Feb. 2, 2012

Dr. Karl Menninger

Former convict and Kansas City Star reporter J.J. Maloney recalls his 17-year association with Dr. Karl Menninger, the avatar of prison reform.

by J.J. Maloney

In December, 1972, I attended a conference on prison reform in Topeka, Kansas, in connection with a prison series another reporter and I were writing for The Kansas City Star.

At lunch I found myself sitting next to Karl Menninger.

I'd seen pictures of him, but he was much more of a presence than I had expected. About 70 at the time, he was developing bags under his eyes, had silver hair, and was getting jowly; but he radiated intelligence, confidence and power.

Menninger remained slightly aloof until I mentioned to him that I had enjoyed a piece he had written for a bulletin published by the W. Clement Stone Foundation in Chicago.

What piece was that? Menninger asked.

The piece on the history of prison literature, I replied.

Menninger looked puzzled and said he didn't remember that piece. When I said I had a copy in my suitcase, he insisted I go to my room and get it.

He read the piece then said to me, "I didn't write this."

I finally told Menninger I had written the piece myself, for Book World, which was published in The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune. Apparently someone at the foundation had thought it would have more impact with Menninger's name on it.

Menninger appeared deeply embarrassed, but from that moment forward we had a warm relationship. Every time I would cover one of his appearances, or happen to attend some event at the same time he did, he would insist that I sit at his table.

We met frequently in those days. The 1970s was the heyday of prison reform in America, and Menninger bore the torch for the movement.

It wasn't always cordial. On one occasion when I attended a seminar sponsored by the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Menninger talked on the subject of training prison management personnel.

I asked him if he'd considered the common problem of prison managers using convicts as pawns in office politics – i.e., after one official gives a convict a job, that official's rival determines the convict isn't really "qualified" for that job and has the convict reassigned. The object of the game is to place the first official's judgment in question. The convict is just a pawn.

Feb. 6, 2012

Missouri State Penitentiary

J. J. Maloney, the founder of Crime Magazine, spent 13 years in prison for a murder he committed during an armed robbery when he was 19 years old. Paroled in 1972, he went to work for The Kansas City Star as a book reviewer and became a full-time reporter the next year. The following stories are based on his prison years at “The Walls” in Jefferson City, Missouri.  Mr. Maloney died in 1999 at age 59.

by J.J. Maloney

I. A Natural Poet

He had a dog-eared sheaf of papers clutched in his hand. "You're a poet, aren't you?" he asked.

I nodded yes, but felt immediately paranoid because he made it sound like more of an accusation than a question. He was a reddish-haired kid with a puffy face and thick eyeglasses that made his eyes look watery. Between his two front teeth there was a sizeable gap.

He was a poet. He'd brought this sheaf of offerings as proof. I listened, politely, but with a lack of enthusiasm. Every prison has a hundred would-be poets.

He was different in that he had a sheaf of poems, which indicated some industriousness.  He rattled off the names of several small poetry magazines that had published his work.

I reluctantly agreed to take his work to my cell and read it and critique it. People who write are generally more interested in confirmation than criticism.

That evening, though, when I'd finished everything I considered important, I dragged the poems out and read them.  They were good – very good. They bordered on professionalism. So I read them again, and they were as good as they'd been the first time.

I sat there and stared out the bars for a while, thinking of this awkward-looking kid with the puffy face who also happened to be a good poet – a promising poet, since he was only 19 years old.

Jan. 23, 2012

Jack Henry Abbott

Jack Abbott sold himself to Norman Mailer as the “Super Convict.” Mailer turned the letters Abbott sent him into the best-selling book, In the Belly of the Beast, and assisted Abbott in gaining parole in 1981. Six months later Abbott stabbed a waiter to death in a New York restaurant.

 by J.J. Maloney

Jack Henry Abbott started as a boy in a training school, worked his way up through the system-—getting in trouble here, being transferred there, getting into more trouble until, ultimately, he spent virtually all of his life in some form of reform school or prison.

When it became known in 1977 that Norman Mailer was to write The Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore, Abbott, who was incarcerated in the same Utah penitentiary, wrote to Mailer, suggesting that Mailer could make use of the observations of someone like Abbott, someone who had lived in the world Gary Gilmore inhabited.

Mailer began to correspond with Abbott, and apparently began to care about him. Abbott wrote long, grandiloquent letters, in which he discussed his fantasized perception of himself as a Super Convict. He claimed to have been subjected to more brutality than other convicts, to have risen higher above the situation than other convicts, to have been more philosophically correct than other convicts.

Mailer bought it; for his own reasons, he wanted to believe what Abbott was saying. And, of course, there was some truth in many of the things Abbott said about prisons. 

May 16, 2010

Dartmoor Prison

   Opened in 1809 to hold French soldiers captured during the Napoleonic Wars, Dartmoor Prison became Great Britain’s version of Devil’s Island for the most hardened of British convicts.
by Robert Walsh

“There are two ways to enter Dartmoor Prison, and it is far, far preferable to work there.” – Anonymous

Her Majesty’s Prison, Dartmoor (known simply as “The Moor” to prisoners and guards alike) is the oldest, and by far the most notorious prison still in use in the Great Britain. Located in the middle of the Dartmoor National Park, it is also considered the most difficult prison to visit. It’s reputation as being a punishment prison for intractable  repeat offenders, coupled with various riots, murders, spectacular escapes and notorious inmates, make the word “Dartmoor” synonymous with brutality, harsh living conditions, even harsher discipline and a long-established (and well-deserved) reputation as the hardest time a British convict could do.

Dartmoor was designed by well-known architect Daniel Asher Alexander and constructed using local labor and local materials, especially the Dartmoor granite used in building the cell blocks. It was opened in 1809 and intended to hold French prisoners taken during the long-running Napoleonic Wars and as a replacement for their previous accommodation, the filthy disease-and-rat infested prison ship (known as ‘hulks’) then anchored 17 miles away in Plymouth Sound. Along with French prisoners, it also held U.S. prisoners taken during the War of 1812.

After the end of hostilities with America and France, the prison was closed down in 1816. During it’s time as a military prison it held between six and 10 thousand prisoners of which over 1,500 were to die, mostly from cramped conditions, harsh treatment, malnutrition, and disease.