Jack Henry Abbott (January 21, 1944 – February 10, 2002) was an American murderer and author. With a long history of criminal convictions, Abbott's writing concerning his life and experiences was lauded by author Norman Mailer. Due partly to lobbying by Mailer and others on Abbott's behalf, Abbott was released from prison in 1981 where he was serving sentences for forgery, manslaughter, and bank robbery. Abbott's memoir In the Belly of the Beast was published with positive reviews soon after his release.
Six weeks after being paroled from prison, Abbott killed waiter Richard Adan following an argument at a New York City cafe. Abbott was convicted and sent back to prison, where he killed himself in 2002.
Abbott described his life as being a "state-raised convict", having spent just over nine months outside of confinement in state facilities, including solitary confinement, between the ages of 12 and 37. He wrote that because of confinement with other violent offenders from whom he could not escape, he developed a subjective perspective that every encounter was potentially threatening.Criminal Law - Cases and Materials, 7th ed. 2012, Wolters Kluwer Law & Business; John Kaplan, Robert Weisberg, Guyora Binder, ,
Early life Abbott was born on January 21, 1944, at Camp Skeel in Oscoda, Michigan, to Rufus Henry Abbott and Mattie Jung. Rufus, who was of Irish descent, served in the Army Air Corps and was described as an alcoholic. Mattie, who was of mixed Chinese and European descent, made a living as a prostitute around military bases and had four other children that she gave up for adoption. The couple married after Abbott's birth, but Rufus abandoned the family shortly after the end of World War II, divorcing Mattie in 1948. Both sides of Abbott's family rejected Abbott and his older sister Frances for being mixed race. Abbott himself identified as White and referred to his mother as "Eurasian".
Abbott and his sister were raised by their mother in her hometown of Salt Lake City until 1950, when both were taken into foster care. For five years, the siblings lived with the family of Albert Barlow, a Mormon man with five wives and 54 children. Abbott became fond of his foster family, referring to Barlow as "Uncle Albert" and being baptized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. During the same time, Abbott still received regular visits by his biological mother. At age nine, Abbott was first tried by a juvenile court for vandalism and later dropped out of school in the sixth grade.
In 1955, the Abbott siblings were taken out of Barlow's home when the latter was imprisoned for bigamy. Abbott subsequently ran away from any other assigned foster family before being sent to Utah State Industrial School, a reform school in Ogden, Utah, following an attempted car theft. Barring a sixty-day parole, Abbott remained inside the grounds of the facility between the ages of 12 and 18. According to Abbott, his mistreatment by the school guards left him maladjusted for life. The year of his release, Abbott had also learned that his mother died by suicide, with state authorities refusing to let Abbott attend her funeral.
When Abbott reunited with his sister Frances, he learned that she had married a former neighborhood friend, Ben Amador, the same year he was confined to the reform school. Abbott rejected Amador, believing him to be of Mexican origin, and, by his own account, also struggled with "incestuous urges". Although the relationship between Abbott and Amador mellowed over the years, Abbott ordered Amador to never physically touch Frances in his presence. Abbott reportedly only accepted Amador upon learning that he was of recent Spanish descent, still expressing hostility towards Latinos in later prison writings.
First incarceration In January 1963, at age 18, Abbott was sentenced to a maximum sentence of five years at Utah State Prison for forgery, after falsifying $20,000 worth of checks he had stolen during a shoe store burglary. On January 10, 1966, Abbott stabbed two fellow inmates, fatally wounding James L. Christensen, who died at the prison infirmary ten days after the attack. Prison officer Lester Clayton testified that Abbott had snuck up on the men from behind, specifically targeting Christensen. Abbott later claimed that Christensen had previously made sexual advances on him, which Abbott alleged was planned by "enemies" from his former reform school, and that he acted in self-defence, believing Christensen was planning to rape him. The other inmate, Olsen, was seriously injured in the neck. Guards apprehended Abbott at the scene and beat him severely before locking Abbott in solitary confinement for nearly a month.Reports of Selected Cases Decided in Courts of the State of New York Other Than the Court of Appeals and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court (1982); p. 768–769 On April 17, 1967, he was given a sentence of three to twenty years for assault with a deadly weapon. In later correspondences with Mailer, Abbott framed the killing as the result of a prison fight by claiming that both of the other inmates were armed with "a club of some sort", while during his conviction, Abbott claimed he attacked Christensen because he had told staff about contraband in his cell. He spent a significant portion of his incarceration in solitary confinement for repeated disciplinary infractions, which he estimated amounted to over five years. Between 1966 and 1971, he had thirty incident and disciplinary reports at Utah State Prison, including for two assaults on correctional officers. Whenever not in solitary confinement, where the only reading material in Utah was the Bible or the Book of Mormon, Abbott extensively read books provided through a prisoners' program by PEN America.
