This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.
I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill
I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/
Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/
The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.
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The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter
No. 122, March 16, 2017
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Norman Mailer, Jack Henry Abbott: Liberals & Criminals
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There is a new book out by Jerome Loving, Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song: primarily about the relationship between Norman Mailer, one of the foremost liberals of the 1960’s and beyond, and John Henry Abbott, the criminal/convict whose book, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, is a compilation of letters between Mailer and Abbott while Abbot was still in prison; a book I devoured when it was published in 1981, a short 12 years after my own release from prison in 1969.
Mailer proclaimed Abbott as a significant thinker and writer and helped him get released only to witness Abbott’s killing of a restaurant manager outside the New York City restaurant he managed, six weeks after Abbott’s release.
As a former criminal and convict who served time in some of the same prisons as did Abbott—though several years before him—and who shared his prison experience of serious reading while locked away in solitary confinement; I respect Abbott’s writing and his intellectuality underneath the hyperbole and believe he may have been one of the foremost intellectuals among prisoners, though, I am sad to say, based on information I learned about in the Loving book, he would not be a member of the professional criminal cohort—those to whom Lampstand’s mission is directed—which I define as:
Professional criminals—as defined by the Lampstand Foundation—are those who commit crimes for money, have served at least five years in a maximum security prison, and are not informants, pedophiles, rapists, or serial killers.
As Jerome Loving writes in his book, Jack and Norman:
As his prison misconduct in the federal system continued and worsened, Abbott became known as a reformer among fellow inmates and troublemaker to his jailers. In making the rounds of the many federal prisons as a result, he landed for the first time, in 1979, at Marion. When, by 1980, he received a tentative parole date from federal authorities, he decided to break the inmate code he had so often boasted to Mailer about in his letters and became a “snitch.” Around December 12, 1980, he identified the leaders of what became at the time the longest strike in federal prison history. Through biographer Peter Matthiessen, Mailer got wind of this information the following year, before it became public with the Adan stabbing, while Jack was still at a halfway house in New York. Although shocked that Jack had broken the inmate code he had all along boasted that he would uphold, Mailer let the matter go, wondering about what lengths he himself might go after half a lifetime in prison. (pp. 36-37)
What brings extra heft to this charge of being an informant is the status accrued by serving time in Marion, which at that time, was, within the carceral world culture, equivalent to a PhD from Harvard in the culture of the academy; consequently those who were informed on would have had great influence and stretch throughout the prison system, federal and state; so their labeling of Abbott as a snitch would ensure he was in danger, certainly while still in prison, and, in most cases, even when out.
The great swirling of complimentary verbiage from the literary community around the publication of Abbot’s book was not surprising to those of us who had actually spent time in prison as opposed to those who think they know what prison is like, or more importantly, what they want prison to be like; and my reaction was exactly as expressed by Death Row prisoners in an article by Bruce Jackson in the Buffalo Report 1 March 2002:
In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner’s Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott’s letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott’s first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).
When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.
Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that “they’re the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn’t know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will.” He and several other men on the Row found the book’s success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were. (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://www.murderpedia.org/male.A/a/abbott-jack-henry.htm )
Liberals have long been enamored by criminals and outlaws, a social stance captured wickedly by Thomas Wolfe as Radical Chic and noted in an article in the New York Post by Michael Kaplan, February 16, 2017:
At a 1981 press conference before New York media, a grim-faced Norman Mailer held up that day’s edition of The Post. A headline blared, “Norman Mailer Shocker: I’d Help Killer Again.” The city was aghast, Mailer lobbed a $2 million libel suit against the paper, and a law-abiding restaurant manager was dead.
The headlined killer in this disaster tale was Jack Henry Abbott, a lifetime product of the American prison system and an unlikely darling of Manhattan’s literary scene.
In the guilt-stink of “Radical Chic” — a term coined by Tom Wolfe after Leonard Bernstein hosted an event in his home that brought together society types and the Black Panthers — Abbott’s prison memoir, “In The Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison,” was poised to be published to rave reviews and best-seller status.
The collision of macho posturing, a publishing industry hungry for authenticity and an ex-con whose considerable literary gifts were tragically overshadowed by jailhouse paranoia are all chronicled in “Jack and Norman” (St. Martin’s Press), by Jerome Loving, out Tuesday.
Long before Abbott entered the picture, Mailer thrived on his reputation as an Ivy League brawler. He punched out Gore Vidal, stabbed his wife and, as Loving tells The Post, he was “a tough guy in the way that Hemingway was a tough guy. Mailer boxed until he was 60, got drunk and fought people in the street; he once got into a confrontation with somebody who made fun of his dog. Mailer had a bad temper and would not back down from anyone, but he had never been in a true danger zone. Abbott with a knife was very dangerous — and he often had a knife on him.” (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://nypost.com/2017/02/16/how-norman-mailer-helped-a-criminal-kill-again/ )
The story surrounding his life and thought after the New York killing and return to prison, is admirably captured in the book by him—co-authored by Naomi Zack—My Return, which can be purchased at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/My-Return-Jack-Henry-Abbot/dp/0879753552/ref=sr_
My Return is a must have as a companion to In the Belly of the Beast and Jack and Norman, as an admirable case study of a convict’s life amid the liberal literary world.
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