In a journey that began with Killing for Sport: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, I spent some of last year indulging in true crime stories. One of the things that Pat Brown does in the book mentioned is make a clear distinction between Psychotics (who can be cured, or at least managed, with drugs) and Psychopaths (who don't have underlying medical issues but are cold and calculating and have the makings of becoming serial killers if social conditions create them that way). Intrigued by one of her stories, and by way of a recommendation found in the writings of Dominick Dunne, I read The Executioner's Song, in which Norman Mailer wrote a "nonfiction novel" about the killer Gary Gilmore and his quest to compel the state to enforce his sentence of execution.
As the story goes, while assembling vast amounts of material into his book, Norman Mailer was contacted by Jack Henry Abbott, an incarcerated convict, who offered to educate the novelist about the real inside workings of penitentiaries and the criminal mind, an offer that, based upon the intriguing voice of the convict's correspondence, Mailer eagerly accepted. I found The Executioner's Song to be a bit sterile and bloated, but was intrigued by the relationship that Mailer developed with Abbott and was led to In the Belly of the Beast.
If half of what Abbott writes is true about sensory deprivation, starvation, torture and humiliation by prison guards, constant/crippling fear of other prisoners and the emasculation/infantilization of the prisoners, then it's easy to see his point about how it's the penitentiaries themselves that turn budding psychopaths into full-blown murderers. I could only console myself that he was writing of a time 40 or more years ago and the treatment of prisoners must be improved by now; that I may as well have been reading about a Dickensian workhouse for how removed the situation is from what I assume to be reality today.
Mailer thought that Abbott, a self-taught expert on everything from Philosophy to History, was a literary genius, deserving of another chance in society (although to be fair, he didn't agree with the killer's Marxist views). Lending his weight at a parole hearing, and offering a job to the convict, Mailer was able to get Abbott released and they were soon gratified to see Abbott's correspondence to the novelist edited into this volume. Within six weeks, Jack Henry Abbott had killed again and went on the run.
I suppose that looking into the aftermath of this book has very little to do with what lies between its covers, but since Abbott spends most of the book blaming society in general and the penitentiary system in particular for the man he had become, it might be instructive to consider (as Pat Brown, the criminal profiler, would) to what extent his psychopathic tendencies were at play during the writing of these letters; to what extent the convict was conning the novelist into giving him another chance at freedom and at killing.
I don't know if it's appropriate to talk about whether I "liked" this book or not (I can't say if I did, truly) but it is an interesting piece to fit in to my reading journey of late.
