In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison

by Jack Henry Abbott

Book Overview

A visionary book in the repertoire of prison literature. When Normal Mailer was writing The Executioner's Song , he received a letter from Jack Henry Abbott, a convict, in which Abbott offered to educate him in the realities of life in a maximum security prison. This book organizes Abbott's by now classic letters to Mailer, which evoke his infernal vision of the prison nightmare.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679732373
• ISBN13: 9780679732372
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Communist propaganda.

Book is literally just communist propaganda

A work of pathological narcissism--not to be taken at face value...

It is easy to see why the elite (Norman Mailer et. al) would easily become seduced by Abbott's particular pathological narcissism. But those truly seasoned by time (and not necessarily by serving time) will see beyond the print and into Abbott's need for (anti)heroic self-mythologizing--to construct a Self that was never developed because of his lifelong incarceration. Abbott's letters lack the one thing Carl Panzram's A Journal of Murder possesses: honesty. Panzram had a real implied reader, Lesser the guard, and it was this human contact that, no matter how monstrous the accounts, kept him honest to the point of being even more monstrous. Panzram was inhuman, but he wasn't the pedigree of con Abbott appears to have been. (Abbott's pathology of reconstructing himself as a victim-antihero played quite well into the privileged class's muddled notions of Marxism and social injustice.) It is this pathological (re)construction of himself that destroys his story, but not all of my sympathy for this tragically wasted life. All proceeds of the book go to the widow of the young man Abbott knifed days after his release.

Difficult to read but necessary

In order to work within the Prison System we sometimes have to read difficult books in order to understand the "why's" of what people do to one another. This is a very difficult book, very honest and pretty well written. It gives an insight into what our society should do and must do in order that what happened in this book CAN and WILL NOT happen again.

I finally see the light!

After forty some odd years, I finally see the light thanks to this eye-opener! Whereas I used to believe that prisons were places of punishment for people that chose to victimize others, and therefore were not only useful but also morally justifiable, I see now that prisons are merely places designed by society to clip the wings of those free-spirited individuals who simply do not wish to be bound by the laws of man! I once saw an individual beat an elderly tourist, rip her purse from her shoulder, and flee....and I did what is now inconceivable to me: I called the police! Now, this poor guy is probably suffering in prison somewhere right now, maybe even without cable TV!! Oh, but that I could turn back the hands of time! If I could go back, I would gladly furnish an exculpatory statement for this poor guy! People, left to their own devices, are NEVER evil! Any thinking person knows that if prisons were abolished today crime would probably disappear anyway, because the only reasons that people commit crimes is because of mean prison guards. Let's say that someone happened to be a pedophile, and they came to kidnap your child.... you should realize that just because this person may succeed in taking your child, removing him/her to a secluded place and torturing them for days before killing them in the most horrible manner imaginable, that putting the perpetrator in prison is not right! I mean, people nowadays are so stupid as to believe that putting these people in prison to be picked at by mean correctional officers is somehow warranted just because a child was tortured and killed mercilessly! Come on, people, WAKE UP! If we could only be more understanding, the world could be a Utopia beyond our imagination. What we REALLY need to do is start putting crime victims in jail and see how THEY like it!

Every issue has two sides

So much debating over what should be so strikingly clear. Was Jack Henry Abbott a bad person? Yes, he was. Was he irredeemable as a human being when he entered the penal system in his youth? Certainly not. Did the brutality of the penal system render him irredeemable? Absolutely. When one enters prison at such a young age and spends a considerable length of time there, it becomes the only world one knows or understands. In the convict's mind, the social structure in prison becomes the social structure of life. When considering how brutality breeds brutality, one should consider the life of Carl Panzram. True, even as a youth, Panzram was "no good"...a drunk and a small-time criminal. But then, so was Huckleberry Finn. After running away from home and hopping a freight train, however, Panzram's life took a detour onto the road which would eventually lead him to death by hanging. On that freight train, Panzram, still a child, was sodomized by two old men. He later stated that this was when he learned a valuable lesson in his life: "Might equals right." After that day, he spent more time in prison than out of it. When granted a day pass into town by one open-minded warden due to his good behavior, Panzram raped a woman, proving that he could no longer function in society for even one day. In the end, he was put to death for the murder of a prison guard, and fought along the way to ensure that he would, indeed, receive the death penalty, as opposed to another life sentence. So, was Carl Panzram evil? Undoubtedly. He was the living personification of evil. But his brutality stemmed from brutality which was perpetrated against him, as with Henry Lee Lucas, Edmund Kemper, and nearly every serial killer in modern history...and also, Jack Henry Abbott. Was Abbott a bad person when he first entered the system? Possibly. But I don't feel that there is any doubt that prison conditions pushed him from a strained bad to an outright evil. If one wishes to make an animal of a man, all one has to do is keep him caged for long enough. I highly recommend the Australian/American film "Ghosts...of the Civil Dead" for an intriguing and potent view of the modern-day prison system. It is a true eye-opener, and a film that may force some to re-evaluate their opinion on this subject.

The best book yet on the prison experience.

Jack Henry Abbot tells it like no other can. The realism of this book is incredible and frightening. You will never think about prisons, prisoners, law, or the judicial system in the same way again. A must read for everyone.