Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  And that is what, in my opinion, must be understood—such a rebellious, secondary personality would never be formed or forged if there wasn’t a strongly felt need for it. Certainly it is never the result of spiritual spontaneous combustion. Moreover, however falsely, such a personality offers not alone protection but integration as well, and the opportunity to grow, to know purpose, to be “free,” to have and retain individuality, to be a quantity that must be given social recognition and reckoned with.

  It seemed to me, just as it usually seems to my kind, that society was simply trying to strip or rip off my shield, that it was willing to do so ruthlessly, that it didn’t care about me personally, or the amount of humiliation or degradation it might inflict in the process. I stubbornly balked at being manipulated, regulated, or being compelled to conform blindly through fear or threat or punishment, however severe. Indeed, I came to question the validity of a society that appeared more concerned with imposing its will than in inspiring respect-There seemed to me something grossly wrong with this.

  “We’ll make you be good!” I was told, and I told myself nobody should, would or could make me anything. And I proved it.

  One time a mammoth policeman growled at me, “You think you’re a tough guy, don’t you, Chessman? Well, you punks are all alike— you’re all yellow underneath. We’ll break you before we’re through or we’ll bury you.”

  I grinned. “Yeah, and you bulls are all alike. You’re all a bunch of dirty sonsabitches. So shoot your best stick.”

  And I proved, because I had to, that I wasn’t yellow underneath and that, if anything, it was decency and not cowardice I was hiding. Because I had to, I gave “them” a chance to break or bury me. Irrationally perhaps, destruction seemed trivial, unimportant, but not being broken or turning yellow, all important.

  “You’ll be sorry! You’ll be sorry!” people kept telling me. I thought, Yeah, well, you’ll never know it if I am.

  “You can’t beat us. It just can’t be done. Crime doesn’t pay! Crime doesn’t pay!” I was told over and over. Smugly. Challengingly. “Admit you’re wrong. Admit you’re wrong or you’ll be sorry. You’ll wind up in the gas chamber!”

  Well, so what? What’s the difference? That’s what you righteous bastards seem to want, so maybe I’ll accommodate you. And you can be damned sure of one thing: I’ll never come crawling back on my belly crying for mercy.

  “Then we’ll punish you. We’ll keep punishing you.”

  Well, punish and be damned! You’ll never extort good citizenship.

  “Fiend! Fiend!” shouted the prosecutor, as though he were divinely commissioned to wield Jehovah’s flaming sword. I grinned and thought: Maybe the joke’s on you too, Oswald. Maybe society keeps scaring itself with self-created social villains, monsters, demons, fiends and fiendlings. And wouldn’t it be immensely funny if this time I just didn’t happen to be guilty?

  I remembered the words of Dr. Johnson: “It is not sufficiently considered that men require more often to be reminded than to be informed.” Well, I’d keep them reminded what happens when you twist the tiger’s tail. Let them figure out for themselves why there are tigers-

  “It’s too late to save your life, so get down on your knees and beg God for forgiveness for this wicked life you’ve led!” cried the young preacher who came to the jail unsolicited to see me after my conviction. I shook my head, smiled and declined to do so. I preferred to stand on my feet, even if it was in Hell.

  And so I did stand on my own feet, and I continued to do so when brought to the Row. I stood and fought for survival.

  Each morning I would awaken to find myself surrounded by bars and walls and the aura of death. A cold, driving anger would return as the ugly immediacy of my situation closed in on me. Among other things, I would find helplessness, despair and naked fear all around me, and I would remember the lesson I had learned early in life: It is better to be anything than afraid!

  It was better, I told the fear-ridden, to be angry and defiant. Better to be cynical and contemptuous and sardonic. I knew, though, the price I personally had paid to rid myself of fear, and I knew there was something more inherently terrible than fear. That is reaching a point where you believe it is a sign of intolerable weakness to believe in anything or the worth of anything, or to admit the need for human warmth or friends. That is when your own fanatic strength can destroy you.

