A VOICE FROM DEATH ROW

...He sat down and talked to me about many personal problems, beginning way back when I started to feel resentment—how I felt about being a Negro and therefore inferior...

...By doing whatever you can on the level you can, you can bring out that goodness...

...Take the Bible: God, after he created everything, said that it was good...

...This is the sort of inferiority that I had nothing to do with...

...Since I've come here and met Warden Johnson, I was able to talk to a man who is sincere for the first time in my life...

...It is a tribute to Johnson that, under his care, Crump has been transformed into a warm and compassionate human being, with a genuine understanding of himself and the environment that almost destroyed him...

...Yet the good news of rehabilitation raises a nagging question...

...This is why he was so glad when he saw that I gave an indication of becoming curious about some things...

...Most of them were very young, and I saw myself in them—when I was sixteen and first went to prison...

...Too bad someone, somewhere, can't stop it, someone who is truly sincere, really concerned, not just motivated by another desire, but motivated by a sincere wish to stop this waste...

...We also know that the crime rate is higher among colored people than it is among whites, and people are puzzled as to why this is so...

...You know and everybody knows that in slums the crime rate is higher than in other areas...

...Their puzzlement is really a matter of throwing sand into their own eyes...

...Crump, who was then still under sentence of death...

...Crump, though not a big man, held himself high...

...So I started writing...

...The proverb that there is a little good in every man, I think, points it up...

...I wanted it to be effective, you know...

...My cell is right next to the receiving room where all the inmates come in, and I started noticing the inmates that came through...

...I don't know, but I'll say this, that within every man—and this is based on my religious convictions— there is goodness...

...But your backers, those who have known you well for the past few years, say your rehabilitation has been complete...

...To probe the answer to this question, I journeyed to Chicago's Cook County jail to talk directly with Paul FRITZ HAMILTON is on the staff of the Aurora, Illinois, Beacon-News...

...And I started writing...

...There's a certain area of confidence that one inmate will share with another, that he won't share with anyone else...

...He helped me to understand what I was trying to say...

...Prison Warden Jack Johnson, who is largely responsible for the accomplishment, has asserted that Crump could now walk out and take a useful and respected place in society...

...I asked the assistant warden [Hans Mattick] if he would help me in some way, to get a correspondence course or something, because I wanted to write...

...I know I have...

...These people won't listen to a bunch of zealous reformers, you know, spewing the same doctrine of change your ways...

...For basically speaking every man is good, and the influence of the society in which he lives brings him to bad...

...I started talking to them and asking them where they came from, what type of neighborhood...

...He's talking about the things that I have done, the same things that I intend to do tomorrow...

...If Crump possessed such innate qualities of good citizenship that even in a prison environment he could develop into an upright, respectable member of society, what was it in his earlier life that—in the words of his own lawyer—reduced him to "a violent, anti-social criminal [who] got in jail because he deserved to be there...

...I became interested in reading books because of my writing...

...This is why he has worked with me...

...His voice was quiet and gentle...

...I've talked to Warden Duffy [Chessman's warden at San Quentin] who has voiced the same point of view as you in regard to Chessman...

...But by his own testimony it was imprisonment that set him free from a society which had so brutalized him that at the time of his conviction nine years ago Warden Jack Johnson could describe him as "the meanest guy I ever ran into...

...To write a novel about crime and sex and all that jazz, it wasn't enough...

...I started comparing them with my own experience, and I found that they were so similar...

...He told me that when he first saw me, he said to himself that this is the meanest guy that I ever ran into...

...All of this is very relative to me...

...If you've got a society that's indifferent to the ailments of its crop, if it impinges upon man's growth to the point that it doesn't adhere to the moral doctrine of Christianity that it advocates, you're going to have a society with a lot of crime, slums, racial prejudice, and all the other things that make it necessary to build one institution after another...

...You know what I mean...

...Crump is a living example of the adage that "the finest prison stands as a monument to neglected youth...

...I'm not proud of my past...

...As far as Chessman goes, I was very much aware of him...

...The door was closed, and the one violation of privacy was a nearby transmitter monitoring every word...

...The slum spawns the different resentments and rebellions that end in breaking laws...

...He began to show that this could be a good book, that it could have some purpose...

...I tried to be as coldly analytic as I could...

...All this youthful potentiality, I thought, is going to snowball into a greater destructive force...

...And I think that this has something to do with this basic goodness that I was speaking of...

...And so I talked to them, and they're truthful, I think...

