no one

is

perfect

is

to intuit, to grasp

with the heart the nature of an imperfection and to take a stand against

This

it.

is

commitment Wrong. Anyone's

called:

Dialectical Right contains

The human

the truth of

this.

maintain

integrity

its

around the world This

is

if

heart

is

if it

does not

by siding against Wrong, by chasing

need be to stomp

why Castro

heart can feel

betrayed

it

into dust.

allowed prostitutes to organize (unionize

their forces) instead of "abolishing" prostitution in

He

never

this.

This

is

why

(man-made), making sodomy

power

in

mankind

is

state

of

Havana.

go away and hide. Sartre did not properly

let it

understand

it

Lenin's party abolished "laws" a

crime when the Bolsheviks took

Russia through the October Revolution. just that abolishes

No law

men. The "higher" laws are

the material principles that govern the universe as well as the societies of

tion

the

men,

and sodomy felt

needs of

in spite of

prostitu-

were not necessary, and nine-tenths of

men

in a reactionary society are necessitated

by unnatural conditions of

Communists

men. There would not be

if it

social

life.

are closer to solving

all

kind than any scientists or philosophers

the "riddles" of manin

the past and present

have ever been. I

do not mean

to boast

but a demonstrable

fact.

when I

I

say this. It

is

not a "theory"

"Damn

did not one day say:

the

whole world! I'm going to be a communist!" Frankly, the

word scared the

a million ways, trying to I

shit

evade

out of

this

me and

"infamous"

pursued philosophy not as a disinterested

my

life

was fighting to retrieve myself from

my

a student or scholar,

but because

hasn't? Everyone has at lasted

cause

much I

longer;

some point

my

life

in life.

I

temporized

title.

scientist,

not as

depended upon

it.

I

death throes.

Who

my death

throes

But

was much more endangered be-

was fighting the time of

my

life

and

I

have been

in

— IN

700

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

prison a long, long time. Dissatisfaction with

me

me, drove

drove

life itself

farther than the rest.

peaked with Hegel and Schopenhauer and regressed with

I

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. But

Marx and

with Karl

ism since then has taken

me higher yet;

teach the highest principles of

Nietzsche

advanced to a higher

I

Lenin, Stalin and

human

Mao

society.

the presence of communists

felt

level

Friedrich Engels. Every advance in Marx-

when he wrote

of the philosophers of action, the philosophers of the future

who would come after him,

such as Kierkegaard,

who perceived

the death of faith and the birth of individual responsibility and

commitment. The thing-in-itself is knowable through action. Marx put an end to philosophy, to philosophical studies as

we

know them. He

traditionally

has given philosophers the

tools to

change the world, and ipso facto called forth a new

kind of

man who

.

.

Marx demonstrated philosophically that the endowed with legitimacy not by God but by a ruling

.Essentially,

State was class.

pursues philosophical problems.

In bourgeois society, whatever rights a citizen has are

granted by the State, by bourgeois interests. These rights support the existence not of the individual citizen but of the bourgeoisie.

What good is

one man to another

an object of exploitation.

skills, it

is

his

American society? Whether what is sought are in

He his

knowledge, his cooperation, his capital or his labor

makes no

difference.

Men

imprison one another not

just in

the concrete sense but in the most abstract and mental sense.

A man

is

originally

an obstacle for

men by

the grace of those

very qualities which are sought in him. Ultimately, in this society of

men,

obstacle to

men

The

it

is

Man

himself

tragedy of the society of

dominate Man.

who

—and not Woman, who Men

men

can never be

is

an insurmountable

plays is

no decisive

that

fulfilled as

it

role.

can never

men, because

Choosing

Sides:

Communists and Marxism

men

every advance in society drives

farther

101

from themselves by

the same measure that they require for themselves the qualities

they must seek in other men.

No man

American

in

society has

ever gone to his grave fulfilled, content, for this reason.

This

true because in his

is

he must confront, almost

life

and he must violate the good if he is to survive as a member of society. And what is meant by "good" if not the qualities of justice, equality, truth, freedom all of those things we consider "ideals'? How is this tragedy reconciled? How do men redeem themchoice between good and

daily, a

evil

—

selves in their

wholeness as

Man?

It is

reconciled in a farce

—

and with no lack of poetic justice: all the romantic intrigues of courtship and consummation of sexual love between men and

women

in this society of

duced

in

woman are reprobetween men. The powerful and

men

relationships

that excludes

wealthy magnate, the distinguished and honored senator, the ingenious and cultured scholar

man and

the sportsman

—

—

as well as the

find themselves

members

their "holy" will power, infatuated with

sex

—the other man. does not matter

It

mains.

woman;

if

can appear

It it

can appear

it

in in

is

common

family

one day, against

consummated, the

of their

own

intrigue re-

the underlying competition for a

almost every act of personal violence,

especially in the psychological violence

committed against the

mind.

And them

in the history of all civilizations a

all

as

they

fall

symptom common

to

and ruin is the image of that embracing himself in passionate

into flame

farcical fulfillment of

Man

sexual love.

.

.

.I've

The made

spent a lifetime packed with others like sardines.

most obvious thing to change. Fear

I

notice

is

how

easily

people can be

and ignorance are the mental weaknesses that The two are distinct; in no way are they

give access to people. identical.

Words

teach nothing but a vocabulary

—

in other

words, words only address the imagination in one way or an-

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

102

other.

sand

The

use they are put to should be to

People begin to

castles.

act,

not to build

think and change for the

really

if they are forced to experience things, whether good or evil. They become refined only in this manner. If it were otherwise, life would hold no gusto, no surprises, no interest. We would all be the same. Reform is merely words;

better only

revolution

A

action.

is

revolution

the most liberating experience, the most

is

glorifying experience

world

coming

own

their

.

is

destinies in their hands.

.To me, to

.

It is a time when a new when men and women carry

anyone can have.

into existence,

live

is

to change.

That

is

fundamental to

Marxism. I'm not trying to convert you, I repeat. You are much wiser than I. Wisdom to me is still a star in a galaxy light-years

You

away.

insult

me

by assuming

I

am

so prejudiced

I

cannot

hold a conversation with anyone.

.

.

me

.They always say ineffectual,

as

if

I

effete things.

were part of a conspiracy and told

—

She spoke

me

to

"Violence

all there was to it. happen outside the will of man. not conspiracies by experts. It does not matter

breeds violence"

as

if

that was

told her that revolutions

I

That they are what anyone thinks about revolution

is

No

They

talk as

though a

something that begins and ends with people

'

ing 'positions" on issues. test.

violence.

one 'Votes"

for

A

revolution

is

tak-

not a debating con-

it.

The maxim which states violence breeds violence should answer their own doubts about violence. If they think the American government and its ruling classes and flunkies have not always committed violence on the American lower classes and weaker nationalities, they live in a dream all by themselves. .

.

.There

ment,

is

nothing strange

in

the fact that a violent govern-

a violent class, breeds the violence that will

violently bring

them

to their knees.

someday

Choosing

.

understand the question that

.1

.

that

it

Communists and Marxism

Sides:

seems people can change

arises

103

when they

for the better

relate

without

vio-

lence, without experiencing the real force of circumstances of social revolution.

Aside from the fact that the experience of social revolution is

a cherished wish of

a dreadful thing at all

—and

most of the world's masses I would concede perhaps

—

a

it is

is

not

"bad

experience" for the enemies of those masses.

The enemies clergy

—

—and they

are mostly the political liberals

and

say that "an awful lot of violence and anguish can take " I'm not used to talking s skull.

place simply within one person like this,

but

this

is

one of the few cases where

I

can properly

say such notions are "quaint."

—

God knows, know all about "one person's skull" but let me just say this. There are those who suffer from themselves I

and there are those who suffer from others. There is a vast difference. The first form of suffering is illegitimate. This by no means says it is not genuine suffering the sufferings of a

—

Hamlet.

It

is

illegitimate because

suffering of others. Selfishness Historically, classes,

it

is

it

really

does ignore the

genuine form of suffering.

a

has always been a malady of the oppressing

the ruling classes.

No

one

else suffers

from

it.

—

Words do not infuriate me. My beliefs are "arid?" they must be because my life is arid. I have never qualified my belief in things like violence, and your friend is indeed a "cultured Marxist" nowhere near the Marxist I am if he is unaware that Marxism-Leninism preaches violent conflict. If one phrase could characterize Marxism in action in capitalist

—

—

would be violent conflict. I do not But it is a fact of our society (and "human behavior," as you suggested). it

like

it

and never

did.

not,

I

believe, of

society,

said

.

I

.

.The type of ridicule

I

like best

nineteenth-century "critiques," the

by Kant and refined master of

it.

To be

is

the eighteenth- and

critical

method originated Marx was a

in revolutionary writings.

able to breed

contempt

for

something

is

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

104

associated with the ability to teach. a thing lightly,

by being

airy

You cannot teach by

about

its

surface

People tolerate things that amuse them, even

But no one

taking

—by humor. if

doesn't

it

what he has contempt for. There are things in this world that need to be set straight. Amusement is not the way to get the job done; contempt is. What creates amusement and humor is differences that truly are only transitory or surface differences. But to laugh at the differences between, say, the working class and the bourgeoisie as if they were only surface differences is to lie. The differences "suit" them.

tolerates

are painfully profound.

The

anguish of a bourgeois over

and the anguish of

party)

life

(what

tie to

wear to the

a proletarian over life (lack of shoes

for the kids) are not superficially different.

They are not

equiva-

lent.

.

.

.Once from

letters

in the hole, serving

a fortyish

movement people asked the idea being that outside

who were

if

about two years,

woman who

wrote

me

I

received

because some

the public to write and show concern,

the Bureau of Prisons

concerned,

it

would save

knew

me

I

had people

from the goon

squad after every meal, then at the psych building

in Spring-

all, did work. We became friends and had nothing but my balls in that cell, but if I had a few dollars, I could have bought something from the prison store by ordering it. I had no toothpaste, let alone a cup of coffee or cigarettes. I once asked her (she was constantly ending her letters, two a week, with "Be sure and let me know if you need anything") if she could send me a few dollars and I listed the essential things I needed. She wrote me a haughty letter (I in a strip-cell, so fucked up even the sight

field. I

This strategy,

wrote a

all

lot to her.

in

I

of a piece of colored cloth

moved me

to euphoria), telling

me

and that she did not like "materialists." She said she thought I was above "material things." I quickly wrote her in my frenzy not to be abandoned, and apologized. She wrote me letters on rich, scented paper and sent them in scented envelopes, and told me about her probI

surprised her

Choosing

Sides:

Communists and Marxism

lems getting into television acting and

(I

105

swear to God, I'm

not lying) about her having "only one" mink coat that meant everything to her!

When

you are so down that you

you hit the bottom

there,

"bottom";

it

—

or so

will cling to

anyone out is no

seems. There really

it

bottomless, this pit of the "ten thousand

is

things" that you

fall

through forever

you do not grab one of

if

them, no matter how slimy.

am intellectually consistent, stable. But when it comes to my situation, my subjective side, can react to pain like rattlesnake. No one likes to be hurt, to be injured, and all of I

me, a

I

this in

painful. All of these things are

is

any

civilized society takes for

mean, petty things anyone I do not have.

granted but that

Anger, anger I'm not even conscious

of,

always burns within

me.

And

it

is

even painful to talk about

cannot possibly know heart, the feeling

me

to

that

so humiliating

is

one has

it

this experience, for

and

to suffer through

it

to you because you it is

so close to

delicate, that

to grasp

what

it it

my

seems really

means.

someone

and calm, someone on the gentle you for what you take in essence be nothing (perhaps slighted him accidentally in a minor

It is as if

side,

to

rational

were to one day rage

at

way). I

know how

and

to

And

to have

weep

it

feels to

be comfortable for pity

be a natural

Spartan outlook.

—who she missed one meal would me my "materialism," things" — there no me

someone

—

ascetic, a natural Spartan,

in that asceticism, that if

ridicule

for

"selfish-

"scheming for is greater insult to than to be accused like that. And yet, as I said above, we all have to get a grip on something, no matter how little, to break ness,"

through that pit of the "ten thousand things" (I sound Chinese philosopher, I know, but I just started The Secret of the Golden Flower (by C. G. Jung and Richard Wilhelm). the

fall

like a

.

.

I

can never be happy with the petty desires this bourgeois

society has

branded into

my

flesh,

my

sensuous being.

IN

106

And what

is

the experience

missed, so

odd about

so it

in the fact that

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST it all is

enjoys (or thinks I

that society has denied

it

enjoys).

oddity exists

cannot know from experience what

why am

I

I

have

not happy?

have been denied the society of others:

I

The

me

it is

as simple as

that.

.

.You rold me,

.

finally,

that

I

have a Marxist-Leninist vision

and that those ideas die the hardest of all. Not really. It depends on who has those visions. You said you prefer "ideas which are fragile and delicate and have to survive each day and be re-created each day under the most I

most scorn all

difficult of conditions."

think that perhaps you have scorned knowledge of "the difficult of

conditions" and are even

me and my

condition.

The most

now

fragile

trying hard to

and

delicate of

ideas are those that reflect the fact that within

beings, there defile: a

is

human

an impenetrable area that no one can enter and

heart of

human

tenderness so tenacious, so all-suffering

and accepting, calm and resilient to human response, to love, that no force on earth can ever defeat it. It is the idea of the soul and there are many of them; they are born "fragile and delicate and have to survive each day and be re-created each day under the most difficult of conditions." I need beauty like I need to breathe. Do you imagine that those most cherished revelations, those ideas you speak of, do not come to me in that pit as they do to you? I know how transitory beauty is, but I also know from experience how eternal it is in the heart of man. It just now occurred to me that I would like to think I have captured some of that beauty

—

for myself.