  I had made it crystal clear that I considered Chessman quite capable of looking out for himself. My briefs to the court were technically correct in every detail; they were exhaustively researched and were coldly logical presentations, but they were also written in acid.

  Bullheadedly, I had virtually placed the state in the position where it must destroy me. I’d been a fool. And too seldom is the anatomy of folly understood.

  • 37 •

  The Return from Outer Darkness

  But was it possible to tell—coherently, convincingly and dramatically—what I believed should and must be told?

  With a relentless fixity of purpose, I set to work to find out. Now I have my answer. Consequently, there is little—and yet much—left to be said.

  A month before I was scheduled to die that June morning in 1952, a panel of three San Quentin psychiatrists interviewed me in the sergeant’s office at the east end of the corridor and just outside the birdcage-like enclosure leading into the Row proper. This interview was a formality, since its purpose was to inquire into the question of whether I was legally sane (and hence liable for execution), and all three psychiatrists knew me. They knew me, to put it simply, as a character who did inexplicable and seemingly crazy things but who was not crazy in the legal sense. They also knew I would never feign insanity in an effort to avoid execution.

  The interview was not stiff or formal. We exchanged amenities. I was invited to be seated in a chair facing them. I lit a cigarette. They spoke pleasantly, and did not treat me as though I were a noxious sort of bug under a microscope.

  My long record of juvenile and adult crime was mentioned and then discussed. Yes, I had been in reform schools, jails and prisons most of my life. Yes, I had committed many, many crimes and had ample warning of what to expect if I kept on. Yes, I had kept on nevertheless. No, I was not guilty of the crimes for which I had been sentenced to death. I was not the red light bandit, but I would not belabor the claim. I was simply mentioning it as part of a paradoxical picture. Yes, I would say I was not the red light bandit even if I were.

  One of the doctors commented that simply punishing or even capitally punishing the young offender did not seem to be the answer. It was not. Punishment itself just made him worse, more rebellious. Legally executing him only proved someone had failed to reach him in time.

  What did I think was the answer? The question was flattering, but I didn’t think I could spout out the answer in a few words. I wasn’t even sure I knew the answer if there was more to it than what they already knew. All I knew I had learned from experience, and that had been largely a rugged, seemingly one-dimensional experience. I ventured the thought that perhaps after one spends a while in a jungle world he gets so he cannot or does not want to believe there is anything better, or that it is attainable in any case. Maybe hate has a lot to do with it. Hate for everybody, himself and psychiatrists included. God included. Maybe an X factor, on the other hand, is the key to this form of psychopathy.

  I told them I could “say” it much better on paper. I thought I would like to try. What did they think of the idea? They all thought it was a good idea.

  In spare moments, I began to draft the story of my life. I tried to tell a story of how a psychopathic hate is born and what it can do; I ended by letting Hate tell the story. And I saw convincing proof Hate was not a very good storyteller. I found myself running out of days, so I tore up what I had written.

  Was life nothing but a battle in the jungle? Would it go on senselessly until I was finally destroyed?

  I paced the floor of my cage. Smoking. Thinking. The time
was 2:50 a.m. Only now it wasn’t late any more; at least it wasn’t too late. Yet bodi society and I had paid a needlessly terrible price to get Caryl Chessman to this hour of his life.

  The price I had paid was two death sentences and a figurative million years’ time to serve under maximum supervision if the death sentences were ever set aside. I had paid by spending more than thirteen years of my life behind bars, in reform schools, jails and prisons, on the Death Row. I had paid by giving up friends, a beautiful young wife, a normal life—everything, in fact, but life itself. And now I had only a most tenuous lease on the sole possession I had left, with the odds a conservative two hundred to one that an appointment in the green room still awaited me.