...People don't want to live in squalid conditions...

...I said, maybe I could do it...

...Now I don't mean to say that this is the way it's going to be with everyone...

...I can understand that a person would be inferior if he showed himself to be inferior by some action, but to be born into inferiority and therefore not permitted an opportunity to show my individual worth, I thought this so wrong...

...My father deserted the family," Crump began, "when I was seven years old, and as I grew up, I became more and more aware of the struggle that my mother and five sisters were waging in order to keep the family together...

...I mean, this is something they can't help, and they can't help the fact that their father and their father's father were reduced to the level of animals, unable to hand down an estate to their children...

...A Voice from Death Row by FRITZ HAMILTON When Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois commuted the death sentence of Paul Crump to 199 years, a milestone of sorts was passed in the nation's progress toward a more rational understanding and treatment of crime and criminals...

...As for rehabilitation, well, I don't think that I can speak with any authority and positiveness about it...

...Well, I'll say this...

...Why, hell, I'd better cool it, because I don't want to end up in the penitentiary.' And then at that moment when he reaches his awareness, he will pause and think about his life...

...Once I found that I could be a positive force, that I could relate myself with something that had a purpose, then all types of interests, all types of desires welled up in me...

...Crump's novel, Burn, Killer, Burn, will be published this fall.] "And I really began to get into it...

...You know, it might just sell to half a dozen people, but if it impressed just one, it had done its part...

...That's what I want to do...

...If I could write in a way to make them see themselves in me and take pause, that's all that I felt necessary...

...I feel I owe it to everybody...

...In my book I try to portray all these different emotions in this one man, and show that a person so filled with these anxieties is subject to do anything...

...Well, most of them came from slum neighborhoods like myself...

...And I compared this with my own feeling...

...He showed his sincerity when he took time off from his duties in order to hear my problems, not only mine but those of the other inmates as well...

...I'm merely saying that those who aren't driven to some bad are in the minority...

...It is good news, indeed, that nine years on death row have ended with the rehabilitation of murderer Paul Crump...

...We breed our own delinquency, and we do so with the full awareness that we do it...

...Eight out ten of them were Negroes...

...And something these young criminals could read and say, 'Well, hell, this guy must be following me around...

...For several hours in a small room, he spoke with me...

...It's going to be an insane asylum, or it's going to be jail...

...And I don't think that anyone who has done wrong is proud of it...

...I want a chance to do it...

...I found justification for this point of view: If I graduated from high school, maybe from college, the chances of finding a job that suited my education—well, I wouldn't be able to...

...Maybe I can write, and at this time—since I had acquired a certain notoriety from the newspapers, radio, and things—I could be believed...

...Then I could feel that I had accomplished something— something maybe to direct a counselor or a man like Jack Johnson in his work...

...And Warden Johnson started showing me different things about myself...

...They need someone who can talk to them in their own language, and because of this position that I found myself in, I believed that maybe they'd listen to me —if I could put it across...

...I broke in to say, "Even the people who tried to save Chessman thought him far from rehabilitated...

...I wanted to write about someone who did as I did...

...People don't want to be second class citizens because their skin is of a different color...

...Paul Crump will probably spend the rest of his life behind prison bars...

...Perhaps, now that he has been allowed to live, Paul Crump can reach out from behind his prison bars and help rehabilitate the society into which more Paul Crumps are being born every hour...

...I'll say this, I have changed...

...But I didn't want to just write a book...

...I think that the overall indifference of a community contributes to delinquency...

...What Paul Crump told me sheds a great deal of light on the basic problem of what makes a man a criminal...

...Perhaps, too, he can reach, as no one else could, some of the young men who are following in his footsteps and teach them the lessons he has learned at the price of another man's life and almost at the cost of his own...

...I'm not going to say that everyone of us is going to the penitentiary or is going to end up sentenced to death as a murderer...

...They'd tell of the various things leading up to their arrests and the reasons why —why they committed their crimes, why they held certain prejudices and resentments toward society...

...He was tense, slightly nervous, and his handsome brown face portrayed sensitivity...

...He's going to end up in an institution somewhere...

...I've always had a great love for my family and five sisters, and I felt that I was shirking my responsibilities to the overall effort of my family by staying in school...

...Many condemned men have been saved by acts of executive clemency, but this is the first instance, in Illinois, where the stated reason was that the criminal had been "rehabilitated" during his years in prison...

...I was sort of a challenge to him...