AMERICAN VIOLENCE AMERICAN JUSTICE: The Legal System

m n America

it

has always been popular to follow mass murder-

ers, crooks, killers of all stripe.

everything its

vast,

tioner's

that

if

it

America

fashions, even people

cultivates violence in

—the people fashioned by

complicated governmental administration. The Execu-

Song should speak

to America; should

tell

the story of Gary Gilmore entertains them,

Americans

if

they

thrill

to the violence done to (as well as done by) Gilmore, then they

should always be prepared, always have a gun or a cop within reach, because

American

it

will

happen again and again

traditional system of violence stands

as long as the

above the use

of reason.

For Americans to be shocked and disgusted

murders and is

at

at senseless

crimes of extreme violence against the innocent

exactly identical to an old, worn-out prostitute expressing

moral indignation at the thought of premarital sexual

America that. Tell America that

relations.

Tell

as

long as

it

permits the use of violence

IN

70S

in its institutions

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

—

in the

traditional to this country

whole vast administrative system

—men and women

will

always

in-

dulge in violence, will always yearn to achieve the cultural

mantle of

this society based on swindle and violence. America can get angry because of the violence done to my life and the countless lives of men like me, then there will be an end to violence, but not before. But whatever you say, tell America it is not (as Europe is fond of saying) a raging monster that was bred by the emigra-

When

tion of the worst blood of

America

Tell

it is

cannot, has never tried

And because

it is

all

the nations of the Old World.

a cringing, back-stabbing coward because to, exercise its will

a coward,

it

does not respect reason. America

resorts to the use of reason only as a final

only after too

it is

.

it

it

without violence.

attempt to persuade,

has tried unsuccessfully to destroy a man, only after

late.

who were ashamed yesterday of having Vietnam are now saying: "I fought for Are now proud of it. Proud of killing and

.The Americans

.

served in the military in

my

country."

(!!!??)

—mutilating—

a doll-like people whose average adult male weighs under ninety pounds, stands under five feel tall, and tends to be a vegetarian and to practice that delicate form of sexual innocence called in the West "free love." Proud of

torturing

deflowering a gentle and beautiful people!

.

.

.

It is a

big American pastime to talk about

—and

how

horrible

America is worse than the Soviet Union! Particularly since no one in this goddamn country will help or gives a good goddamn what happens to us. This is the most unjust and oppressive country in the whole world, and I'm not going to go into lawyerlike details and comparisons. I'm not going to "argue my case" by their rules. I am totally convinced and I do not believe I would have suffered greater injustices in Soviet justice

is

yet

—

any country in the world than

I

have here for a lifetime.

American Violence/American

I'm wrong, show me. That

If

the

last

decade: help

us.

is

what

709

Justice

have been saying for

I

Bring justice to these courtrooms,

jails,

prisons. .

if I were asked the single most consistent cause derangement in prisoners, I can tell you with utmost

.In prison,

.

of mental

confidence: injustice. First

and foremost, the

The

land.

dured

if

injustice of the laws

and courts

injustice of the prison administration could

of this

be en-

that were the only injustice.

maxim: Anyone in prison who has faith in retrieving the injustice done him by appealing to American jurisprudence will go mad unless he abandons it and refuses to ever believe there is an ounce of justice in any courtroom or I

can state

as a

prison in America. This does not apply to I

must emphasize. America

If

have an animal

I

whom

far

is

I

countries. This

from "universal"!!

have taught to stand on

and beg on command, and

legs

all

it fails

to

do

so,

I

its

hind

must punish

it to obey my command. by deprivation as well as with the whip. Any other way of teaching it to always obey would register in the animal as a reward for disobeying. This applicait

some manner

in I

inflict pain.

I

tion of force can

animal and If

commit

I

then

still

I

to teach

can do

it

be humanely executed.

I

cannot injure the

be humane.

force to a degree that

it

can be called violence,

seek the destruction of the animal and not just the

correction of a habit of disobedience.

no one can dispute any of this. I taught the animal to stand and beg by rewards. But if at some point or for whatever reason it does not properly obey and stand and beg, I may send it to an animal trainer. When I do So

that,

far,

I

tell

the trainer what

do on command. I to stand and beg. If

to

I

fail

to

do

tell

that,

it is

him

if I

the animal knows but does not

to teach

it

to

obey

my command

simply send the animal to a trainer

be trained generally speaking, the trainer may teach

it

every-

110

IN

thing but what

it

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST requires to obey the

command

to stand

and

beg.

The animal

learns that

any pain

being that nourishes and sustains for disobedience.

If

inflicted

it is

pain

is

stand and fight or "learn"

its

pain

is

it it

it by the upon itself

no recourse but the application of

violence in order to destroy the animal.

with violence;

upon

inflicts

does not assimilate this "lesson" of

it

self-inflicted pain, there

itself

it

will

To kill

it.

become maddened and

will flee. It will

do

It will

defend

sullen. It will

all this if it

does not

self-inflicted.

Do not ask me what all

this has to

do with American

justice:

American system of justice. American courtroom. He is told to shut his mouth unless spoken to. He is told he is a fool if he tries to be his own lawyer. He is told his motivaof the essence to the

it is

A

prisoner begins his "training" in an

tions are not the subject matter of his indictment for crime.

His court-appointed lawyer tells him what law he violated and how many years in prison the punishment carries. He is told that if he informs on and betrays his friend, he will receive leniency. If he is the only one charged with the crime, he is told that if he helps solve other crimes, he could get leniency. He is told that because he knows the hour of the day and the day of the year and that he is in jail, he cannot claim to be insane. It does not matter that he cannot either read or write or understand the vocabulary or the rules of the court.

why he robbed

not matter

a store

—

just that

It

he robbed

does it.

If no violence was committed and he has a degree of wealth which places him above the need to rob a store, he will receive leniency in some form if this is his first indictment for crime.

He

will not

Yet he

be sent to

will

prison.

go to prison

if

he does not have the degree of

wealth which places him above the commission of such a crime.

and

He

is

sent to prison

if

he

is

poor.

That

is, if

he

is

poor

refuses to (or cannot) act as an agent of the police to betray

his friends If his

and solve whatever crimes they committed.

lawyer likes him, he will dicker with the prosecutor and

the judge to obtain as short a sentence to prison as he can.

If

American Violence/American

111

Justice

his lawyer does not like him, he will not make that effort. In America today over eighty-five percent of all defendants who go to prison have pled guilty.

In

of this the prisoner never learns a single social value;

all

never learns the definition of law or the customs of his society that the judicial system claims to be based upon.

Every right the prisoner has

turned against him.

is

chooses to plead not guilty in order to receive a

he

will, if

found

the

guilty, receive

maximum

trial

he

If

by

jury,

penalty the law

prescribes for putting everyone to trouble, for "wasting" every-

one's time. His

trial

jury of peers

a determination of acquittal only

is

instructed solely to reach

if it

cannot be proven by the

government that the physical event did take

place.

The jury is The jury The jury is

told that his motivations are, in essence, irrelevant. is

never told

it

can acquit for any reason at

intimidated into believing

law

if

did otherwise. Yet

it

personal sympathy. of lawyers is

it itself

Not

and scholarly

it

would be

all.

in violation of

the

can acquit out of nothing but

the fine-honed, specious reasonings

all

jurists in

the world can refute

this. It

a practical fact.

Men

have pled guilty to murder and have been executed

without anyone asking them the simple question:

Why?

In

no

other country on the face of this earth do such injustices exist today.

There

is

no tyranny

profound

this

in

any country but

America. It is

held in this country that the punishment ends upon

sentencing and is

commitment

to prison. This

not punished further, while he

is

means

a prisoner

in prison, for the crime. It

—

would be "double jeopardy." This is what the law states yet there are two black men who were sent to prison ten years ago as youngsters and the judge ordered that every Christmas Day the warden was to place them in solitary confinement until New Year's Day and it is done. This is the spirit of American

—

justice.

The

prisoner enters prison.

He

is

thrown into

a violent

whirlwind of moral, mental and physical destruction.

The government

likes to

boast that capital punishment

is

— IN

112

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

any more. The government likes to boast two or three men out of over two hundred million has been executed in the last twenty or twenty-five

virtually nonexistent

that only citizens years.

Yet more prisoners are murdered today

in

American prisons

than in any other on earth. About ten percent of America's

wounded

murdered annually. Every single prisoner every day must exist with the imminent threat of assault at the very least and from any quarter. prisoners are seriously

or

—

.

is

.

.The sentence to prison

committed

is

to prison for x

A man

the judicial punishment.

number

of years. So

he

sits in

and the law releases him. It is bearable because he can measure it, no matter how insufferable the prison conditions are. If he leaves an eye or hand behind, he prison for x years

is

nevertheless getting out.

But when the

judicial

sentence

is

indeterminate, he

tenced to a longer term every time any pig

time he "rules"

he

is

is

disciplined,

—which

feels like

is

resen-

it.

Every

punished for infractions of prison

are as arbitrary as the currents of the

in effect resentenced to prison

wind

before the parole board.

There are no procedures before the parole board that guarhim "judicial due process" and this fancy legal term means no less than a guarantee of justice. How does a prisoner count the time he must serve in prison when it has no end? If it was a life sentence, it still has an end. A prisoner can even face that he will die in prison but by a happy chance may someday be freed before his life is over. The mind's relationship to time is fundamental What can the mind think when the fate of the man has been reduced to such a degree of uncertainty that he cannot predict the next

—

antee

—

day or the next hour?

The

next day or the next hour could result in the certain

annihilation of the (momentary) limit the law has supposedly

placed on his imprisonment, his punishment.

He

could break one of those petty,

mean

prison rules at any

American Violence/American

113

Justice

And also (more importantly) upset the balance of his mind. One of the greatest scientists and philosophers in the world said that the human moment and

mind

is

upset the balance completely.

only conscious of a progression in time because

it

can

count (Kant).

What

happens when the mind experiences

quantity

it

moment

cannot count

the

in time

mind must

—

a progression of

for the reason that at

any

over again the process of

start all

counting because of events so capricious and arbitrary not even

can be calculated? .From here to there is five years. Each day closes the interval between my imprisonment and my freedom, which lies a moment beyond those five years. At any point in that interval, I must stop and start counting all over again, over and over again. For almost twenty years I have had to stop and start over many times. And I am not serving a life sentence. I have merely a nineteen-year indeterminate sentence yet I have their uncertainty .

.

—

served, to this date, ten years of I

have

now been

started counting

in prison for

my federal

it.

That

is

not

all,

however.

eighteen years because before

time,

counted eight years

I

I

in state

prison.

But the parole board ten years.

been

free

weeks

six

have

It refuses to

insists

have only been

I

"recognize" reality

once since January 1963: as a fugitive before

much

I

I

in prison for

—because

I

have

escaped once and lived

was incarcerated again.

Why

do not recognize that I turned the key on myself. Others turned the key on me; I was sent to prison against my will and am held in prison against my will. What else is the meaning of these bars around my cage or those riflemen that keep constant vigil in the I

served so

time? This

is

why:

I

gun-towers that line the high walls that surround this cage?

And I

they like to say that

must

face, or

I

am

not perceiving

reality!

submit to mental derangement, that

serve nineteen years to the day.

the maddening promises that

before every day of

my

I,

I

I

must

can therefore not "believe"

like all

the others, will walk free

"indeterminate" sentence

is

over.

The

IN

114

only way a

man

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

can

—because prison

live

with himself in hell

in Christian society

is

is

abandon hope

to

nothing more than the

expression of Christian hell after death

.

.

.

American judiciary, anyone who is sent to prison suffers civil death. American legal scholars scoff at this today and call it a thing of the past. If they would take their faces out of their books and look a moment beyond official courtroom "facts" and events, they will find civil death is very much in effect in every American prison. How so? It is so simple any child can figure it out. There is no legal relationship between prisoners and any social relationIn the

ship

among

cial

relationship

prisoners not monitored directly

—by

the pigs

is

in

—

a "forced" so-

violation of rules.

It

is

insubordination.

No debt a prisoner contracts from another is not in violation No prisoner can claim an obligation to

of rules. Serious rules.

other prisoners without declaring war. .

.

.There was once a prisoner

named

Blackie,

and during

a

he seized four guards hostage and held them through the quelling of the uprising. In a battle with hundreds of armed riot

guards, one guard was stabbed to death

and many hospitalized

for injuries. It

in which guards regularly bad habit of attacking prisoners randomly.

was one of those penitentiaries

had

fallen into the

No

one ever went to the hole

beaten as he was placed

in those days

in a cell.

One

without being

day the guards

prisoner and there was a mass inmate uprising.

That

killed a

is

how

it

began. Blackie took hostages in the middle of a pitched battle to

He demanded the news media enter the prison and hear the grievances of a committee composed of three men of each race, and he demanded my release from the hole for defend himself.

this purpose.

The

news media were not allowed inside the prison. newsmen were brought in. There were nine of us, and we voiced our grievances until the morning hours and Blackie released the hostages unharmed. He was later removed to a jail outside prison and no one ever national

Instead,

two

local small-town

American Violence/American

saw him

alive again.

his shirt

from

his

He

was

bunk. For

Blackie was well over

six

seventeen years and loved

He

have hanged himself with

said to

many feet life,

115

Justice

reasons no one believed

He had been

tall.

especially his

this.

prison

in

own.

was not given an autopsy and the only witnesses of

death were guards. They in fact wrote the original death

his

report.

A

young intern came to see me during some legal proceedtown and he spoke to me in hushed tones through the

ings in

screening in the holding tank of the

He had only seen me that there was The

jail.

morgue, but he told

Blackie's

body

a crease

an inch deep around Blackie's

at the

and was an expert. He told me that over two hundred pounds of pressure had been applied to the noose and he explained the physics of it. Only two or three pounds of pressure is enough when a man hangs himself. His weight did not matter in any throat.

intern was specializing in forensic medicine

real sense.

The "law" him

cannot be buried without an But Blackie had no relatives. I tried to have an autopsy and filed a petition before the

states that prisoners

autopsy at the

least.

disinterred for

courts with the help of an attorney.

