Jack Abbott
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- For the fictional character on the soap opera The Young and the Restless, see Jack Abbott (Y&R).
Jack Henry Abbott (January 21, 1944–February 10, 2002) was an American criminal and author. He was released from prison after gaining praise for his writing and lauded by a number of high-profile literary critics, but almost immediately he committed a murder and was locked up for the rest of his life.
He was born on a U.S. Army base in Michigan to an American soldier and a Chinese woman. As a child Abbott was in trouble with teachers and later the law, and by the age of sixteen he was sent to a reform school.
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[edit] Prison and release
In 1965, aged twenty-one, Jack Abbott was serving a sentence for forgery in a Utah prison when he stabbed a fellow inmate to death. He was given a sentence of three to twenty years for this offense, and in 1971 his sentence was increased by a further nineteen years after he escaped and committed a bank robbery in Colorado. Behind bars he was troublesome and often refused to obey guards' orders. He spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement.
In 1977 he read that author Norman Mailer was writing about convicted killer Gary Gilmore. Abbott wrote to Mailer and offered to write about his time behind bars and the conditions he was experiencing. Mailer agreed and helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book on life in the prison system consisting of Abbott's letters to Mailer.
Mailer supported Abbott's attempts to gain parole. Abbott also gained the support of such celebrities as Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon. Sarandon's son, Jack Henry Robbins, is named after Abbott. Abbott was released on parole in June 1980. He went to New York City and was the toast of the literary scene for a short while.
[edit] Murder and return to prison
On the morning of July 18, just six weeks after getting out of prison, Jack Abbott went to a small cafe called the Binibon in Manhattan. He clashed with 22-year-old Richard Adan, son-in-law of the restaurant's owner, over Adan's telling him the restroom was for staff only. The short-tempered Abbott stabbed Adan in the chest, killing him. The very next day, unaware of Abbott's crime, the New York Times ran a positive review of The Belly of the Beast.
After some time on the run, Abbott was arrested and charged with murdering Richard Adan. At his trial in January 1982, he was convicted of manslaughter and given fifteen years to life.
Apart from the advance fee of $12,500, Abbott did not receive any profits from The Belly of the Beast, as Richard Adan's widow successfully sued him for $7.5 million in damages, which meant she received all the money from the book's sales.
There was a tragic irony to the murder, not lost on the community of aspiring writers and actors in New York. While Abbott was an accomplished writer, Adan was both an actor and a playwright, whose talent was just beginning to be recognized: shortly before his murder his first play had been accepted for production by the La Mama theatre company.
Norman Mailer was criticised for his role in getting Jack Abbott released and was accused of being so blinded by Abbott's evident writing talent that he did not take into account Abbott's propensity for violence. In a 1992 interview in The Buffalo News, Mailer said that his involvement with Abbott was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in."
[edit] Final years
In 1987 Abbott published another book titled My Return, which was not a success. It contained a great deal of self-pity, but no remorse for his crimes. In fact, Abbott blamed his crimes on the prison system and the government and said he wanted an apology from society for the way he had been treated.
He appeared before the parole board in 2001, but his application was turned down because of his failure to express remorse and his lengthy criminal record and disciplinary problems in prison.
On February 10, 2002, Jack Abbott hanged himself in his prison cell using a makeshift noose constructed from his bedsheets and shoelaces. He left a suicide note, the contents of which have not been made public.
[edit] Quotations
- "Even European philosophers have taken notice that most of what we take for knowledge is nothing but bias and prejudice." - From 1981 In The Belly of the Beast
- "The world is amazed at how 'cruel' it is! (This is very funny to think about!) And then, when the 'chips are down' (Sartre's favorite expression), Sartre, who has never gambled but is enamored of the terminology of a kind of daring that doesn't involve getting his ass skinned, 'martyrs' himself. It is the same kind of responsibility 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 that, forlornly tells you he is sorry it rained last night, sorry the price of tea went up, etc. etc." - From 1981 In The Belly of the Beast
- "Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself." - From 1981 In The Belly of the Beast
- "The mind does not regulate its own condition. Mental depression, for example, is a state of mind caused by the body. In a cell in the hole it only seems that there is a separation of mind and body - in fact, the body's condition (of deprivation of sensations; experiences, functions, and so on) controls the moods of the mind more than in any other situation I can think of." - From 1981 In The Belly of the Beast
- "The intelligence recedes, no more a tool of learning - because knowledge is based on experience - but a tool of the outside world it is deprived of knowing. It tries to contact other minds by telepathy; it 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." - From 1981 In The Belly of the Beast
- "But a kind of genius can come of this deprivation of sensation, of experience. It has been mistaken as naїve intelligence, when in fact it is empty intelligence, pure intelligence. The composition of the mind is altered. Its previous cultivation is disintegrated and it has greater access to the brain, the body: it is Supersanity. Learning is turned inside out. You have to start from the top and work your way down. You must study mathematical theory before simple arithmetic; theoretical physics before applied physics; anatomy, you might say, before you can walk." - From 1981 In The Belly of the Beast
- "I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society." - From 1981 In the Belly of the Beast
- "This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release." - From 1981 In The Belly of the Beast
