J. J. Maloney

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. 

South Kansas City Blast Site

by J.J. Maloney

On Oct. 30, 1998 the 8^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the appeal of five defendants convicted of causing the deaths of six Kansas City firefighters in 1988. The defendants, Darlene Edwards, Frank Sheppard, Earl (Skip) Sheppard, Bryan Sheppard and Richard Brown, were sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

For months the defendants, and their attorneys, had been hoping the 8^th Circuit’s lengthy deliberations might lead to a new trial. The case was argued before the 8^th Circuit on April 15, 1998. At time of oral argument, the three judge panel had sharply questioned Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Becker, head of the Organized Crime Strike Force in Kansas City, who had prosecuted the case. This sharp questioning caused many to believe the 8^th Circuit would overturn the convictions.

As it turns out, on the very day the decision was handed down, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Becker was in Washington receiving an award from U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno for winning convictions in the case. The U.S. Treasury Department had earlier given an award to retired ATF Special Agent Dave True for putting the case against the five defendants together. (Ironically, the Missouri Bar Association gave this author its 1997 "Excellence in Legal Journalism Award" for two lengthy articles that forcefully say the five defendants are innocent.)