The

ruled, "recognized" that while Blackie

court,

when

it

finally

was never given an

autopsy, there was no living cause for action, since

I was not on him. I tried to get around this by producing proof that Blackie was indebted to me, and his death had resulted in a legal financial loss the government must pay if it was found he died of causes other than suicide. The court ruled no prisoner can have obligations of any kind

and had no

his relative

legal claim

to other prisoners.

How am

going to get him out of his grave?

I

to get justice for

As long

as

do nothing

The

I

.

.

am

How am

going

him? nothing but a ghost of the

civil

dead,

I

can

.

prison reform that took place for twenty years

1960 to 1980

I

—never succeeded

— from

in establishing the constitu-

IN

116

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

tionality of prisoners' rights. It

stopped short at the

civil rights

of individuals. It

has resulted today in consequences few of us dare to

contemplate.

When

the prison reform

needed to do was send

had the good sense

courts

movement began,

a letter to a judge

to

all

and ask

a prisoner

for help.

The

presume that there was a funda-

mental antagonism between a prisoner and those

who held him

and so the courts did not question

a complaint

prison,

in

outside the courtroom.

Today, the courts

not accept even a petition for a

will

writ of habeas corpus unless a prisoner sends in a filing fee or a certified affidavit of pauperism

ployee

who

empowered

is

penniless prisoner

—and the

to administer oaths

must turn

He must

to.

ation of the prison in order to

file

prison

is

em-

the one a

get the cooper-

a complaint against the

prison.

In essence, the courts have returned not only to a "handsoff" doctrine in regard to prisons,

question that

may

but also

in regard to

any

lead to an issue of prisoners rights (distin'

guished from individual constitutional

civil rights).

Therefore,

the courts have even embraced a "hands-off" doctrine toward prisoners.

We

have been handed over to policemen to be dealt

with in any way

it

a true statement

regard

in

a

to

pleases them.

I

have never read or heard

come out

of the

prisoner's

condition,

mouth

of a policeman

and

curious about the mentality of policemen,

do

is

tical

have the vaguest notion of what a fascist,

and

find

anyone

if

is

one has to

all

fascist

is,

a poli-

out a few of a policeman's ideas

The policemen are the concerned. The every whim of

about patriotism and democracy. law so a

far as a prisoner

backward pig

be

murdered,

is

is

framed

for

crimes

tortured within an inch of his in

explanation

is

A

prisoner can

never

committed,

law for a prisoner today.

a

single,

life

he

—and

all

that

is

required

unquestioned statement of a

American Violence/American pig

that

no

was

there

foul

play

117

Justice

on

his

part.

Nothing

more.

While

in

Leavenworth, a grand jury

turned an indictment on

me

for a

in K.C., Kansas, re-

crime that carries a ten-year

sentence: conveying a dangerous weapon.

—

Do

you know what

pen one of those long BIC pens. The little ball was missing, and so they decided I had altered it enough to make it a dangerous weapon in the hole. (Now, I have a copy it

was?

It

was

a

of the indictment;

send

it

to you.

I

if

would please me to and the BIC was found "insane" on another

you disbelieve me,

was arraigned before

charge was dropped only after

I

it

a magistrate,

charge.)

.

I

.

.The law has never punished anyone

want

for hurting

punish a wrong done me,

me.

If

entirely

up to

Just picture yourself in that position right there in

New

justice to

it is

me.

You can't call a cop or the law when your house is burgled, when you are mugged downtown. The police walk York.

into your

home,

slap

you around

(to

put

it

mildly)

and help

themselves to whatever they want. Your wife and kids even.

Anyone

there in

New York can

are punished without even

have absolutely no rights

The most you can do

accuse you of anything and you knowing who your accuser is. You to legal protection by prosecution.

is file

a civil

are "slapped," but nothing

hands"

is

I

hope

merely

this

this.

doesn't

complaint against the is

done.

doesn't even bother to respond to the "admonition." up, stretches, yawns

and ambles away. All the

faces

even the judge's, are covered with smirks. That's I

have had to

live all

city.

The "slapping of The judge says: "Now, Mayor (Warden), happen again." That's it. The mayor

Hands

my

it.

He stands

around you, That's

how

life.

What would you do? I assure you, you'd become a deranged coward or the exact opposite. If you become the former, every-

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

775

happy and

one

is

the

latter, they'll

you

they'll give

little

rewards.

destroy you at every opportunity they get.

They'll say you are "crazy," a psycho, etc.

coward

you become

If

The "norm"

is

the

in this situation.

To become

rehabilitated

means

to accept

and

by the and

live

values of your society. It requires not just faith in the laws

customs of your society, but

—and

faith in the people of your society

to extend those values,

and reproduce that

faith, in

your

transactions with others in social intercourse.

To

someone

rehabilitate

a process of teaching. It

is

process of learning by experience for the rehabilitation.

He

requires to

know

man

is

a

need of

in

the benefits of the values

of his society; he requires a firm understanding of the proper

and customs of his society. man who is a social anomaly can

uses of the laws

Only

a

best interests, especially

him, for a

social

when

fail

to pursue his

the pathway becomes clear to

anomaly knows the values of

and

his society

laws and customs.

its

The system of justice in America teaches these as to men as if they were social anomalies already

—

lessons if

they

had knowledge of the values and customs and laws of this society. This reflects the American maxim: Ignorance does not acquit.

So rehabilitation punish

men who

And what tail?

It

is

presumed and American

(theoretically)

know

does punishment that aims at rehabilitation en-

does not aim at winning

presumed

justice seeks to

better.

a prisoner

men

over by reason

cannot be won over by reason.

—

It is

it

is

the

application of force.

.

.

.A system of justice that does not instruct by reason, that

does not rationally demonstrate to a

accomplishes the opposite ends of

No

one

in

any prison

in this

man

the error of his ways,

justice: oppression.

country has ever been shown

— American Violence/American

the errors of his ways by the law.

It is

119

Justice

an annoyance no one

in-

volved in the administration of justice wants to be bothered with.

So

it is

relegated to the prison regimes.

Everyone

in prison has

committed crimes, could be

called a

But that does not mean everyone in prison belongs would like to suggest that there are men who are justly

criminal. there.

I

in prison

prison

but do not belong there.

who do

there are

men

justly in

belong there. Perhaps the great majority of

prisoners belong there.

come and

And

They keep

returning. I've seen

them

one Almost every one of them entire prison turn over in population. (in fact, everyone I've seen) feels relieved to be back. They need shaves and showers; they are gaunt, starved-looking when they come in from outside. Within a week they are rosycheeked, starched-and-pressed, talking to everyone. Laughing a lot (hail-fellow-well-met). They fit in in prison. This is where they belong. Or, to be more charitable because if men pursue their best interests, no one really "belongs" in prison go; leave

and return

for so long, I've seen at least

—

me

let

say that there are less uncertainties in

than on the outside. they have it.

Prison

become is

It

is

institutionalized out of habit.

much more

prison

life in a

not a matter so simple as that

than a habit with

That

men who

is

not

belong

here.

The

point

is:

there are those

—and they

day

—

Let's leave off

They

just

do not

where fit

in

it is

they belong; that

—do not belong—

many, but

are not

men for whom prison does punish and who do not belong here in prison.

they are

is

punishes every

not the point.

in prison. /

am

speak-

ing in terms of being, not justice or any other occasion.

Luckily, those in prison

who do

and seldom

a long, long

time

much time But there are some who do spend For them the hole was made.

not belong seldom spend

return.

in prison.

Prisons certainly were not erected to serve the purpose of a

boardinghouse; a private estate; a separate cultured I

commune.

submit to you that prisons can serve the purpose of rehabilita-

— IN

120

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

tion of men. But there are men who cannot be rehabilitated, and these men belong in prison. Society and not prison prevents their rehabilitation. For rehabilitation is something we all stand in need of; the rehabilitation of society itself has not been accomplished. This is reflected also in the fact that so

many men

in prison are

not

rehabilitated there (there in prison). If

society

man

be a

to

And

I

is

so intolerable that a

in prison,

it is

men

suggest that a few

man

can only

feel

himself

the "fault" of society. are constantly rehabilitated in

prison: they belong in society or they belong to

be dead. But

not in prison.

.No one has ever come out of prison a better man. I'm like Allenwood and Maxwell Field the places they send government informers and that frail species of individual who falls from the graces of the government or the Republican party or the Stock Exchange. I'm speaking of the penitentiary. There is at least one in .

.

not talking about places

Some

every state.

Michigan, federal

Illinois,

— —have states

government

like

New

York, Texas, California,

at least a half

itself

dozen of them. The

has over forty prisons but only about

a half-dozen penitentiaries.

I'm speaking generally.

I

do not mean

to say anything "less"

than San Quentin, Walpole, Leavenworth, Dannemora, sey

ber

Farm

(Huntsville), Anglola,

—do not

fit

into

what

I

am

Trenton

—

Ram-

prisons of that cali-

They do. have seen prisoners come and saying here.

For almost twenty years I There is not one of them who comes

to prison for the

first

go.

time

who is capable of the vast repertoire of crimes he is capable of when he finally gets out of prison. I'm not talking about the fine technicalities of, say, safe-cracking or the

mechanics of

murder. I'm not talking about methodologies.

No one learns

those things in prison, contrary to the govern-

ment's claims: prisoners do not learn

from other

prisoners.

They know how

how

to

commit crimes commit crimes as well to

American Violence/American

you (reading

as

about

how

to

this) do.

commit

121

Justice

Novels and the cinema teach more

anyone could

successful crimes than

possibly learn in prisons.

What

is

the will to

down their throats in spite of themselves is commit crimes. It is the capability I am speaking

forced

of. It

used to be a pastime of mine to watch the change in men,

to observe the blackening of their hearts. It takes place before

They

more bewildered than afraid. them. They are Every experiencing men and the administration of things no novels

your eyes.

enter prison

step after that, the fear creeps into

—nor even the worst rumors about

or the

cinema

teach.

No one work

start to

Everyone

is

in prison, are

is

It is a practical

very least

if

afraid. It

matter.

—someone

the yard or

thumb

prepared for

down

the

If

will

one

not prepared for

life

prison

—can

when they

threaten you.

tier to

your

cell,

When

first

it.

you do not threaten someone

—

fear.

at the

you walk across

you stand out

like a sore

kill.

times you have to "prey" on someone, or you will be

many

years,

you are not

bluffing.

is.

For want of a better expression, of

pigs,

not an emotional, psychological

"preyed" on yourself. After so

No

Even the

you do not appear either callously unconcerned or

cold and ready to

Many

is

it.

so dangerous,

it

this

is

a cynical experience

changes you so that you don't even

it's a way of commit murder, and everyone from the warden on down are active accomplices. That is putting it

notice the change in yourself. In five or ten years,

life.

You

mildly.

see pigs

The most well-known

politicians

suppress evidence of such crimes. often, It is

vowed ers

it is

and judges

are

rife.

You

actively

see

it

so

routine.

routine to see guards to

They

kill

make

sure prisoners

who have

one another are forced into a cell together. Prisonalready demonstrated they will kill anyone. You

who have

them kill each other ment of guards.

see

The

like flies at

prison clergy, the easiest of

the instigation and arrange-

all

to intimidate, keep their

— IN

122

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

mouths shut because (they whine) they cannot "prove" anything and, you know, the evil is outweighed by the "good" they can do if they just keep quiet and "do what they can." If they speak out, they are

By the time you

fired.

get out

of anything, any crime at

Have you of

combat

—

man

ever seen a

himself to murder?

am

I

you get out

if

—you

despair because he cannot bring

not talking about murder in the heat

that very seldom occurs in prison

of cold-blooded premeditated murder.

who do

have ever seen

—

The

Most

of

them it.

I

am

speaking

only prisoners

I

not suffer from that despair of being

who are capable of it (not a few). somewhere down the line that they

incapable of murder are those

are capable of

are capable

all.

—

find

—

To

discover that there was no basis for your

young consummating his man who has doubts about being capable of and when the time first sexual encounter with a woman comes, if he did not perform magnificently, at least he got the

anxieties about

murder

is

a feeling similar to that of a

—

job done. If

You

you can

feel stronger. kill like

that,

elements of every crime

you can do anything. All of the

come

into play.

There

is

the deception;

the ability to hold a secret; the calculation; the nerve activity of well-planned

Most important, you

—and the

violence.

learn never to trust a

man, even if he deceive them-

how men

sincere.

You

learn

and how impossible

it is

to help

seems honest and selves

and executed

them without

injuring

yourself.

You know

all

of this

and more

in a conscious

way before you

get out of prison.

do you steal when you get out? Why do you commit crimes you never dreamed of being able to commit before you entered prison? You have changed so that you are not even aware there was a time you were incapable of such things. If you meditate on it, you tell yourself that you steal because you are no longer afraid of going to prison. This is because you do

Why

not remember you were not afraid originally.

The

truth

is

that

— and

money

I

mean

the wealth of a

life-

— American Violence/American

time you have labor. Capital

something that

All you require

is

123

cannot be earned by honest

lost in prison is

Justice

is

expropriated: stolen.

a little self-confidence

—and anyone who

walks out of prison has that: he has confidence in himself, but

no confidence

The how to

at all in others.

sorry thing about

all

this

steal properly in prison!

is

that you truly did not learn

The very

thing the government

and the apologists for American prisons charge prisoners with teaching one another. All the capability you have for crime never made you a whit more intelligent in that regard.

—

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

AND GARY GILMORli!

CJomeone

passed

me

a small

book containing a selection of I found a fragment on capital

letters written by Marx. In it punishment This may amuse you. It was an unfinished letter to the New York Herald Tribune in response to an editorial in The Times on capital punishment. found it interesting because Marx points out a causal I relation within society between capital punishment and senseless, atrocious murders and suicides. The Times editorial observed that whenever there was an execution especially a well-publicized, famous execution there seemed to follow "instances of death by hanging, either

—

suicidal or accidental/' within society.