  On the other hand, my so-called “life of crime” had cost society a conservative half a million dollars when totaled. Since my last arrest alone, it had cost the state thousands upon thousands of dollars merely to try to take my life, to liquidate what it regarded as a bad investment.

  I realized then, with a new awareness, what a staggering price this was, and how society and I both and equally were on the losing end. I realized, too, that society well could say: “We heartily agree. But what else could we have done with you? What else can we do with any man like you?”

  And that was what sorely troubled Warden Harley Teets. It was what had prompted him to demand an accounting, if I could give it. I knew he didn’t want a lot of excuses. He didn’t want me to say, “I’m sorry. I’ve been a bad boy. Now I’ll be a good boy.” He wanted to know why. And so did the psychiatrists. I saw that same unvoiced question in the eyes of the members of California’s Adult Authority when they visited the Row. These men, and many like them, hold positions of grave social responsibility. They must deal with the convicted felon when he is brought to prison. They must decide when he is ready and equipped for release. They want to help him because in doing so they are helping society, and their view is the right one: the most sensible way to help the man in prison is to give him the opportunity to help himself. But some of the institutionalized sneer at the idea they need help. These are the ones called aggressive psychopathic personalities. These are society’s terrible problem children. They hate and rob and kill and defy and curse and throw away their lives.

  And that isn’t what they want at all, but they get trapped.

  I knew then, walking back and forth, back and forth, that this was an awful social tragedy. For criminal violence is definitely reactive, and in every man is the ability to be either good or bad. It is, moreover, an ability that may atrophy but is never lost. Why, then, did society persist in needlessly confounding itself? Perhaps because it was overstocked with Pollyannas, professional do-gooders, amateur optimists, social evangelists, vise-turners, polemicists of vengeance, horror hucksters and the like. But the problem remained one of finding reasons and not fault. Blame-fixing for its own sake was a profitless practice.

  I was one of the trees in this dark and forbidding forest. I knew what it meant to live beyond the reach of other men or God. I had “proved” everything I had felt the need to prove: that I couldn’t be scared or broken or driven to my knees, that I didn’t give a damn. But here is where the tragedy lies: this felt need is compulsive and negative only. It is a need to prove one can do without—without love, without faith, without belief, without warmth, without friends, without freedom. This negative need to prove becomes progressively greater and greater; a ruthless tyrant, it comes to dominate; it grows brash and boldly demanding. If not checked, the ultimate (conscious or unconscious) need is to prove that one can do without even life itself.

  Whether in its first or final stage, it is essentially a self-destructive, probably masochistic need and is therefore more often satisfied than eliminated or even temporarily held in check by punishment. For that reason the use of punishment as a correctional device is self-defeating. And that is why the idea of social vengeance and places like Death Row merely tend to create and to aggravate a problem that is at once immense, vexing beyond expression, appallingly ramified and often decried vociferously—yet so little and so seldom understood.

  Unwittingly, the public creates and puts into deadly operation a Darwinian law of survival for the criminal. The smartest, the cleverest or the luckiest murderer is not caught at all. It is even possible that a perfectly innocent citizen will be charged with his crime. Of those apprehended, the shrewdest will escape execution, if not always, at least most of the time. If sociological and related “laws” have any validity, then, by killing off the hapless and less resourceful of the murderers, we are perfecting the strain. And if the suggestion is sophistic, the reason for capital punishment is equally so.

  Many responsible citizens are familiar with the facts above set out—if not all of the inferences to be drawn from those facts—and yet hold to the belief capital punishment is a necessary evil because it acts as a deterrent to those individuals who otherwise would commit crimes punishable by death. Those who cling to this notion take a pretty dim view of their fellow man and necessarily commit themselves to the proposition that, at heart, he is a homicidal brute who can only be held in check by fear and force. That notion is wrong, actually and morally. Guilt or innocence aside, the story of my own life is proof that the doctrine of total depravity is both wrong and dangerous when applied to social relations and relationships, and that fear of being put to death does not deter the criminally inclined from committing capital crimes. If it did, a neat solution to crime would be at hand: make all crimes punishable by death and then there would be no more crime.

