In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison (Paperback)

~ (Author) "I'VE WANTED somehow to convey you the sensations-the atmospheric pressure, you might say-of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American..." (more)
Key Phrases: prison hole, prison regimes, Soviet Union, Maximum Security, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

A visionary book in the repertoire of prison literature. This is a 37 year old man's account of 25 years behind bars.

From the Inside Flap

A visionary book in the repertoire of prison literature. This is a 37 year old man's account of 25 years behind bars.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 2, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679732373
• ISBN-13: 978-0679732372
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #54,906 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars OK, not as much on day-to-day prison life as you'd think, December 19, 2000

By	I. Gimlet "i_gimlet" (Honolulu, HI USA) - See all my reviews

"In the Belly of the Beast" is a selection from letters about prison life in America written by Jack Henry Abbott to Norman Mailer while Mailer was writing "The Executioner's Song." I figure there are more or less five reasons someone might decide to read it:

First, you might be curious about what it is like to be stuck in prison -- a voyeuristic, or even macabre interest. Perhaps schadenfreude. You will be disappointed, I think. Less than a third of the book is devoted to Abbott recounting his experiences in prison. Although there are some terrifying or just plain creepy moments, the majority of the book is not devoted to an anecdotal account of prison life.

However, Abbott does expend some effort explaining how prison life is structured to magnify the fear people experience in lock-up. For example, he explains how the authorities will take advantage of prison rivalries to off inmates they particularly dislike or just feel like taking down. The method I found most interesting is the "hands off list". The guards -- "pigs" in Abbott's parlance -- will decide amongst themselves to let one prisoner get away with anything he likes. He will basically be free to do as he pleases in the hopes that the fact that he is a "favorite" will irk the other prisoners so much that they will kill him. Apparently, the fact that a man in prison has this freedom means that he will feel compelled to abuse it -- in part because of the ethos he had to develop in order to survive. Give `em enough rope, basically. But he doesn't offer much prison jargon and there is almost no information on gang life, for example, or on how the drug trade is carried out or on how value is figured in the prison "market." There is nothing on the role of the mafia. Guess it would be bad karma in prison to be known as someone who tipped off the authorities as to how it's done. There's some information on how prisoners are "socialized" to prison. There is more information, but not much detail or many stories, about sexual life in prison.

Second, you might be interested in how an intelligent man might develop politically in prison. Abbott obliges with a lot of grist for the mill. I believe that a significant portion of the prison population scores fairly high on IQ tests. (Abbott gives his as 139.) Given that there are more than a million inmates in the United States -- or a little less than .4% of the total population -- the book is rewarding sociological primary source material. In short, Abbott believes that our prison system is proof positive of the evil nature of our system and that it, like the society on the outside, is geared to make us less than men. As the Clash once asked, "What do you think they're gonna do to us" if they all got out at once? As others here have pointed out, two months after his parole, Abbott murdered another man.

Third, you might be interested in it as "authentic" political theory. Although Abbott does make some interesting connections, "In the Belly of the Beast" is no work of genius and there are better political thinkers who did their work in prison. It is no Antonio Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" or even Marquis de Sade's sexual socialism. Abbott does make some philosophical remarks about the psycho-sexual roles in prison, homosexuality and the idea of the male that are intriguing, if confusingly put. You get the sense that he, himself, is trying to figure out the consequences of what he's thinking as he's writing. In any case, he doesn't present a coherent, fleshed out, theory on this. Unfortunately, Abbott's political musings account for about a little more than a third of the book.

Fourth, you could be interested in how inmates experience the "meta-structure" of prison. As I've explained above, there is some good material, but you should be warned you don't end up feeling like Abbott's given the complete picture. I thought it was interesting that a lot of torture methods used by prisons in the 1960's were the same as those used in the early 20th century as witnessed by Jack Black in "You Can't Win" -- a great book about hobos and life in prison at that time as well as William Burrough's favorite of all time. But Abbott gives examples from different times, never explaining it all for any given era. Still, should you be looking for points for or against Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" you would probably find Abbott useful.

Finally, you might be interested in Norman Mailer's introduction. It's well written and somewhat insightful, but I think I'm safe in recommending that you just go down to your local bookshop or library, pull it off the shelves, and give it a read. Won't take you more than ten minutes. You won't be blown away, nor will you necessarily feel like you've wasted your time. But you probably won't feel like you have to have it for this reason alone.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Abbott is best observed from a distance, October 2, 2001

By A Customer

While it must be said that "In the Belly of the Beast" has a certain seductive quality, for its reputation as "prison literature," and its colorful cast of supporters, the book is ultimately more important for simply existing rather than being a work of any literary stature.

This obviously gave the career prisoner a voice that had never before been heard in the popular arena. His life experience provides the book's primary thesis: Prison is a culture that breeds career criminals. Abbott is reasonably smart, and his descriptions of prison life are coherent and literate, although they're buried in a morass of ideological recrimination.

When considered purely in the abstract, his analogy between prison culture and the proletariat isn't entirely ridiculous. However, when he claims that convicts are the best and the brightest of human culture, and likens his fate to a class struggle, his arguments become overbearing. By the conclusion of the book, we learn more about his grasp of Marxism than about prison culture, and even less about Abbott himself. At some point, we can see that Abbott has even thought of himself as a political prisoner.

"In the Belly of the Beast" is best experienced by examining what other people say about it, and not by actually reading it. It's more fun to read Norman Mailer's beatification of Abbott than it is to read Abbott himself. In this case, intellectual distance makes the book easier to tolerate.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The writings of a self-pitying psychopath, August 6, 2000

By A Customer

This book is interesting mainly in that it shows the psycopathic mind's justifying that all they've done wrong is not their fault. It's the system's fault, Man! Blah, blah, blah. This book probably never would have seen print if introduction-writer Norman Mailer hadn't supported it. Norman Mailer famously stabbed his own wife badly enough to hospitalize her (but she didn't press charges). I wonder if Mailer's excusing Abbott's behavior was an indirect way of excusing his own behavior? So Abbot stabbed a waiter and ended up back in prison. As an example of his lack of a conscience, consider what he said on "Current Affair" when asked if he felt remorse: "I don't think that's the proper word. Remorse implies that I did something wrong. IF I'm the one who stabbed him, it was an accident." He "justified" murdering the waiter/actor by saying "He had no future as an actor--chances are he would have gone into another line of work." Abbot had told the victim's wife in court that her husband's life was "not worth a dime." If you do read this book and somehow find yourself sympathizing with Abbot, I implore you to read WITHOUT CONSCIENCE, THE DISTURBING WORLD OF PSYCHOPATH'S AMONG US by Robert D. Hare (where I got the above quotes of Abbott's). It will reveal to you what psychopaths like Abbott are really like. It may even help you escape, unscathed, psychopaths you run into in the future. (Psychopaths number 2%-3%of the population, so chances are you will run into one sometime.)