Marx

attacks this

predilections

phenomena

by saying The Times

and bloody at

logic,

y

with

its

hanging

"has stopped before these

the apotheosis of the

hangman"

—

in

other

words, that people were merely imitating the hangman. The

Times ignored the hanged these

phenomena

man

of "suicides

as having any connection and accidents."

to

125

Capital Punishment and Gary Gilmore

Marx showed

this

by citing some data compiled by another

The Morning Advertiser (an enemy of capital punishment and The Times). The data cover a period of forty-three days of the year 1849, showing not only suicides but 'murders of the most atrocious kind, following closely upon newspaper

(British),

the execution of criminals':

MURDERS AND Hannah Saddles M.G. Newton

EXECUTIONS OF

.... March .... March

Millan Petley

20

20

SUICIDES

March 22 March 22

J.G. Gleeson (four

Smith

.... March

27

Murders at Liverpool) Murder and Suicide at

Howe

March

31

Poisoning at Bath

March 27 April 2

Leicester

W. }.

....

Wards murders

his

mother Landish Sara

.

.

.

April 9

Thomas. May 9

April 13

Yardley

April 14

Doxey, parricide

April 14

J.

Bailey

kills

his

two

children and himself J.

Griffiths

J.

Rush.

.

.

.

.

.

April 18

Chas. Overton

April 21

Danie Holmston

Marx merely acknowledged self

April 7 April 8

Bailey

.

April 17

April 18

May

a relationship here,

2

but he him-

did not draw those parallels (or the table).

Marx points out that the bourgeoisie accurately predict the number and kind of crimes that will be committed over any given period, based on a number of approaches including the

—

above

table.

Budgets

for prisons, scaffolds, judges (so on) are

estimated on such figures.

Marx itself as

writes that

it is

difficult for

the bourgeois

mind

to see

the cause of crime by creating the conditions legally.

Here the fragment

trails off,

but Marx coupled the cause

connecting the data with the reason for compiling the data. I would like to add that capital punishment was originally employed in law as a punishment for things we today view as misdemeanor crimes. A man was hanged for everything from

IN

126

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

pickpocketing to stealing morsels of food.

It

was

originally

and not murder.

effectuated to prevent petty crimes,

In history, capital punishment appears before there appear

the crimes of atrocious murders and suicides.

Not only do laws perpetrate the forms of crimes they "abolish/' when they finally contradict the very purpose they were written for they give birth to other forms of crime. This

become

has

Men

is

what

of the death penalty in history.

Son of Sam are consciously motivated by capital What else do you call their now-standard manner of toying with the police by leaving clues in the form of riddles and notes to mock the hangman? That is how it can strike a morbid and immature mind, as Marx related in the fragment. But there is more. .Here in prison the most respected and honored men among us are those who have killed other men, particularly like

punishment.

.

.

other prisoners.

Everyone

relationships

all

It is

not merely

in prison has

fear,

but

respect.

an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath

between prisoners

in prison

is

the ever-present

fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship

among

ourselves.

And "murders and

suicides" have not always been aberrant

we reached

behavior in society. Before

this stage of civilization,

our society had no such things as murders and suicides.

The

events these terms define today were not so defined then.

human

was no more a horror long ago in our punishment is to us today, and there are periods in our history when a man was given high honors only through acts of what we today call murders and suicides. A man who killed his father was looked upon with awe at one time, Ritual

sacrifice

society than capital

for example. .

.

.1

think that

strata of social,

one of

all

people feel something special beneath the

everyday consciousness

murder or

suicide. It

is

as

the degree of frequency

We are reminded us,

not

when

they learn that

by an atrocious act of frightening to the common man, to

their society has lost his life

just that

it

occurs. It can drive him.

that anyone in society can easily

anyone can

easily

murder

be murdered. Death can

727

Capital Punishment and Gary Gilmore

come from any

quarter where other people are present. In one

degree or another, we learn

The

this. It is

human

expectation influences

not an "instinct":

notion that capital punishment

contradicts

itself

human

chance. is

a deterrent to

before the whole world

murder

when someone

is

actually executed for an act of murder. It demonstrates irrevo-

cably the opposite of the purpose for which the law was written: the

men who

are executed were obviously neither insane

nor deterred in committing atrocious murder.

The

subject (the

hanged man) has dominated the object (the hangman). The only way to prevail .

The

.

to

is

kill.

causal relation

is

the government, because

it

con-

the death penalty with murder. Practical knowledge

nects

(common

consciousness) does not distinguish the government

punishment with the apotheosis of

that practices capital

itself

the hangman.

.Your book about what happened to Gilmore should be accompanied by a little chorus of screams in the audience, don't you think? If society punishes its members by death and imprisonment, why is anyone surprised when a member of society punishes his enemies with "death and imprisonment'? (Que va! Savages!) .

.

.

.

.

Everyone knows that America

trialized civilization

behavior. talk like reality

—has the

around

almost

Why, execute a

that any modern, indus-

scientific

means

to alter a

man's

You can even call it "brainwashing," if you want to a fool who has been sheltered all his life from the us.

We

can "brainwash" a

not commit murder again. this,

—

effortlessly:

then, does

man

so that

he

will

The whole world knows we can do

Do

it

humanely, without destruction.

American

in this

man

country

is

society execute criminals?

To

perhaps ten times more costly

than "brainwashing" him to never commit crime again. It is not more "humane" to execute a man than to "brainwash" him when he has committed murder. It is not more humane to kill a man instead of making of him a better man

who

does not

kill

people.

IN

128

This

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

the argument from civilization against the death

is

penalty. It

is

anything but a sophism.

According to Marx: "Punishment

in general has

been de-

fended as a means either of amelioration or of intimidating.

Now, what

right have

you

intimidation of others?

such a thing as

to

me

for the amelioration or

there —there —which proves with the most com-

And

statistics

punish

besides,

is

history

plete evidence that since Cain, the world has

is

been neither

intimidated nor ameliorated by punishment.

The criminal

is

either a scapegoat or the merchant of his

own

soul.

This

is

the essence of the form of justice that

America

in

in

the

last half of

we know

today,

the twentieth century.

modern American justice and I don't want you to think I'm saying this is all there is to it. Everyone knows you can purchase our justice with one coin or another and that those denied "free will" by the circumI

say this

is

the essential concept of

stances of their class position (the stupid, friendless, poor, etc.)

pay the price of the crimes of those more fortunate.

.

.

I

realize that

Gilmore.

I

I

have completely identified myself with

many men like me; I am not unique because we do not classify

assure you that there are

We

from unique. are Others do. In this case, the prison regimes, the authorities do. And if you went into any prison that held far

ourselves.

Gilmore and

me and

asked for

all

of the prisoners with certain

backgrounds, both in and out of prison, backgrounds that

in-

clude observed (and suspected) behavior, you will get a set of files, a list of names, and my file and name will always be handed you along with Gilmore's (and at least eight to ten

others).

Gilmore appeared when convicts were principled, when being a convict was important. It was a time when a man was

129

Capital Punishment and Gary Gilmore

Then in

own

Judged as an individual. transition began. Previously, if you were even seen

judged by himself, his a

conversation with a pig,

on

a snitch:

made

are

he was

easy,

it

actions.

could jeopardize your

because the

pigs,

Now

randomly.

killed casually, I

Shame

life.

the prisons

think, realize the value of

keeping prisoners suspicious of one another and disunited.

.

.

.Nothing about his case

is

more easy

for

me

to understand

than his insistence on being executed.

To me, and

clerk

the problem of Gilmore

is

why

did he

a service-station attendant in the act of

kill

a

motel

armed

rob-

when they did not resist? It is difficult for me to grasp that. You only reasonably kill like that if it is a robbery for a great sum of money. It is predicated on the motive that it will be your last robbery. Or you kill like that, if it is your first robbery

bery

and your

last

He may by

and you are desperate, driven.

have been

his record alone

little

professionalism.

many

a petty thief,

an unsuccessful

you have to grant him a

Anyone who has been

little

thief,

but

expertise, a

in prison so long,

minimum

(you might becoming "hip"). That is what deepens the problem Gilmore poses for me. What possessed him to do that? He could have at least driven to Salt Lake City to rob something, if he was worried about being identified. It is only thirty miles away from Provo. I'm uncertain as to the nature of his intelligence. I do know he experimented quite cold-bloodedly with himself. (He once wore half a mustache; he steeled himself to do things ordinary so

times, acquires that gratis at the

call it

men^ould not If

do; he was brave).

he had the intelligence of

men who

are portrayed as

"Nietzschean," he killed them for experimental reasons. Like

Leopold and Loeb, intelligence that

for example.

There was something

was morbid and sublime, from what

can gather about him. Certain kinds of of the gods. But first I

if

God

men

in his little

I

incur the jealousy

wished to destroy him, he would have

driven him mad. Even a communist knows that! do not understand why Gilmore did that. I want to under-

IN

130

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

stand, because then

I

would understand

a little about

what

evil

is.

.

.Sometimes

.

many

(like

now)

think Gilmore was one of the

I

"causes" that culminated in the deaths of those two

and that they are the

men

Sometimes I feel the focus on them, and Gilmore was but one of many causal forces that combined to effect their end, their real "effect."

of the "effect" should be

deaths.

The problem

here

is

just as great as

logical or existential connection

of their deaths

Thinking of

and the it

in

is

the

as the cause

effect (their deaths)?

it

solves.

think a "cause-efTect" continuum in this matter must be

I

internal, primarily internal as

Where

such a way only leads up a blind alley and

more questions than

raises

the other:

between Gilmore

"movements." But

to use this idea

an index to contemplate the matter throws open the gates

to such a deluge of psychological

and behavioral and

ideological

theories that you can hardly get a footing without reflecting

your

own

internal private beliefs, because to say anything

take a position

among

to

"schools of thought" and theoretical

"systems" of thought, of

belief.

know this. There is nothing as internal as pain, espehuman pain. The catalog of suffering it would take to

But cially

is

I

record the intricacies of pain that led to the manifestation of

an act of multiple murder would be very melancholy to

.

.

.However ignorant

sophical matters. sophical

turn

of

my

Sometimes

mind

is

relate.

I do tend toward philodoubt that anyone with a philo-

impulses, I

fit

to

judge anyone.

He

never

comprehends the concept of guilt. That is not the concern of true justice. The question is, rather, if he was privately guilty. For a variety of reasons he could only be guilty in his heart if he chose to be. Only he really knew. We can only guess at it.

Capital Punishment and Gary Gilmore

131

His insistence on execution seems to point to that conclusion If

(among other I

things).

myself were certain and could accept his private

knowledge of his prior innocence would itself acquit him mind, but I am not myself sure he should be privately because of the kind of pain he must have suffered

guilt,

in

my

guilty

in his life,

pain caused only by the consciously evil intentions of the penal institution in our present society.

It is

hard to get at the truth of men. There are a

general "truths," but truth I

is

always something specific.

lot of Still,

bottom man the opposite is true. At

don't want to leave the impression that

I

feel at

is vulgar, yet I'm sure you know I feel bottom men are principled; the vulgarities are acquired. When I say "principled," I in no way mean "innocent" or "full of love and good feelings." I mean, at bottom men do what they think and feel is "right" whether good or evil. This means that at bottom men are not weak and I would never say, to justify a lapse in principle, "I am only human" as though that were some kind of justification for weakness, moral weakness. Flesh and blood is much, much stronger than fools believe.

—

—

When Marx identified the "holy family" with

men's dreams "on earth," he implied that the dreams would end should that paradise be realized. He implied that the conquest of the universe is the sine qua non of the conquest of man's of paradise

dark side, of his instincts, of nothing

less

than the unconscious.

Today one must begin not by studying the unconscious mind but by studying the world, the material world ans can't possibly understand.

The

—

a thing Freudi-

universe obeys laws, a great

variety of laws, but fools think this reflects that

born free and have no free

will,

when

men

are not

in fact this very belief

men because only by knowing those laws, those principles, can men put them to use instead of being blindly tossed about at their mercy, the mercy of men's own ignorance. enslaves

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

132

So the

pity of

that neither Gilmore nor the world really

it is

knew what was happening have reached

.

level of civilization

.You said Gilmore wrote Nicole over

.

pages in three and a half months. of religious feelings.

the result

When

mysticism, religion.

is

all

I

we

illustrated.

hundred

fifteen

guess they reflected a lot

one mixes poetry and philosophy, emotional and impas-

It is

we

sioned "reasoning" before a fact are

The

to them.

time and place was defined,

in this

are

all

at the

mercy

helpless before: death. I'd bet you could almost

of,

we

adduce

the nature of his mystical beliefs from the nature of his particu-

death

lar

—from

will

it.

This

such as his formal, legal execution, his

facts

waiting alone in a

cell for

last fact

is

his wishing in the latter days to

it,

probably the most crucial to the uncon-

scious formulation of his mystical beliefs: to create his

own

eschatology as well as his

Only

a convict,

afterlife, his eternity.

wax upon the

when

were

a

lost,

could not be more enslaved.

conquest of his

can't

will

know how

and the nature convicts feel

of,

sad

I

in reality

feel

when

I

subject as though

it

he could not be more realize the source of,

the involuntary pride and exhilaration

when they

though they were vicious

all

up hand and foot as dangerous animals. They make

are chained lions,

out of pussycats like that.

killers

own

will it

an old hand at suffering that special kind of

anguish, could so absurdly

You

To

the spotlight, center stage.

It's as if

The world

suddenly

we

are in

has focused on us for a

moment. We are somebody capable of threatening the world in some way, no matter how small a way. That is why, for example, Son of Sam could not suppress that smile, that bashsmile pride causes in very humble, very humiliated men.

ful

Men

in chains.

It is

that involuntary pride of humiliated

a strong

to

component

when watch him

last

days

in

men

Gilmore's emotions,

that

the whole world seemed to be holding die.

I

feel

was

his feelings, in his its

breath

Capital Punishment and Gary Gilmore

Nietzsche said things relevant to this

133

in his Zarathustra in

the verses of 'Tale Criminal/'

.

