Latin America and the Caribbean have been cited by
numerous sources to be the most dangerous regions in the world. Studies have shown that Latin America
contains the majority of the world's most dangerous cities. Analysts attribute the reason to why the
region has such an alarming crime rate and criminal culture is largely due to
social and income inequality within the region. Many agree that the prison
crisis will not be resolved until the gap between the rich and the poor is
addressed. But it belies the truth when
we crimes are more rampant in rich commercial and industrial societies than the
agricultural society of village peasants and community labors.
Presenting
here a classical example of an individual’s crimes and violence of a born
American of born American parents.
Panzram,
one of the worst mass murderers in American criminal history was awaiting trial
for house breaking. He revealed his confession in one of his prison terms. Panzram became a writer in prison, but in
1928 his autobiography was regarded as too horrifying to publish and had to
wait more than forty years before it finally appeared in print. The odd thing is that most of his murders
were ‘motiveless’. He used to kill out
of resentment, a desire for revenge on society.
Panzram’s basic philosophy was that life is a bad joke and that most human
beings are too stupid or corrupt to live.
His
father, a Minnesota farmer, had deserted the family when Carl Panzram was a
child. At eleven, Carl burgled the house
of a well-to-do neighbor and was sent to a reform school. There he was a rebellious boy and was
violently beaten. The beatings only
deepened the desire to avenge the injustice.
Travelling around the country on freight trains, the young Panzram was
sexually violated by four vagabonds. The
experience suggested a new method of expressing his aggression. “Whenever I met a homeless I would make him
raise his hands and drop his pants.”
Panzram lived by burglary, mugging and robbing churches. He spent a great deal of time in prison, but
became a skilled escapist.
In
various prisons, he became known as one of the toughest troublemakers ever
encountered. What drove him to his most
violent frenzies was a sense of injustice.
Every time he was put in jail, he managed his escape by his skill of
breaking the jail. He aided other prisoners to escape and sometime warden was
shot dead or the jail was put on fire.
So
far Panzram had been against the world, but not against himself.
One
night Panzram got drunk with a pretty nurse and decided to abscond. Recaptured after a gun battle, he was thrown
into the punishment cell. He escaped
from prison again, stole a yacht, hired some sailor, took them to the stolen
yacht, robbed them, committed sodomy, killed them and threw their bodies into
the sea. He then went to West Africa to
work for an oil company, where he soon lost his job for committing sodomy on
the table waiter. The US Consul declined
to help him and he sat down in a park ‘to think things over’.
Back
in America he raped and killed three more boys, bringing his murders up to
twenty. After five years of rape,
robbery and arson, Panzram was caught again in New York and sent to one of
America’s toughest prisons, Dannemora.
‘I hated everybody I saw.’ Like a stubborn child, he had decided to turn
his life into a competition. He spent
his days brooding on schemes of revenge against the whole human race: how to
blow up a railway tunnel with a train in it, how to poison a whole city by
putting arsenic into the water supply, even how to cause a war between England
and America by blowing up a British battleship in American waters.
When a bar was discovered in his cell, Panzram
received another brutal beating—perhaps the hundredth of his life. In the basement of the jail he was subjected
to a most brutal torture. It was during
this period in jail that Panzram met a young Jewish guard named Henry
Lesser. Lesser was struck by Panzram’s
curious immobility and cold detachment.
Lesser was so shocked by this treatment that he sent Panzram a dollar by
a trusty while he was tortured. At
first, Panzram thought it was a joke.
When he realized that it was a gesture of sympathy, his eyes filled with
tears. He told Lesser if he could get
him some papers and a pencil, he would write him his life story. This is how Panzram’s autobiography came to
be written. When Lesser read the opening
pages, he was struck by the remarkable literacy and keen intelligence. Panzram made no excuses for himself:
“If
any man was a habitual criminal, I am the one.
In my lifetime I have broken every law that was ever made by both God
and man. If either had made any more, I should very cheerfully have broken them
also. The mere fact that I have done
these things is quite sufficient for the average person. Very few people even consider it worthwhile
to wonder why I am what I am and do what I do.
All that they think is necessary to do is to catch me, try me, convict
me and send me to prison for a few years, make life miserable for me while in
prison and turn me loose again. It is
like someone had a young tiger cub in a cage and then mistreated it until it
got savage and bloodthirsty and then turned it loose to prey on the rest of the
world … there would be a hell of a roar.
But if some people like me do the same thing to other people, then the
world is surprised, shocked and offended because they get robbed, raped and
killed. They done it to me and then don’t
like it when I give them the same dose they gave me.” (An excerpt from “Killer: A Journal of Murder,” edited by Thomas E. Gaddis and James
O. Long, Macmillan, 1970).
Panzram’s
confession is an attempt to justify himself to other human being. Where others were concerned, he remained as
savagely intractable as ever.
Transferred
to Leavenworth Penitentiary, Panzram murdered the foreman of the working party
with an iron bar and was sentenced to death.
When Panzram heard that Lesser and some other literary men, who were
impressed by his autobiography, were trying to get him reprieved, he protested
violently: ‘I would not reform even if the front gate was opened right now and
I was given a million dollars when I stepped out. I have no desire to do good or become good.’
In a separate letter to Henry Lesser he wrote: ‘I could not reform if I wanted
to. It has taken me all my life so far,
thirty-eight years of it, to reach my present state of mind. In that time I
have acquired some habits. It took me a
lifetime to form these habits, and I believe it would take more than another
lifetime to break myself of these same habits even if I wanted to.’ When he stepped onto the scaffold on the
morning of 11 Sept. 1930, the hangman asked him if he had anything to say. ‘Yes, hurry it up, you bastard. I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling
around.’
Panzram
became a writer in prison; but in 1928 his autobiography was regarded as too horrifying
to publish and had to wait more than forty years before it finally appeared in
print.
ISRAR HASAN
17TH AUG.
2014
Reference:
Edited “The Psychology of Self-Destruction.” From ‘A Criminal History of Mankind’, by
Colin Wilson, Pub. Granada Publishing, Great Britain, 1984.
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