Word: abbotts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...author of those words, Jack Henry Abbott, 37, had practiced that lethal sidestep on a fellow inmate while doing time in Utah state prison. He described the art of murder in one of some 1,000 letters that he wrote to Author Norman Mailer between 1977 and 1980, providing a cool but furious description of life behind bars. It was an existence filled with violence: the violence done to Abbott in roach-infested solitary-confinement cells and the violence that Abbott, long a prison incorrigible, did to others. His was a voice so choked with rage that he admitted...
...Abbott's agonies began before the prison reforms of the '60s. Once he was chained to a floor naked for 13 days. Another time he was kept in darkness for a month. He was sometimes forced to eat insects to survive. Reform was even more horrifying. Heavy injections of Thorazine -chemical lobotomy-replaced the jackboot. Overcrowding forced Abbott into cells with ethnic militants, who derided his Chinese-Irish heritage. Homosexual punks and homicidal psychopaths were everywhere. "It is only a matter of time," he notes, "if you love life too much or fear violence too much, before...
...Abbott's tireless defiance is informed by a unique education. A sixth-grade dropout, he began reading seriously during some three years of solitary in a Utah prison. He consumed-but did not wholly digest-Hegel and Marx, Kierkegaard and Camus, mathematics and physics...
...Nine-tenths of my vocabulary I have never heard spoken," he writes. Unsurprisingly, Abbott is ingenuous about a worldwide Marxist revolution and hysterically partisan about "pigs" (guards). Yet his letters belong with the best prison literature, not because of their accounts of atrocity, but for their disturbing picture of daily life behind bars...
...Mailer notes, Abbott's trials are far from over. His gift for survival now faces its newest and hardest test. He has been paroled to freedom for the first time in 25 years. -By J.D. Reed