The Red and the Black

.I'm reading

.

least

twenty years since

now

that I'm older

first

I

read

it.

that there

is.

It

me

occurred to

It's

been it

at

more is

one

— the romantic outlook

in the first

existential age, the last vestiges of

today

again.

can appreciate

and from more points of view. This

of the best portrayals of romantic love

—

I

pages that, in this

romanticism appear to us

(in social intercourse) as paranoia.

Stendhal unwittingly presents Julien Sorel as a homosexual totally

deluded from childhood into working out his desires on

the stage of a society ruled by the male.

about on and carry out

in personal relationships

standing

itself

woman

was

I

guess that misunder-

what the romantic period of our

defines clearly

like.

Stendhal's

women

are really victims of

(hilarious) sense of "duty," la

is

who completely misunderstood

one another and yet continue together. history

stage they walk

Stendhal, in this book, has succeeded in displaying

herself.

people

The

their petty sublimations

men

victimized by a

but one of them, Mademoiselle de

Mole, delivers a "biting epigram" she could have arrived

meditating on Gary Gilmore:

man

the death sentence."

is

the death sentence. ter of a official

I

men

I

death sentence

referred to above

romanticism. I'd like to self

could be put to death without

sanction.

in his

ing"

'The only real distinction for a Not death itself, mind you, but

don't think the Mademoiselle, the daugh-

Marquis, knew

In other words, anyone

was

at

there at the

last.

I

who is

says Gilmore's real distinction

involved in the "misunderstand-

which

I

mentioned

know what Gilmore thought

of him-

can't help but to secretly wish that

was protected by some such delusion

To be wrong

as a definition of

he

at the point of death.

is one thing, but to be so completely in error, so wrong that everything in existence scolds you for your mis-

IN

134 take,

is

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

a terrible experience.

I

wouldn't wish

it

on anyone

(except the bourgeoisie). I've

one

experienced

else.

some

of

I

think

my

I

it

sufficiently myself

will

mistakes.

not the law!)

not to wish

it

on any-

always feel the debt of apologizing for

(To other people, of course. Certainly

RACISM IN AMERICA AND HI HIM) BARS

m

lipping

Engels

this

Diihring, policy of

through morning,

a I

booklet of excerpts from

confirmation of what

human

rights

Marx and

found, in a passage from Engels' Anti-

employed

I

said about the

American

as a political doctrine

—

a cry

of self-defense, exactly like the plea of a prison guard held

hostage at knife-point by a prisoner he has spent his working

time intentionally tormenting: "But children! Please, don't

Here

.

.

those

.

kill

me!"

It is

I

have

a wife

and two

a ploy.

it is:

And it human

is

significant of the specifically bourgeois character of

rights

that the

American Constitution, the

first

to

recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirmed the slavery of the colored races then existing in America: class privileges

were

proscribed; race privileges sanctioned.

How

is

racism "significant of the specifically bourgeois char-

acter of those

human

rights"?

— IN

136

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

human rights sanctioned the Magna Carta, which established

All of these trines of the

right (writ of

ideological doc-

the white man's

habeas corpus), and Manifest Destiny, which

established the white man's burden (colonialism).

Under the doctrine

of Manifest Destiny, any white

man

could declare the sovereign rule of his land over any non-

European lands under the auspices of various colonial mandates of the various white man's countries.

This

is

how human

by

lished

were established. They were estabwhich extend legislatively up to this

rights

legal doctrines

very day.

The the

idea was that the white races

would

rule

and administer

the non-white races; that the non-white races

affairs of

would become the source of labor and the white races would become the source of capital, i.e., civilization, wealth, culture. in existence.

It is still

The

race theory of

humanity evolved

in those early days of

the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, but there

was not for

in existence at that

time the

scientific tools required

proper scientific demonstration. Hegel, at that time, was

the most systematic in his empirical "proofs" of white suprem-

acy

Philosophy of History).

(cf.

The

race theory of

humanity

states that the

the most advanced in the evolution of the

the genetic structure of the white races

non-white races

more

inferior

—indeed,

it is

to the

out to be the white

The

it

white races are

human is

species; that

superior to the

states that the darker the race, the

"human

race."

The human

race turns

race.

scientific tools are

the tools of scientific empiricism.

Empirical observation and experimentation conclusively demonstrate the truth of the race theory of humanity.

The so-called

"humanists" take the position that the white races should guide the

become This world

is

less

fortunate through an evolutionary process to

white.

possibly the "best-kept" secret in the bourgeois white

scientific

community

—and includes

also twentieth-cen-

tury bourgeois philosophers, especially in Continental Europe.

Racism

(Heidegger

one of the important "pioneers.") It is so "setalk about it to one another. I can imagine

few even

cret,"

them

is

137

America and Behind Bars

in

in their

a

brow

significantly every

or

come

in

and arching gathered

white laboratory coats catching each other's eyes

—

Great Experiment"

—

that help to cinch "the theory"!

drawing to a

is

(The Great Experiment

time some new data are

is

close!

I

can hear

what, historically, the

ideologists called democracy.

Only

later did

it

first

come

it

"The now.

bourgeois to refer to

the United States of America.)

The

only statistics that "favor" the black masses of Ameri-

can society are those that demonstrate greater athletic prowess than the white masses. But this

is

even "explained away" by

the citation of selective slave-breeding prior to the Civil

—and

have heard

I

it

War

explained away like this even by current

black scholars themselves.

So there

is

no lack of empirical evidence

theory of humanity.

Crime

behavior, economic

—the

includes everything.

behavior, psychological response It is

because of this

causes

—

that

is,

list

to support the race

statistics, social list

that this theory culminates in genetic

according to scientific empiricism.

It is

already

recognized in the athletic prowess of black people as an inherited characteristic of race.

Professor Shockley demonstrated that black people are in-

mentally inferior intellectually.

herently

He had

the "bad

taste" not to simply publish his finding but to talk about

to discuss

it

in a

men. His "discussions"

him

begin with what

is

no longer

for

What to do about this is the object of his "discusThe consequences to democracy are negative, to say

people.

—

all

or his listeners debatable: the genetic inferiority of black

sions."

the

it,

"democratic society" of "free and equal"

least.

The

only scientific force in the industrial world that opposes

at least in

theory

—

this race theory of

humanity

is

the

proletarian-class theory of history with the tools of scientific dialectical materialism.

Here tic

is

the communist theory in opposition to the capitalis-

bourgeois theory (based on scientific empiricism):

)

IN

138

(This

is

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

from the Notes

and

to Anti-Diihring

appears also

it

appendix to Engel's Dialectics of Nature. It is from Section (a) On the Prototypes of the Mathematical "Infinite" in the

in the

Real World.

... By recognizing the inheritance

of acquired characters,

it

ex-

tends the subject of experience from the individual to the genus; the single individual that must have experienced

the results of the experiences of a

among

instance,

no longer neces-

is

experience can be replaced to a certain extent by

sary, its individual

number

of

us the mathematical axioms

its

ancestors.

seem

If,

for

self-evident to

every eight-year-old child, and in no need of proof from experience, this

is

Negro

"accumulated inheritance."

solely the result of

.

them by

to teach

difficult

.

a

proof to a

Bushman

It

would be

or Australian

.

The accumulated

experience of a

use Engels' terminology ditions of a society,

—

is

number

of ancestors

—

to

twofold: the outward cultural tra-

which includes books,

myths,

tools,

etc.;

and secondly, genealogically acquired experience. Perception

is

based on these two areas of experience to

become conscious knowledge. (Logic

itself is

one aspect of such

knowledge.)

What is self-evident it

cannot be placed

self-evident.

requires

no

by someone

in question

And what

is

proofs, for the simple reason for

self-evident ultimately?

whom

The

it

is

world

is

self-evident; the existence of the selfsame individual

evident.

Those

so far as

outward experience went

are the

two things

a Cartesian could not for

him.

He

is

self-

doubt

could also not

doubt the mathematical perception he entertained so magnificently. Descartes

Communist intelligence;

and that

states the bourgeois

.

a

a prejudice

only the foundation of bourin general. It states that cul-

and genealogical .It is

is

is

empiricism

isolation

and history has demonstrated .

an obstacle to

is

world outlook

and not of science

scientific

geois science tural

it

was a white man, a European.

theory states that prejudice

maxim

is

the death of

all civilizations,

this abundantly.

that the morally strongest

and the most

— Racism intelligent

in

139

America and Behind Bars

among an oppressed people

and

scaffolds

in

are to be found

on the

the prisons of the oppressors.

in prisons with American Indians, and black Americans. Without quesMexicans and Chicanos, tion every non-white prisoner I have known is grappling with but the most cona revolutionary consciousness of the world sistent, the most persistent, are black prisoners. I have seen them so radical in their critical perception they cannot will

have spent a lifetime

I

—

— understand even

not

a book.

a paragraph of conceptual

language

in

learned early they will not learn by rote anything that

I

addresses the everyday world.

They

will

not clutter up their

minds with (memorized) "knowledge" which is not self-evident to them. I have heard them point to the most abstract and seemingly universal "principles" and condescendingly say: "It is prejudice!" and leave it there. I admit this was maddening to me, particularly since a certain amount of vehemence and

—

hostility

is

manner when they make

always evident in their

such declarations.

Morons do not hold such

opinions.

gence do not become enraged over

Men

with low

injustice;

intelli-

they question

nothing and accept everything said and done to them.

.

It

.

.And whence came

came

this

"holy" white European Culture?

from the Roman and Islamic European culture coalesced as a distinctive "en-

as a cultural inheritance

civilizations.

many

tity" as a result of the ingathering of

and

logical

specifically

cultural "entities." It

began

races; as

many

genea-

an independent,

European culture roughly over the period we

call

the Renaissance (from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century).

of

Islam and

many

Rome had

a similar history of

many

The same

cultures,

races.

is

an ingathering

true of Ancient

Greece and India and China. It is equally true of the Mayas and Aztecs in the Western Hemisphere.

Whether or not

the world was round only became a question was no longer self-evident that it was square (or "flat"). Whether or not the world was the center of the revolutions of

after

it

the universe

—the

"lights in the sky"

—only became

a question

IN

140 after

it

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

was no longer self-evident that in European history is long.

was

it

so.

The

of

list

examples Let

me

go with the

no one

evident;

world-is-flat

example.

doubted

in that culture

was once

It It

it.

self-

had that

felt

From

it

flowed a whole world outlook, a whole body of knowledge.

It

certainty about

had the

fixity

it

that forbade properly doubting

of a popular prejudice

prejudice consists

Anyone

of.

for

— and

this

whom

is

it.

exactly

what

that fundamental

"fact" was not self-evident lacked intelligence and was consid-

ered a fool (in those days there were not any fine distinctions,

such as

Only

idiot,

moron,

ability to

and

be able to place

the world was

could do

flat.

this.

and

racially

had the

culturally distinct people

in question the

Only those

for

fundamental

whom

it

whom

the world

culturally

backward

is

in

flat

fact that

was not self-evident

Only, therefore, the fools could do

In a society for is

etc.).

a genealogically

—and

this

it!.

every society

manner

—

all

knowledge of the world that contradicts the world being is

the flat

erroneous: an example of ignorance or a mental defect.

American (European)

In

society the intelligence tests are

not just of European culture, but are part of the European cultural traditions.

These

extent prejudice has

do nothing but demonstrate the

tests

become

a popular fixity.

People in European culture artistic creative

who have shined forth as true who have been capable of

geniuses are those

transcending cultural prejudices, barriers.

gence

test

could possibly discover

the failure of the test

—the high

No

—except

said, in all

intelli-

quality of this intelligence.

In every society in the world, the wisest

aside

academic

negatively, through

men have

always

one way or another, that only after they had pushed they had learned as a student did they begin to exercise

their intelligence. .

.

.What

overall, a

matical

European intelligence tests is, certain kind of self-evident knowledge called matheis

reflected in the

Its logic is

tions of quantities self-evident.

A =

C.

fundamentally mathematical.

and

The

opera-

their relations (in formulations) are

It is self-evident

that

if

A =

B and B

=

all

C,

Racism

The

in

America and Behind Bars

intelligence quotient

judging the degree of

itself a

is

fixity (in

way

of mathematically

the popular mind) of the

evident axioms of mathematics. Nothing more.

the most passive and obsequious

pendent

—people

141

It

self-

means that

—ultimately ignorant and

de-

our society will score the highest

in

There is no such thing as a "de-cultured" intelligence test. Even if the mathematical method is employed and the quotient

is

a ratio

between the genetic age of

a certain people (in

substitution for the chronological age of an individual) cultural age of that people (in substitution for the

of that individual),

still

and the

mental age

the quantity of positive and negative

("true" and "false") answers creates a mathematical judgment of values of qualities

—

values that are not quantitatively

mea-

surable.

Machines can form of

calculate. Therefore, calculation

the lowest

is

intelligence.

Whatever must be learned by rote is a prejudice; it is not knowledge. Knowledge is something that has a subjective side, an intimate meaning as well as an outward meaning. The tune of the hickory stick across the butt of a schoolboy

is

proper experience required to inform his intelligence

goddamned dog is

fool should

taught: to obey.

is

he

is

know

He

is

him

number number x

thinks that x

the arithmatical

But

this

number

what

a

not taught to understand what

it

that. All

he

is

—even saying the —

doing when he obeys

based on "love and kindness"

of

is

of is

unless

fool

taught

just

is

obedience

his

who

is

composed

may be what

the

is

whipping

thumps across the butt

is

what

of.

the best illustration: In actuality (for

thumps

not the

—and any

number

x

is

I

suspect x

composed

(e.g., whipped) what concepts are, more often than what mathematics is. He is being whipped what history is; what ideals like justice, equality, etc., are; what passion and poetry are. The boy is being punished in order to learn a poem! Punished to "know" what is true, good, beautiful. A truly gifted boy would turn on his "teacher" And what? If he had a pistol, he would shoot his way out of school the way Carl Panzram did. That

the boy what things of!),

is

being taught

are,

—

—

IN

142

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

what he would do. Then he would probably rob a bank and get out of town fast! This is what made the "Chinaman of Konigsberg" (Kant) say: "Genius makes its own rules." Even European philosophers have taken notice that most of what we take for knowledge is nothing but bias and prejudice. The point Engels made was that we would not demonstrate to "a Bushman or Australian Negro" what is self-evident to us but that a Bushman or Australian Negro could, because he (and not us) is in a position to do so for the simple reason it is

—

—

him not self-evident. Nor can humanity(l) look upon itself the way it does other species of life. "Humanity" may "know" what the best strains is

for

of

wheat or

best). It it

cattle or

are,

seeks in a species, but

qualities that

human people; a

dogs

can breed strains of

make up

being). This it is

a

peculiarities.

and to

.