  Several states do not have a capital punishment law, yet their per capita murder rate is no higher than those states with such a law. Each year California executes nearly as many men as any other state in the Union, yet hundreds of homicides continue to be committed within its borders each year.

  Four dozen men have taken that last walk by my cell and I am yet to have the first one tell me he gave thought to the possible consequences of his act. Contrary to popular belief, most homicides simply aren’t the result of cunning planning or long thought. Many of those I watched being marched off to the execution chamber were young men who were of the opinion that taking money from honest citizens at the point of a gun was an easy way to make a living. They were shocked numb when their banditry was resisted and they pulled the trigger of their gun in their anxiety to get away. They were real life Walter Mittys who hadn’t meant to play for keeps. They learned too late that when you buck society you aren’t playing a fun game.

  In addition to the necessary evil argument offered to justify capital punishment, less responsible and more cynical citizens are satisfied to have legal executions because they offer a “cheap” solution to the problem of what to do with criminals. They point out that a criminal can be put to death for less than two hundred dollars, whereas maintaining him in one of its prisons costs California slightly over a thousand dollars a year.

  There are several answers to this bargain rate idea of what to do with the criminal wrongdoer. I shall limit myself to two. First, there are fewer than thirty men on the Row at the present time, while there are more than twelve thousand men committed to and serving terms of imprisonment in California’s prisons. Hence, it is difficult to see how any substantial savings can be realized unless the whole bunch of them are done away with. And before we can do away with all of them we first will have to do away with all statutory and constitutional safeguards and we must develop an unprecedented bloodlust, as well as an unprecedented police state where absolute power to destroy is held by the few. The trouble with all this is that the advocate of the bargain rate solution to the crime problem may then find that his master regards him as a criminal who should be expended in the interest of another sort of economy.

  Don’t get the idea Death Row is a nice place. It isn’t. It’s a rugged, tough, ugly place, and not because prison officials make it that way. They don’t. Its stupid horror is inherent, built in.

  Let me briefly tell you something more
about it. First, select at random between twenty and thirty men between the ages of eighteen and seventy-two. Their physical size or shape is immaterial. Put them in a situation beyond their capacity to control, or neglect to plant some essential seed in their minds which fills them with an awful sense of inadequacy. Causally or casually condemn them. Give them only a tantalizingly slim chance of survival in the courts or with the governor. Confine them closely in a special, isolated section of the prison. For a time each day let them commingle. Periodically march them off and execute them, one by one, or two by two. Replace the ones executed.

  Do that and you have created the Condemned Row—with all its tragic pathos, its gripping tensions, its smoldering resentments, its flaring violence, its courageous, its cringing, its constantly clashing personalities, its secret hopes, its fear. Do that and you have created a limbo-like place where men are held suspended between two worlds, this one, and the next. Do that and you have erected a monument to futility. A social abattoir. That is Death Row. It is nothing more.

  The Row’s surface casualness is as deceptive as quicksand. For days or weeks at a time all will be quiet and orderly. Then tension will generate, a corrosive tension capable of eating its way inside you, in many ways an unintelligible tension. Nitroglycerine is known to be unpredictable, to explode suddenly, without apparent agitation, into violence. It is this quality the explosive and the Row have in common —ordinarily both when handled sensibly remain in a quiescent state. Yet both, without apparent reason, without extrinsically discernible provocation, are capable of exploding with an abrupt and shocking violence.

  The seeming reason for such cyclic, savage spiritual convulsions is not elusive. The slugging impact of a death sentence upon the psyche is often terrible and always tormenting, with the result that as often as the Death Row ennobles it degrades. Some men reach the point where they would literally sell or sell out their own mothers for another day of life, and the knowledge that this is so can make you want to vomit.