Theoretical Explanations of Murder by Jack Henry Abbott

 This paper asserts that both nature and nurture are to blame for Jack Abbott’s criminal life, and that differential association theory aptly explains the social forces and conditions that bred the criminal.

At its core, symbolic interaction theory focuses on how people define reality, how they figure out the world around them, and how they define and experience the actions of people around them. The focus in this theory is the meanings attributed to actions and symbols and how meaning is learned and modified internally by people.

The theory seeks to understand the factors influencing the interpretation of actions, as well as patterns of thinking that result in similar interpretations for other social circumstances. It assumes that social reality is a creation by people, arising as standards and patterns of behavior when people interact (“Traditional Sociological Paradigms”).

In explaining the deviant behavior and life of Jack Henry Abbott using sociological theory, a fine line needs to be drawn between how much of Abbott’s behavior is due to his early history of juvenile delinquency and his long years in prison, and how much of it can be attributed to Abbott’s ingrained deviant tendencies.

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In other words, I would like to argue that both nature, the inherent criminal tendencies of Abbott, and nurture, his social conditioning from his reform school stint to his long incarceration in jail which further hardened him, are to blame.

In the case of Abbott, I think the appropriate viewpoint to take is that inherent deviant tendencies gave rise to deviant actions necessitating punitive action from society, with the subsequent experience of brutality and isolation in jail reinforcing pathological deviant tendencies and behaviors.

We reject explanations from a strictly labeling theory viewpoint, or that the behavior and actions of Abbott when he was still alive is deviant because society has deemed it so, because it seems to me to negate some objective rules of behavior, such as for example, the prohibition against killing and stealing.

Labeling theory is also inappropriate because it negates to a significant extent Abbott’s ingrained criminal inclinations as well, and his seeming lack of sensitivity and regard for society and its basic rules. We reject theories on experienced power and inequality for the same reasons – other people subjected to the same inequalities do not become criminally deviant.

With that clarification, I think differential association theory (“Sutherland’s differential association”) applies to Jack Abbott. This theory holds that people who behave deviantly tend to form social bonds with other deviants, from whom they learn deviant norms and values. According to this perspective, the same processes of socialization produce deviant behavior as conforming behavior is (Sutherland’s Differential Association). Every social group transmits its own cultural norms and values to new members through family influences and peer pressure.

The new members adopt these norms and values as their own because they are immersed in them through close association with the group. Of course, when the norms of their own group contradict those of the larger society, especially regarding important moral issues, the new members are being socialized into a deviant subculture. Thus, through differential association with deviants, people can be socialized to a drug subculture, a delinquent gang subculture, or any number of other deviant lifestyles. His association with the women he was with at a restaurant may probably have led him to kill the waiter.

No one knows exactly for sure how the two women he was with on that night prodded him to commit the crime again. These were women who may also have had associations with gangs and other notorious groups, for most women will be wary of going out with a man who had just been incarcerated. Thus, these women may have urged him to slug it out with the waiter for a slight misunderstanding about the use of the washroom for patrons or for employees only. Since Abbott had the knife, he was at an advantage in that situation during that fateful night. Adan, the waiter fell victim to Abbott’s innate urge to kill (Recidivism, 1981).

This differential association theory can be very subtle because it is the influence of others that is at issue here. Seeking out others who are supportive of one’s lifestyle is not limited to those who are labeled deviant by the larger culture or some groups within it, but it is especially important to them. The result is that through differential association, the attitudes and norms of the deviant subculture become even more deeply entrenched.

Its conclusions are especially useful in explaining Abbott’s killing of a restaurant waiter shortly after his conditional release in 1981. Differential association theory states that criminal behavior is learned, and much of Abbott’s early testimony reveals that much of his hatred and anger at people was cultivated and reinforced from his many years in jail. His experience served as a hothouse for his criminal tendencies and underlying emotions to boil over instead of dissipating.

“I find it painful and angering to look in a mirror…When I am forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it’s all I can do to refrain from attack… Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions” (Abbott 5). The “learned” attribute is paranoia, overwhelmingly reinforced in jail, and which found expression in the impulsive killing of a waiter when his temper flared and couldn’t control himself. He was thirty three years old when he wrote this, but he had been in jail for most of his life. We note that before this crime, his “only” serious crime in free society was, in his own words, bank robbery (Abbott 7).

Differential association also explains well Abbott’s initiation into the world of the criminally-disposed – he was in and out of foster homes from birth, and begun serving time in juvenile detention centers from age nine onwards (Abbott 6-7). Those early experiences surrounded Abbott with enough criminal influences and provided him with an overwhelming excess of definitions that favored criminal and violent behavior, that, coupled with his innate tendencies, cannot but lead him into the life of crime and hate that he lived.

In conclusion, his early incarceration, experiences in and out of foster homes and reform school, and the overwhelming excess of criminal definitions that also bred in him a pathological hatred towards society and people, together with innate criminal tendencies that cannot be explained solely by external conditioning, bred Jack Abbott the criminal. In trying to make sense of his fate, the tenets of differential association that criminal behavior is learned and that a disposition to crime is influenced by an excess of criminal definitions apply.

REFERENCES

Abbott, J.H.  In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison. New York: Vintage Books, January 1991.

Edwin Sutherland’s Differential Association. Retrieved Jan. 9, 2007 at: http://home.comcast.net/~ddemelo/crime/differ.html

Traditional Sociological Paradigms. May 9, 2003. Retrieved Jan. 9, 2007 at: http://husky1.stmarys.ca/~evanderveen/wvdv/Introduction_to_Sociology/traditional_sociological_paradig.htm

Recidivism. (1981)  Norman Mailer Makes a Bad Character Evaluation. New York Daily News. Retrieved Jan. 9, 2007 at:

Sutherland’s Differential Association. Retrieved Jan. 9, 2007 at:

http://home.comcast.net/~ddemelo/crime/differ.html