.

We

know

speak a

At present

by Mexican Spanish.

to

cultured and genealogical

we

are

still

toilet tissue

evolving,

arrest our evolution.

aliens here.

No

one speaks

Some of them piss in the down the toilet you see

—

go past your

cell in

pushbroom when he sweeps the

in herds, like

the

know what we know what we once

no position

in

flush toilet tissue

heaps of shit-stained

move

scientifically

complete, many-sided

that as a species

little

shower and refuse to of the trustee's

is.

is

growth would be to

.I'm surrounded I

(a

not because humanity cannot breed

is

traits are actually

arrest that

English.

being

because "humanity"

human

in relation to itself (at

to bring out certain qualities

cannot breed

human

complete human being

took to be

it

but only

life

the wake

corridor. Flies

miniature cattle grazing a few feet above

The Mexican border

is only two miles away. most foreign countries the water pressure in sewer plumbing is too low to accommodate the flushing of wet paper through the pipes. This is why most of them who have never lived in this country and speak no English do

the

floor.

In

Mexico

—

—

as in

—

—

not flush the

toilet tissue

down

the

toilet.

Racism

A

racist

could

for

.

.1

about

are

months

five

man

— maybe

was

I

people do; that

is

some experiences

I

In the to Texas.

summer I

you see the

free once.

and

five

I

was

months

a half

free

—

in

of the world!)

have seen racism outside prison.

Some

143

Do

a big deal out of this.

wasn't always in prison! Hell,

1962. (I'm a I

make

America and Behind Bars

between ignorance and prejudice?

relationship

.

in

why

I

had before

of 1962, before

arrived in

,

I

do not

have to state that

I

went

I

like injustice. I

do

not.

Here

to prison:

was sent to prison,

I

went

Texas, by bus. At the bus station

there were two identical drinking fountains.

One

said

White

Only and the other said Colored Only. It was the first time I remember seeing anything like this. I thought it funny. It was in July of 1962 and the civil rights movement in the South was over with.

What

I

mean

pation of students in the anti-war

The but

in

sizable cities of

Texas

all

is:

before the large partici-

movement

had

their

joined

Colored

it.

Districts,

the small towns in the country, there were no Colored

Districts.

Blacks could not enter those small towns without a

mate excuse." After dark, blacks caught

inside the

'

'legiti-

towns risked

death.

The named

small

town

my

folks lived in

— my grandparents—was

.

In the small towns in the country, instead of a Colored District,

each had what they called a nigger-town!

though they were shadows of the reflect in

real towns.

was

as

They seem

to

It

concept the psychoanalytic relationships between the

conscious and subconscious mind. In the

when

town

of

the sun rose.

blacks came in from nigger-town They washed the windows of the businesses;

swept the streets and sidewalks and picked up the garbage.

Then

they left town before the stores opened. I was at a movie house the only one in town and I rose in the middle of the movie to go to the restrooms. Walking up the aisle, I

—

—

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

144

happened

to notice in the balcony that

occupied by black people. to

sit

anywhere but

all

the seats were

discovered they were not allowed

I

in the balcony.

I

had to

believe they

purchase their tickets for the movies at a certain time each week. They could not merely walk up to the ticket

seller at

movie time, like white folks do. I took most of this racial discrimination to be only an eccentricity of the South. I never attempted to guess at its implications.

Then one day

I

was watching the news on

was an on-the-spot news I

switched

off

black

man

He He must have been

left

The news event

house was at bay against a wall of

was a farmer from the town's nigger-town.

he had

successful at farming, because

International-make hauling truck

He had a little boy,

the house.

a block away.

as big as a

the bus station.

There

covering an event there in town.

the television and

was happening about

A

flash

television.

filled

about nine years

a big

with neat bales of hay.

old.

The boy

stayed in the

cab of the truck.

The

farmer's truck was double-parked over one of the white

But there were no other had come into town to purchase a

lines that separated the parking spaces.

He

vehicles parked there.

block of

ice.

The bus

which

station,

sat

on the

outskirts of

town, also had an icehouse.

A

cop had fined the black farmer two hundred

with the alternative

hauled in his

off to

jail.

—

The

if

he did not pay instantly

dollars,

—

of being

much cash him. The cop

farmer did not have that

pocket and so the cop tried to arrest

called for reinforcements

and about eight or nine more cops

arrived.

One

tried to grab the farmer,

was, at the edge of the parking

who pushed him

lot,

aside.

what remained of

There

a barbed-

wire fence. All that remained were cedar posts sticking up from

the ground, and the farmer jerked a post out of the ground and

backed up against the

He had

to have

wall,

brandishing the club in one hand.

been strong

always buried deeply.

as

an ox, because cedar posts are

Racism

When with, as

arrived the cops

I

me

shouted at

had him surrounded

back to the

said, his

I

Every cop had

his pistol

to stay back,

wall.

but

The farmer was merely

He did her

not attack.

They emptied

on the farmer.

fire

was seeing.

I

standing there with the club raised.

heard him shout over and over: "Leave

their

ammunition

—more

guns

lethal

him from

firing at

dead before he

in his

body.

He

than .357-magnum

The

They

bullets.

about twenty

a distance of

He was

feet.

hit the ground.

was parked so that the front

driver's side,

inches.

me

jerked each time

The little boy was wailing, watching his daddy his truck

I

froze,

I

him. They were shooting him with .44-caliber

a bullet hit

were

I

him. They

at

walked up anyway. Before

I

could not believe what

I

in a semicircle,

drawn and aimed

reached the police, they opened

because

145

America and Behind Bars

in

tire of

was over the white dividing

talk later circulated that

line

die.

I

saw that

the truck, on the

about

six

or eight

he was one of those "crazy

niggers."

When

I

left

Texas by Greyhound bus, there was one other

incident that struck me. These buses are engaged in interstate

commerce and have no

regulations once aboard the bus that

discriminate as to race. I

took a seat by the window, in the middle of the bus. All

the seats were

A

full

except about seven or eight seats on the

aisle.

black student about twenty years old boarded the bus.

He

was the only black there. I

was

lost in

thought and staring out the window when he

stopped and inquired

me. Absently I

still

words

I

said:

if

he could

"Sure,

it

sit in

was not conscious of anything idly.

He had

the

empty

doesn't matter."

boarded with

special.

at least

seat next to

He

We

down.

sat

spoke a few

one other college

student, a white boy from Idaho.

When

the bus stopped at a cafe for supper,

the bus and entered the cafe. together at the counter.

I

The

we

all

got off

black student and

I

sat

remember vaguely asking him where

IN

146

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

the other student had "disappeared"

to.

Then we both ordered

supper from a waitress. In due time

mine

arrived. I

began

eating.

his order to the waitress. / kept eating.

He

order to the waitress. / was through eating.

He

inquired about

inquired about his

He

inquired about

and by now I was getting impatient. She told him that his supper was in a brown paper bag "to go." I looked from him to the waitress, still so innocent I did not understand what was going on but it was clear they did not like one another. I was so stupid I thought that his supper-to-go was because the bus was going to depart before he could finish eating it. He took the bag and paid his check. He and I walked outside the cafe. There were fifteen or twenty passengers standing about on the sidewalk and along the bus. White folks. He stepped onto the lawn and I followed him. He sat there on the grass and opened his bag while we talked. We talked about nothing that had anything to do with the situation at least I thought so. But I recall now that he kept asking me carefully, between bites of food, where I was from. I kept telling him I was born in Michigan. He would chew his food and nod and blink his eyes. The old ladies, the old men and all the others watched us his order again,

—

—

closely.

I

remember

ing manner.

that they

all

grinned at us in a very engag-

We were the only ones on the lawn.

I

thought that

amused them. kept looking in the crowd for the other student, the white

I

boy.

I

heard his

caught glimpses of him, but he apparently never saw or

me when would call to him. I

head was

Every time

I

glimpsed him,

in the act of turning.

When we boarded ought to picket

That was the

the bus again, the black student said: "I

this place." first

time

it

Then we resumed our

dawned on me

allowed to eat in the cafe.

We

were

seats.

that blacks were not

still

within the Texas

border. I

recall

in the

the better part of our conversations was about

United

States.

He

told

me he

liked

cities

San Francisco. At

Racism

that point the white student spoke up. it:

my

catching

The white

I

said quietly:

I

could get rich there.

a big

It sat

believe,

The

No

It

it all

had

I

in racial discrimina-

on

me before went I

Lake City.

dancing place owned and operated by the

on the edge of what was then a black was Second East Street on the corner of, I

right

Seventh South

Street.

place was called Liberty Wells. blacks,

visible there

Mexicans or Indians allowed. The only things were the white faces of physically healthy and

even attractive young white people twenties.

They

intelligence of

who

period

asked,

I

—

to prison occurred in Salt

neighborhood.

so?"

said.

guess the only other experience

Mormons.

"How

student giggled, and the black cleared

tion of black people that left an impression

There was

they do

Then he leaned forward toward me "The dude is a fag know what I mean?"

he

up: "Hustling,"

and

You know how

eyes intently, he addressed the black student

and observed that curious.

147

America and Behind Bars

in

all

in their late teens or early

had the slow mentality of

one of those

cattle,

the

evil

elderly virgins of the Victorian

teach schoolchildren the alphabet and to properly

hate themselves. It

was about ten or eleven o'clock

walking through the area. traffic to pass.

my

in

the evening and

I

was

stopped at the curb, waiting for the

Liberty Wells,

sat kitty-corner

about

I

from where

I

I

noticed, was having a dance.

had paused. Six

age walked up and waited with

me

It

or seven blacks for the traffic to

pass. I

crossed the street with

them and continued down the

sidewalk, directly across the street from Liberty Wells.

There were thick oak trees along the sidewalk on one side and a chain-link fence on the other side. There was no light at that point.

The blacks crowded around me and I stopped. The largest one stood in front of me. The first thing I thought was that I should have carried my gun. I told him to get out of my way and started toward him. He said: "First you have to fight one of us."

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

148

Then he pushed

a scared smaller

one

got

my

on him before I could do was

licks in

the fence, and

all

hit the ground.

I

hit

I

with a right and went for him, ignoring the blows from I

me.

in front of

brushed him aside and stepped into the spokesman.

I

I

him

all sides.

rolled to

there and try to block the

lie

kicks.

While they were

me, one kept

hitting

yelling

something

about not being able to dance. Then they ran down the walk.

I

my

stood up and brushed off

side-

About twenty

clothes.

whites were gathered at the foot of the steps leading into the

dance

hall,

watching.

looked at them and

I

Today

I

realize

it

made

sense.

continued on

I

my way.

have had to pay the price many times

I

for

the social injustices committed by white people in this society. I

much in mean white people who are

have never been close to them, have never had

common

with them.

in a position to

dance

to a

And by

commit

that

I

these racial injustices.

I

had never been

at Liberty Wells, nor ever cared to. is supposed to turn me against me into the ranks of white society.

Getting attacked by blacks

them.

It is a

form of "rehabilitation"

main

virtually the

it is

It

ers

supposed to force

It is

in

many prison

systems,

program there. There you will find

rehabilitation

has worked overall,

who

—and

would

I

say.

prison-

are attracted to racial doctrines, but not near as

many

as the policemen in Los Angeles and Orange County, however. It

me that beneath the robes of the Klan,

has never been lost on

you are more than Mussolini himself

likely to find a

who

policeman. Indeed,

justified his "revolution" of

it

was

policemen

by saying that "the working people will be happy only when there is a policeman on every street corner." Excuse me, but

When

I

I

could never support the police!

think of the profundity of the injustices done to

black people in America, I

would not be

a

man

socially in treating

feel a horror

I

if I

I

cannot

easily describe.

believed that blacks are not justified

any and

all

white people in this society

with violence and hatred. Even as

I

write this

white boys being raped and murdered

I

am

aware of

in prisons, of

white

— Racism

men and women There

is

being attacked and murdered by blacks.

such a thing as social justice

of individual

149

America and Behind Bars

in

White

justice.

—

it is

not a question

society created black

society

(The phrase "racial discriminaremoved from the deep horror white society gave birth to, and nurtured: the nigger. ) The peculiar way the bourgeois class in America developed brought this about. I refuse to sanitize it by offering yet another through

racial discrimination.

tion" seems to be light-years

"class analysis" of the history of racial oppression in

Just the same, there

America.

it.

not in the nature of "white society"—or white cultures

It is

—

a class basis for

is

to oppress other peoples.

There

—

no democracy for blacks for all non-white AmeriAmerica is a white man's country, and this is not simply a result of blind economic laws. I was once reading some old booklets that contained minutes of the U.S. Congress at the turn of this century, and there was a debate concerning the need for legislation to control foreign cans

—

is

in this country.

emigration to America.

A

quota system based on race alone resulted from

senators were concerned with

stemming the

tide of

this.