In March 1971, Abbott escaped prison with another inmate and remained a fugitive for six weeks, but was returned when he was arrested after robbing a bank in Denver on April 27 of the same year. His sentence was increased by 19 years as a result. Abbott later claimed to have spent part of his escape in Montreal and described the brief period as the first time he felt free since his teenage years. Following the bank robbery conviction, Abbott entered into the federal prison system. He spent the first few years at Federal Correctional Institution, Leavenworth, McNeil Island Corrections Center, and United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, Springfield.
In 1973, Abbott wrote a letter to writer Jerzy Kosiński, at the time president of PEN America and a strong proponent of prison reform, after reading Kosiński's 1965 novel The Painted Bird. Abbott, who had become a Marxist-Leninist by this point, mistakenly thought that Kosiński, a staunch anti-communist, shared his beliefs due to a positive portrayal of the Red Army in his novel. In 1975, Abbott accused Kosiński of plagiarising some of his ideas from their letters in his latest novel Cockpit. Kosiński described Abbott's reaction as "the most sustained, vile barrage of personal, sexual, political, and aesthetic abuse, dissecting my novels and filtering them through his notion of my betrayal of mankind". Coupled with Abbott's previous positive comments on Stalinism, Kosiński ceased contact, even as Abbott wrote him apologies.
In summer 1978, Abbott was held at Federal Detention Center, Houston, after being suspected but ultimately cleared of taking part in the attempted murder of a prison guard at Federal Correctional Institution, Atlanta, pending return to Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc II. In July 1979, following a hunger strike, he was transferred to Federal Correctional Institution, Marion, where he became an informant after being promised a parole date. Before returning to Utah State Prison in June 1980, Abbott exposed a drug smuggling operation by attorneys of the Marion Prisoners’ Rights Project and in December 1980, he gave the identities of the organizing inmates in the 1980-1981 work stoppage strikes at Marion. When confronted with this information during his sentence for manslaughter by Mailer, Abbott claimed that correctional staff had put him in solitary confinement for two months during that timeframe and been forced to confess to crimes he was involved at Marion to secure his parole. He ultimately did not receive parole through this measure and by age 34, Abbott had been temporarily relocated to Federal Correctional Complex, Butner in North Carolina.
Correspondence with Norman Mailer In 1977, Abbott read that author Norman Mailer was writing about convicted killer Gary Gilmore. Abbott wrote to Mailer, alleging that Gilmore was largely embellishing his experiences, and offered to write about his time in prison in order to provide a more factual depiction of life in prison. Mailer agreed and helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book concerning life in the prison system consisting of Abbott's letters to Mailer.
Their correspondence continued over several prison transfers in 1978, including FCI Maion, FCI Lompoc, and Federal Correctional Institution, La Tuna.
On October 29 or November 3, 1979, Mailer visited Abbott at FCI Marion, after several previous attempts at visitation failed as Mailer was denied for being of no relation to Abbott. Brothers Peter and J. Michael Lennon drove Mailer over and after the visit, Mailer told the Lennons that he thought "Jack deserved a chance at freedom". Mailer was unable to give Abbott his latest book The Executioner's Song, based on his interactions with Gilmore, but a copy was delivered through prison mail, though first withheld until Abbott staged a hunger strike. Abbott read the 1,056-page book in eight days and reviewed it positively in several notes sent to Mailer. While Abbott called the book Mailer's greatest work yet, he disliked that Gilmore was the only one criticized, and that he had failed to account for Gilmore's intergenerational trauma.
Release Mailer endorsed Abbott's attempts to gain parole, with plans to support Abbott by providing him with a position as a research assistant. Abbott was released to parole on June 5, 1981, despite the misgivings of prison officials, one of whom questioned Abbott's mental state and whether he was rehabilitated, saying, "I thought ... that Mr. Abbott was a dangerous individual ... I didn't see a changed man. His attitude, his demeanor indicated psychosis."
Abbott was placed in a Salvation Army halfway house in the Bowery, at the time known as "one of the highest-crime precincts in the city", after a different facility in the Upper West Side rejected Abbott for his "violent records". Abbott was supposed to stay at the residence until August 1981, when he would switch to federal parole. Describing his time in the Bowery, Abbott described the neighborhood as a "human zoo" and said that he began carrying a knife on him after his pair of new shoes were stolen at the halfway house.