“Many fine books have been written in prison,” said Raoul Duke, in Hunter S.
Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And it’s true. Ghandi, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, the Marquis De Sade, and O. Henry all turned their sentences into, well, sentences.
But those guys were writers to begin with. Every person on this list started out as criminal. Not a political martyr, an intellectual, or dissident, but the sort of the person who would hold no qualms about shooting someone in the face. What’s impressive about them is not that they were able to write books; it’s that they were able to affect real change within themselves, shrug off their violent pasts, and free their minds through the power of creativity.
8 Jimmy Boyle
Photo credit: The Sunday Times
In 1967, a Glasgow gangster named Jimmy Boyle was hiding out in Londonunder the protection of perhaps the most infamous of all British gangsters: the Kray twins. Then he was surrounded by undercover police officers and arrested for the murder of a fellow gangster named Babs Rooney. Boyle had been arrested twice on suspicion of murder in the past but would always maintain that he was innocent of Babs Rooney’s murder. He claimed that the real killer was a close friend, meaning that he was duty-bound not to “grass” (snitch). He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
After several run-ins with prison authorities, Boyle was sent to a special prison unit at Barlinnie Prison in Scotland in 1973. The unit had been set up by a senior prison officer and a civil servant, its aim being to revolutionize the way violent offenders were incarcerated. Prisoners were given democratic power and a say in how the unit was run. They were also encouraged to have an artistic outlet and given access to teachers, books, and art supplies.
In 1977, Boyle wrote his first book, a semiautobiographical novel called Sense Of Freedom. The book deals with Boyle’s harsh upbringing on the streets of Glasgow, his first crimes, and his later redemption upon discovering art and literature in jail. Although the book in no way glorifies Boyle’s life, the novel was so controversial that The Sun would later call him “Scotland’s Most Notorious Murderer.”
Three years after the novel’s release, Boyle ended up marrying a psychiatrist who’d arranged to meet him after reading it. He received parole in 1982 and hasn’t been back in prison since.[3] These days, Boyle is a successful novelist and sculptor whose work, as of 1999 at least, sells for around £10,000 a piece.
7Chester Himes
Photo credit: Alchetron
Chester Himes was born into a well-educated middle-class African American family in 1909. However, after his little brother was blinded in an accident, the family began to fall apart, and Himes started to drift toward a life of alcohol, prostitutes, and crime. He soon ended up dropping out of college after an incident in which he took his fraternity to a brothel and ended up in jail in 1928. His list of crimes included check fraud, armed robbery, and attempting to steal guns from the National Guard. He was 19 years old.
In prison, he began to write short stories. Some of these were accepted in various black interest magazines, giving him the confidence to submit to national publications—a task that would have been practically insurmountable for an African American man in the 1930s. However, In 1934, he was published in Esquire, a huge achievement for the time before the Civil Rights Movement. His byline simply read “Prisoner Number 59623.”
Even though Himes had been sentenced to 20 to 25 years, he was released in 1936 (most likely for good behavior) and went on to publish a series of novels. Although the first of his works were mostly protest novels about race relations in the US, Himes later moved to Paris and spent the rest of his life writing surreal noir detective fiction.[4] He would later become the first black writer (from the US, at least) to receive the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, the most prestigious award in France for writers of crime and detective fiction.
6Robert ‘Iceberg Slim’ Beck
Photo credit: Phase 4 Films
“Iceberg Slim” was born Robert Lee Maupin in Chicago in 1918. His single mother worked hard to provide a fairly stable middle-class upbringing, but even from a young age, Robert was drawn to crime. In order to keep him out of trouble, his mother enrolled him at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in the 1930s, at roughly the same time as noted author Ralph Ellison, who would later go on to write The Invisible Man. However, Robert was soon expelled for gambling and turned to crime, becoming a pimp at just 18 years of age.
Robert would later claim that he got the “Iceberg Slim” handle after he stood nonchalantly drinking whisky on the rocks during a shoot-out in a bar. In actuality, he gave himself the nickname to add to his legend.
After many stays in various prisons, he began to read and write. Eventually, after serving most of 1960 in solitary confinement at the Cook County House of Corrections, Slim realized that he had gotten a bit old for the pimp game. Upon release, he moved to California, changed his name to Robert Beck, and began to write about his experiences. This culminated in the 1967 autobiographical novel Pimp: The Story of My Life.
Several novels followed, as well as spoken-word albums and essays. By 1971, he had sold over two million books and had had one adapted into a movie, Trick Baby, in 1972. Despite this, he received few royalties from his publisher.
However, Beck’s influence on music, movies, and literature has been far-reaching. Both Ice-T and Ice Cube based their names on his. And one of Beck’s biggest fans is Irvine Welsh, who once said: “If I hadn’t picked up Pimp, I doubt that I could have gone on to write Trainspotting or Glue.”[5]
5Robert E. Burns
VIDEO
In 1919, Robert Elliot Burns returned from World War I a broken man. While he’d been fighting in Europe, his fiancee had married someone else, his job had been refilled, and the only other position he could find paid just a fraction of his old salary. Worst of all, the trauma of the war had left him with severe shell shock. There was little in the way of help from the government or the military, so Burns soon ended up a destitute, wandering hobo.
Three years later, Burns and two fellow vagrants were arrested for robbing a grocery store in Georgia. Burns was sentenced to six to ten years of hard labor in a chain gang.
The robbery had only netted him $5.80.
Life on the chain gang was brutal and inhumane, and people often tried to break free, even though the chances of being mowed down by bullets or torn apart by bloodhounds was extremely high. One day, Burns saw a chance to escape. He asked one of his fellow inmates to smash his ankle chains with a sledgehammer, bending the chains just enough so that he could wriggle free. Despite the great odds against him, Burns then managed to evade both the bloodhounds and the shotgun-toting search parties.
He was free. And for a while, things went pretty well for him. He settled in Chicago, married, and even managed to create a successful publication: Greater Chicago magazine. However, things went wrong in 1929, when Burns fell out of love with his wife and asked for a divorce. He’d previously told her about his fugitive status, and in a bitter attempt to claim revenge, she reported him to the authorities.
Due to Burns’s high standing in the city of Chicago, a committee of civic leaders formed to help him fight extradition. At first, it seemed like this would work. Georgian politicians promised Burns that if he returned, he wouldn’t have to serve time in another chain gang. According to them, he’d be allowed to simply carry out 60 days of supervised office work. However, the moment he arrived back in Georgia, he was slapped in irons and returned to another chain gang.
Luckily, Burns was able to escape a second time—this time by convincing a farmer to allow him to hide in the back of his truck—and was soon on the lam once more, managing to evade capture again and crossing the border into Tennessee.
In 1931, Burns submitted a series of sensational stories detailing his experiences to True Detective magazine with the title “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.” To the chagrin of Georgian authorities, who were still searching high and low for their escapee, these proved to be highly popular, so much so that Hollywood soon came knocking. Burns’s story was adapted into a movie, with Burns secretly working on the set as a consultant and acting coach. He spent another 13 years in hiding until his sentence was finally commuted in 1945. The film ending up being so popular that it inspired a huge backlash against the chain gang system, eventually leading to its abolition by 1955.[6]
...[ Continue to next page ]
Comments