The

Chinese

and Japanese immigrants. can quote exactly the principle for determining the quotas:

I

"If

America

senator

name

is

—he was not "it is

non-European

A

going

man

to

remain a white

a

famous senator and

our duty to

restrict

s I

country, " said the

have forgotten

his

entrance into this country of

" races.

quota system for

all

immigrants was worked out and

enacted by Congress to insure that

far

more white people than

non-white were allowed into the country. I

remember when the

State Prison was racially integrated for

There were hundred prisoners. Segregation of so few seems absurd beyond belief today, yet in the history of the state over a hundred years black prisoners

black prisoners.

It

is

incredible to recall today.

exactly six blacks out of about eight

—

—

IN

ISO

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

had been segregated. The Chicanos and Indians represented almost half of the prison population and were never segregated. When this happened and it happened all over the country it began a struggle for the rights of all prisoners. When the Civil Rights Act came into existence a few years later, it permitted prisoners to enter federal courts and sue for their rights to be free from discrimination and cruel and unusual punishment. It began a period of prison reform that had a revolutionary effect on prison conditions for the vast majority of all

—

—

prisoners.

We no longer had to fear being tortured and thrown into the hole for writing a letter to a judge, a lawyer or a senator. For

the most part

it

became

possible to

communicate with anyone

through the Postal Service. Playboy magazine was no longer a in the hole on had a right, for the first time, to medical care, to proper food and clothing. We had a right not to be loaned out on shotgun crews for slave labor to private businessmen. The screen barriers were torn down and for the first time we could touch and kiss our people in the visiting room. They unchained me from the floor and quit tear-gassing

contraband item punishable by twenty-nine days the "starvation diet."

me

my sleep.

in

It

We

became unconstitutional

to use electroshock

therapy to punish prisoners.

The It

is

list is

endless.

true that

when

these things

came

into being,

"sophisticated" and subtle forms of abuse arose.

form of prisoner

arose in the

killing prisoner.

Until then, there was a

was

It

more

harmony among

prisoners.

There

from the prison staff and it was were once one. We were united not

a line that divided prisoners

understood by us just in

all.

We

our misery, but as men; as

men

regardless of race.

There was violence and murder between prisoners who crossed that line as informers not because a man was "black"

—

or "white."

But

it

was nothing to the violence among prisoners that And this violence can be measured by the number

exists today.

of caseworkers, psychologists, sociologists; by the

number

of

Racism

who

prison employees

come about

America and Behind Bars

in

are not ordinary prison guards.

merely

try to is

reform thieves

—

has

uncon-

their goal, conscious or

make policemen out

to

It

SI

America that prisons do not

in typically freakish

scious,

I

of prisoners.

The same way

government makes policemen out of criminals and drug addicts,

who

Society,

them

gives

are turned into informers outside prison.

which has never

exploit that equality to get

them

prison deprives

The problem believe I

I

in reality

accepted blacks as equals,

"equality" only in prison, where they immediately

back

in prison

what

society outside

power.

of:

of racism

politically disturbing to

is

have grappled with

it

in political theory all

see a blind injustice of such towering proportions,

to take in

all its

it is

me.

my

I

life.

difficult

ramifications.

Oppressed races and nationalities

in prisons

immediately

seek to assert the kind of supremacy over whites that whites subject

them

to outside prison. It

—and "should be."

It is

is

almost a mechanical law

the only time and place in this country

most non-whites can redeem the promise of

their childhoods,

namely, to be men. In most of

my a

my

letters in this regard,

eyes the ideal of individual justice

matter of social .

Justice

.

is

the individual.

draws

.

.

its

—and

not always bloodless and It

mistakenly had before it

was,

all

along,

justice.

is

it

does not always

visit

above intellectual considerations and

it

morality from consequences.

.The word "nigger"

realize, in spite of

is

itself offensive,

I

have come to

attempts by both black and white anti-

racist intellectuals to use it.

I

it

in a

non-derogatory way: to defuse

Nothing can redeem that word.

When

blacks call one an-

other "nigger," they have accepted that they are inferior as

human

beings.

It is

the same

when homosexuals

call

one an-

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

1S2

IN

other "bitches"

—they have accepted

that they are inferior as

men.

.

.It

.

has been something

have been aware of since

I

I

started

serving time: So long as, and to the degree that a prison regime

can keep can

its

prisoner at each other's throats

abuse and torment

it

its

—

to that degree

prisoners; to that degree are the

American prisoners multiplied. In the South the prison regimes use mainly a class of prisoners who behave as guards, pigs. They are called variously (depending upon which injustices of

state) dog-boys, building tenders, convict guards, trustees; the list is

colorful,

and every

state in the

South has

its

own name

They are given all the authority They are even armed with rifles.

for these inmates.

prison guards.

Out in the Western states, some cases, the prison regime

of regular

prisoners are divided by race. In

will give privileges to blacks and Chicanos and Indians which they deny to whites. In other

whites they give

cases,

it is

ment

this in

many

ways.

called "culture groups."

all

the privileges

They can

to.

They

imple-

use inmate organizations

These groups are given resources not

available to others of races not of a certain "cultural group."

(Outside

visitors

on

"freedom";

a social level;

way

is

it is

the white prisoners

by harassing only one race

who

etc.)

—more times than

Another

not, today

are the ones being tortured

and

discriminated against.

At Leavenworth and Atlanta,

I

all-black cells, especially in lock-up

to four cells.

I

to get

men

per

cell.

was always thrown into if

those prisons held up

Outside lock-up there are eight-men

was always the only white man

me

attacked by blacks.

The

there.

The

idea was

idea was to get

me

to

hate blacks. I

personally have never

in lock-up or

on the

my

had any problems with them,

yard. This

is

because

I

either

am known among

and as a rule whites are turned into active racists by this method. They have always placed the most outspoken black Muslims in cells with me in lock-up, but I have never had any problems. them. But

case

is

exceptional,

Racism

This

is

in

America and Behind Bars

because we share a

common oppression:

I

at

bottom,

oppression and racial oppression are identical. Before

I

S3

class

even

knew what the word was, I was once told by an old black man when I first started serving time that I was class-conscious. (I looked .

it

up

in

my

books to discover what

it

was.)

.Every leap in the direction of prison reform

.

in prison

by

a period of racial unity

come about

strikes

among

preceded

is

all prisoners.

Work

quickly in quick succession; prisoners fight

back against beatings and are supported by everyone on the yard. Sabotage

on the yard

—

work

at

sites

—

follows quickly

upon any prisoner tortured in the hole. A period in which pigs address prisoners decently

is

accom-

panied by prisoner unity.

.

.We were packed

.

ing the

riot.

A

in cells in

the hole immediately follow-

black prisoner was taken out and severely

beaten. His jaw was broken.

We dumped on

the pigs, tore up

we could. This was in the largest of the federal The pigs were afraid to let us shower for fear we would when they opened a cell door.

everything prisons.

attack

About three weeks later they let us shower one at a time. About twenty pigs escorted us, one at a time, in and out of the shower

stall

from the

They were

all

cells.

white pigs and they stood directly

of the shower watching

like you.

us."

trying to act relaxed.

One

"We're white men Those blacks don't like you any more than they He watched me and I just said: 'Tuck your

named Punchy like

me and

in front

said, in a friendly voice:

mother." If

do

me

like that, I know they must makes me wonder sometimes prisoners around me.

the pigs would approach

it

to other white prisoners. It

when

We

I

look at the faces of

were sent to prison

rested us, gave us

to

be broken.

The

forces that ar-

"due process" and threw us into prison, hate

our guts and wish to heaven

we

did not

exist.

It

is

not an

IN

154

accident that

we

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

all

too often find ourselves in racial conflicts

of self-defense with other prisoners.

They want

us to

ing one another,

and the police

kill

we

one another. So long as we are murdermaking it easy for the prison regimes

are

to hold us

and destroy

us.

and wounded and jails in the last decade or so in America, you could more easily understand that an armed conflict a war, even though a 'small war" is taking place at this very moment in every state, every county and in every city. It is being orchestrated by the police at this moment. Every day of every year in America at least four prisoners suffer violent death in prison and over one hundred are wounded. They use the blacks against the Chicanos, the whites and the Puerto Ricans. And the whites against the Chicanos and the Indians and the blacks and Puerto Ricans. They use every race against every other race, and that is why they are not tearing If

I

offered here the figures of prisoners killed

in prisons

down

—

—

'

the prisons.

Prison regimes and

jails

"teach" white prisoners to hate

non-white prisoners, because after being white racism

all

socially subjected to

their lives, the blacks naturally attack white

and prison. The authorities want the white prisoners to change their ways and "come back into the fold of white law-abiding society." That's the message and it is as clear as a bell. Whites are forced to defend themselves in prison, even if part of that defense is to take the offensive position. American prisoners in

jail

Sunday schools. Whites have to stay close to one another in most of the large penitentiaries and defend each other. This will be true so long as it is not understood by all races of prisoners that it is to their advantage to live in harmony and mutual regard for one anprisons are not

other. Until then,

But will

this

mutual destruction

can never happen.

The

will

be their

lot.

police, the prison regimes

always see to arranging our lives in prison with an eye to

keeping us at each other's throats.

I

TM

OKI N,\ AFFAIRS

he communists who

led the peasant (and petty bourgeois)

revolutions in 1848 in Germany The communists had not devised

winning the peasant

failed for political

reasons.

a correct political policy for

classes over to the proletarian revolution

gathering strength in the cities of Cologne, Paris and London.

The

lessons derived

from Marx's analyses of the communist

experience in France and Leninist

Communist

class alliance in

—an

Germany

Party,

which

alliance that permits the proletariat, small

number in peasant countries, The first successful revolution

tariat

furnished the basis of the

called for a worker-peasant

to rule the government. led

by the communist

prole-

occurred in 1917 in Russia. Since then, the whole history

development of nations has shifted. The proletarian since 1917 has gathered such immense strength throughout the world that a world proletarian revolution is not

of the

movement

far off.

and

its

The

revolution depends on the worker-peasant alliance

ability to

maintain

its

independence (economic and

IN

156

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

—

from the bourgeois industrial nations concentrated most part in Europe, specifically: England. Every peasant nation that frees itself by an alliance with the

political)

for the

Communist imperialist

closer to the is

Party, the dictatorship of the proletariat,

monopoly capitalism of other

from the

nations, brings us

hour of the successful proletarian revolution that

spearheading, historically, the world revolution.

What

happens

Mexico, Central America and South and the Middle East in Third World nations will determine that hour, which is inevitable. It could take ten more years, it could take thirty or a hundred more years but it will come: It is inevitable. What role the communist superpowers will play in this is another matter. China and the Soviet Union could possibly America,

in

—

in Africa

— —

retard the world revolution. in the

am

I

communist movement

not certain as to their place

today.

They

certainly have

no

claim to leadership (and are not the vanguard), simply because

they are vast and powerful. Little Albania or Mozambique, for the sake of illustration only, could possibly play a more important role in the

movement

ful communistic countries and the Soviet Union.

The

role of these

(in every sense)

like

the People's Republic of China

superpowers

sense on the assistance

than the big, power-

will

depend

in

an absolute

they extend to the revolutionaries

fighting for their lives in the

Third World now,

today.

These

revolutionaries are being tempered in a revolutionary war for

power and

are, therefore, in possession of a

higher revolution-

ary consciousness. I

am

with the most feeble and oppressed of

World in

nations.

I

direct

England when the

occurs

.

.

my

first

concern there.

all I

the Third

hope

to

be

successful proletarian revolution

.

There are perhaps many reasons why I seem to "admire" Russia, but the main one is this: I have developed a feeling that responds to the Russian soul

—the

greatest writers of prose

1S7

Foreign Affairs

came from Russia. I see Russia as a great suffering mass of humanity that has wallowed so deeply in the mire that only great passions could result. Besides,

first

I

studied Lenin and then

studied the history of the

guard" of Russia and vivid presences in his

my

Communist

his

all

it

I

must have

comrades and nurse

feel

it

I

know

personally Lieb-

felt like

suits

across a country is

etc., etc.

I

can

to win a country with

To see the realization To walk with comrades

to health.

years of theorizing, of dreaming.

patched-up

I

"old

Europe during Lenin's time are mind. The personalities of Lenin and all

knecht, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Radek, Bukharin,

my

The

of

all

comrades impressed me.

even imagine what

comrades.

Party he led.

of in

from every corner of Europe and America

we

just

conquered and to

feel

the might that

at last ours.

I have read at least three books by Alexander SolzhenitAugust 1814, The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. I have also read a few articles by him. He is a traitor, not to communism (you must first have been a communist), but to his people, his countrymen. (Notice how America is a haven for the vilest of traitors!) I was delighted to read The First Circle because beneath all his shit, I learned a lot about how lenient the Soviet Union was to its prisoners. I have been in prison twice as long as he, and I am not a traitor who tried to hand his country over to another .

.

syn:

country.

He

served ten years in prison for a crime that would

most certainly

result in execution today in the U.S.A. If

execution, he would in

still

just

be starting

his natural life

Leavenworth. In either case, he would never

been

freed.

I

in his life

have served more time than he did,

not

term have

just in

the

hole.

He rism.

was/is a militarist, one

He

is

who worshipped German

not even a propagandist: he

lies,

weaves

The

style of

his fabrications,

one committed.

is

a

liar.

He

milita-

tells his

with a certain amount of

A

certain passion.

style.

That passion

IN

158 is

simply to

exulted in

.

lie

his

way out

bad

of a

situation

—and he has

it!

occurred to

.It just

.

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

me

this

morning that you see

in

my

disgust with Soviet "dissidents" (like Anatoly Shcharansky), a

pro-Soviet attitude.

There born

movement

a

is

—and

movement,

this

the Soviet felon prisons

in

Marxism-Leninism,

There

movement

establish complete bourgeois freedom.

dents."

To me,

I

I

support

I

find in

them

oppose

.

.My

.

position regarding

force

Cuba

U.S.S.R. of

all,

—

(if

to

Cuba

is

Cuban

is

producing.

relation to social

developments have conspired to

"appearances" are correct) to kneel before the

be a "running dog" of

social imperialism. First

alone in the Western Hemisphere.

either to capitulate to

the

Cuba and Cuba's

this: historical

is

The "dissiNot only are

it.

a cynical verification of the

maleducated "intellectuals" the Soviet Union

imperialism

it.

in the U.S.S.R. to

the "dissidents" are ridiculous.

they ridiculous, but

was

communism,

to restore

the Soviet Union.

in

a petty-bourgeois

is

—

ironically,

America and

Cuba had

restore conditions prior to

revolution, or align itself with the

"communist

empire" of the Soviet Union. I

do not agree with Cuba's foreign policy because Cuba has

no foreign Union.

policy.

Cuba

has the foreign policy of the Soviet

The only way Cuba can break with social imperialism is if two or three Latin-American countries have a successful revolution. This would break Cuba's isolation; give her a voice in the Western Hemisphere and allow her to form, if necessary, some sort of bloc to punish her enemies. That was Che's conception of

Cuba I

in relation to

cannot be

other hemispheric powers.

critical of

an infant whose only possible source

of nourishment can be found in the dugs of a wolf.

Lenin made

his Brest Treaty. Stalin his Pact with Hitler.

Lenin saw the Brest Treaty

as a

means

of gaining time, a

means

159

Foreign Affairs

of respite. Stalin saw his pact as necessary,

which indeed

it

was,

because the Western Powers wanted to pit Hitler against Russia and then

move

in

and defeat whichever

side

emerged

victorious.

Lenin's treaty and Stalin's pact were politically brilliant maneuvers. Their response to reality was magnificent. So

is

Cas-

tro's.

Mao, the Chinese Communist Party and the country

are

objectively three separate entities. I

support Mao's influence on the revolution, his contribution

to Marxist knowledge. I I I

support an independent China. do not know enough about the C.C.P. to judge whether

"support" the party.

none we ever heard it rely on weaponry. But it had the best people because they were politically trained, and this element alone defies everything we once knew (or know) about regular positional warfare. I think this is the crux of the difference between bourgeois military doctrines and the military doctrines of people's war. The former relies on weaponry and machinery; the latter on

Under Mao, China had

a military like

did not have the best "weapons," nor did

It

of.

the valor of the people.

The

latter

is

vastly superior in war.

—not nowhere. The innovation warfare century not the discovery nuclear war —

one

seriously contests this

any longer

greatest

in

of

is

at the in

it is

No

Pentagon;

the twentieth the discovery

of people's war.

The

capitalist military

can never use the methods of people's

war without overthrowing

.

.

.The thinking

is

itself.

that the Jews in theU.S.S.R.

who want to

go to Israel want to get there for the express reason of picking up arms against the Palestinians. That is why a lot of people have reservations about the mass Jewish migration to Israel.

That

is

not

from the U.S.S.R.

my "automatic" opinion.

I

don't hold that

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

IN

160

opinion, because

honestly do not know.

I

except, of course, that

have no opinion

I

Jews want to go there to

if

with the

live

same motives anyone migrates to another country, it would be a crime to stop them. But there are rumors to the contrary, and / do know what Zionism is, as opposed to Judaism.

.

wince when

.1

.

the U.S.A. it

only

If

tells

that

I

is

me how

hear that

here in

life in Israel is like life

supposed to be a kind of defense of corrupt,

how

evil

and

Israel,

country

terrible that

is.

you do not understand the devastating nature of

If

violence

—violence

makes the horrible

that

violence look like childish play-acting

prehended the setting

for

both

my

civilized

atrocities of savage

—you have not

truly

com-

and the contents of his mor-

letters

them. That violence that destroys a man's character, als,

mind and

his life, his

that stalks

perverts

all

of his senses

is

beneath the banners of capitalism and

the violence settles like a

plague over industrial democratic republics.

The Shah

chop

of Iran will

off

your hands, but he

will

not

(because he cannot) take your soul from you. In America, for

example,

if its

both can and

prisons hold the slightest authority over you,

will destroy

you

—

can and

it

it

your soul.

will take

We are each of us here burnt-out disaster zones —the more

pitiable because I

am

most of us don't know

it

or can't see

not "for" either civilized or savage violence. Civilized

violence

is,

however, the worst of the two.

It is

a

compulsion

without personal reason that permeates every aspect of bourgeois society.

So

for

me

Marx

even

chies

.

.

in

it

is

infinitely

Saudi Arabia or Syria

and savage

.1

called

life in

"alienation."

to visualize an Israel "like the U.S.A."

to feel alarm; to feel life say,

it.

worse there

—with

its

is

for

me

in quality than,

barbarian monar-

tribes.

wish you would ponder this a moment. Say that

Arab nations tomorrow became partners with

Israel

all

the

and every-

161

Foreign Affairs

thing that implies.

by

The

feudal monarchies would be supported

the interests that support the existence of

all

inevitable collapse of those old feudal systems at

bay for

God knows how many

Revolution would be

stifled.

Israel.

The

would be held

decades.

We

need

instability in that

up the people in that Arab nations are beginning to become aware this. We need to raise popular democratic revolutions in the Arab nations now, and communists are trying to do

area of the world in order to raise area. All the

of all

just that.

This "great country" has sure become enraged

with right-

eous indignation over the Ayatollah's latest farce to get a

out of the U.S.A. by forcing the extradition of one of the most infamous war criminals since the Second World War. Imagine how the Israelis would react if the little justice

U.S.A.

not

only

harbored Adolf

made him an honored course! It

is

guest.

No

Hitler,

but feted

him,

one argues that point, of

the "methods" of the Iranians they take "issue"

with.

Go

Ask anyone: from the man on the Harvard and Yale. See how red their faces get, how angry! At last, at long last, their "country" has been done an "injustice." They are up in out into the

streets.

street to the "experts" in political science at

arms against the Iranian children

show

solidarity

been

historically

barely in

means

its

that the

—

country for daring to

a revolution that has

overdue for forty years; a revolution that

infancy: six

people of Iran.

in this

with their revolution

months

Shah cannot walk

old.

It

free in the

A friend of an enemy

is

is

justice.

That

same world

as the

needs

an enemy. Childish but

true.

The

old yellow pus of

American cowardice

throbbing in the veins of this sorry country. appear? In chauvinism that struts safely in

away from danger.

It

is

is

once again

How its

does

own

it

land,

easy to talk "dangerously" about

knocking people down when you are on your own

turf, be-

IN

162

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

hind an embattlement of thousands of nuclear missiles and

an ocean. This else.

rage.

If

shit revolts I

me

dwelled on

to it,

no end I

just

if I

don't think of something

know

I'd tear

up

this cell in

FREEDOM?

MA ightning rain has

is

come.

about midnight and everyone is

my

—the —has always soothed me. The

roll

always are during a hunger

and

strike. It

is

a torrent of quiet.

They

time to stretch out

relax.

This kind of night driving like

windows and

flashing outside the

It is

the big drums of a

When me happy

it

occurs to

after

all

rain hitting the

symphony

me

orchestra.

the kind of things

these years,

I

windows hard,

of thunder sounds

like to

it

takes to

make

think they are simple.

Simple because money cannot purchase them. Indeed, money

much. Then again, it's not a matter of what I like or dislike, what I "want" or desire. Not a matter of personal taste. It is what I need, what my existence cannot live without. Some would call it "revenge"; others, "vindication." I want justice. I do not want to be in prison so long that I come to gaze up at the sky and curse the stars for my misery. I do not want is

an obstacle to them. But

I

know

I

ask too

IN

164

ever to

come

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

to the upside-down conclusion that

blame/' as the saying goes.

Or

"no one

is

to

that this state of affairs always

has been and always will be in our world.

Or

that

I

turned the

key on myself.

do not know how I would react to the experience of someone, an ordinary man who works for a government, who would come up to me and with his manner, his tone, his voice tell me: "We apologize for what we did to you. We are sorry and will never do it again." If he were truly sincere and I knew it, such an experience would devastate me. I believe it would alter me radically. I might as well forget that. It is not unlike the man who says: 'Til believe in God only if I see Him." In reality his secret desire is to believe, and he does by presupposing God in order to "see" Him. But he never "sees" Him and is never reconciled to his beliefs by an objective but personal act of God: only by his own acts. .

.

that

.1

.

.The main thing too obvious

.

it is

for

me now to overlook is me to exist in prison.

constitutionally impossible for

My vision

of

life

outside prison has

me wonder

become

dream.

a fading

what it has always been all along. I think I want out of prison the way the average man thinks he wants to be a millionaire, or to be, which is a better example, It

makes

if

that

is

a great artist like Michelangelo.

of the sacrifices

and

Not having the

effort that

faintest notion

such things require in the

average man.

Counterposed to "my vision of

life

outside prison"

full-blown perception of a terrible revolutionary war in

—

is

my

its in-

up in fits and starts and dying as quickly in a splash of blood and violence on a scale so microscopic as to go fancy

flaring

unnoticed to the average, everyday perception of events country.

The

realization that

of those unnoticed "fits

and

by

all

odds

I

in this

too will be just one

starts" that dies terribly in a splash

Freedom 7

165

and inhuman violence, indifferent violence,

of blood

heartening. Nevertheless, the line of in that direction.

of

That

the "normal"

life:

The

my

leads inexorably

life

conquered the pastoral one

life.

"natural" revolutionaries ever born to society

first

ways die

vision has

not very

is

in prisons,

al-

always die after long torture and debase-

ment. They are always unknown, unsupported, and usually unconscious of themselves as such.

They think they

die as

"good thieves," "good convicts." The Catechism of a Revolutionary, written by Natcheyev, describes such men. But it describes their Being and not their direct consciousness as revolutionary.

ety

my

is

annihilation. It has

been since

customs, laws of our society oppose

So maybe "really" care

Every

this explains a little of

whether or not

I

am

Simply to die a violent death on

my

why

detail of our soci-

my birth. The it

seems that

.

.

I

how

I

can be happy

society. After all this that society has I

done,

don't want revenge; to punish.

apology of some

itself

sort.

A

little

I

I

just

am

I

to

to

Or walk

an

to

me, not

streets as

my cell and beaten me to the floor, with and consent of everyone? Men who have come

entered

their

working time tormenting me?

the streets with the scores of judges, of politicians,

preachers and lawyers

me

like

consideration. Just a small recog-

be content to walk free along the same

knowledge work and spent

full

naturally

would

by society of the injustice that has been done to mention others like me.

Am

the

American

in

nition

men who have

reason to

"little scale";

blood"). History understands only big things.

cannot imagine

resentful.

prison.

a "bigger scale," (a bigger

with the desire to get out of prison (the

"little splash of

do not

I

ever released from

"splash of blood") instead of in prison, can be exist

morals,

existence in essence.

who have

consciously conspired to crush

through the perpetration of intentional

lies,

cover-ups?'

Who have baited their traps for me with my very sanity? With justice?

With common decency?

IN

166

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Or walk the streets with the "faceless masses" of our society who during my lifetime have supported or acquiesced to evil men and their ambitions? And do it with full cynical knowledge? Just you walk out of your

the street. Talk to him.

house and stop one randomly on

may amuse you because he

It

had power over you. You are not subjected

has never

to his ignorance,

his basic evilness.

But been

you had been, you would not find

if

my

all

How

life

under his arbitrary

wish this would end!

I

my

could find

in the world,

How

life

it

amusing.

I

have

heel.

I

wish

I

could walk free

again and see and do things

other people do.

how

would be possible now, though. Too I want to try. It is my right. That is what "human right" is. My right, the individual's right. We all have that right even though we know in our hearts we may be incapable of accomplishing what we don't see

I

much

that

has happened, for too long, to me. But

have the absolute right to

do

right to

to

me what

it

society does have, then at

some time

ing that

.

.

.1

I

in

try to accomplish. If society has the

has done (and

have the

I

my life even

may not be

legally

I

doing),

right, at least, to

the odds are by

as other

do not know how

thought of

if

is still

men.

feel at

being given a parole.

being free from prison receded from

my

time

ever had plans or hopes of ever being a free

feelings, so long

country again in not now.

walk free

now overwhelm-

mind, I

which

my

life.

ago that

Maybe

I

later

The

my

honestly do not recall a

I

man

can write about

in this it,

but

ABOUT THK AUTHOR Jack

Henry Abbott was born

has written for The

New

January 21, 1944, in Oscoda, Michigan.

York Review of Books.

He

(contin uedfrom front flap)

drugs in prison; the

doomed

relationship be-

tween inmate and guard; the complex behavior of prisoners among themselves; the political philosophy that Abbott has forged from his unique vantage point; his views on the American system ofjustice, parole and rehabilitation—and more. Through the relentless force of its language, the extreme urgency of its concerns, In the Belly of the Beast takes us deeper into the life and mind of a hard-core convict than any other book. Always compelling occasionally shocking, this is a haunting portrait of human nature in a hellish world, the debut of a brilliant writer:

a stunning literary achievement.

Jack Henry Abbott has written for The New York Review ofBooks.

Jacket design: Robert Aulicino

Random House, Printed in U.S.A.

©

1981

Inc.,

New York, NY 6/81

Random House,

Inc.

10022

In Praise of

In the Belly ofthe Beast

"We most

have before us the most intense,

I

might even say the

book of its kind in the American repertoire of prison literature. In the Belly of the Beast is awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is fiercely visionary

indelible,

and

as

an articulation of penal nightmare

it is

completely compelling." -Terrence Des Pres, The New York Times Book Review "It

echoes

like

a

slammed door

in the corridors

of max-

imum security." —J. D. Reed, Time

work touched with dark greatness... in up its own stark poetry, he inverts our reality and asserts his. Darkness, light, hunger, fear, sorrow never have been more extremely defined." -John Rechy, The Los Angeles Times Book Review "Astonishing... a

brutal prose that dredges

"Remarkable... Abbott achieves something accuracy and detachment."

like

an heroic

-James Boatright, The Washington Post Book World

"May be one of the most importaM books of our age." — Vogue