Jack Black Gets One Year

After near eleven months on the lam, late in the year 1912, Jack Black was on his way back inside. Despite his official protest at the Alberta, Canada, province jail, another protest at the Canadian border, and yet another in the States, he was remanded into custody by Canadian and American officials who had colluded extralegally to bring him back to justice in California. Jack called it “as raw a job of kidnapping as ever was done.” He knew the law; they knew the law. Yet here he was, cuffed again.

By way of train across the border and through Montana and Washington state, then finally into California, Jack prayed for either a snatched gun with which to kill himself or a fatal derailment into a ditch and get it over for he knew as well as he ever knew anything in his life that if he was taken back to Folsom prison to serve his twenty-five-year sentence he’d be dead within a year or two. He’d do anything not to see the inside again. He saw himself a loser all the way around.

Against some odds, not only did the escorting officers treat him civilly over the entire trip back to the States, giving him no chance to do away with himself, but instead of to the dreaded Folsom they brought him right back to the San Francisco city jail from where he’d escaped and begun this latest adventure underground.

There was a sort of bright side, as Jack saw it. Though he was back where he started he was a bit healthier (he had gained weight on the run) and most important he had kicked his opium habit. Legally too he found himself in shallower water than he thought he’d had below him. Although following his escape the district attorney had requested the court dismiss everything concerning his case, the special considerations and whatnot, which was done, what counsel did not know is that Black’s initial appeal on his case, the one he had applied for before the great 1906 fire that wiped out his records, was still pending, after all these years. (An intermediate court of appeals was set up for just this purpose in the post-fire years, so when the DA went to the state supreme court to make requests on Jack Black’s case, the denials for appeals reflected the prisoner’s stature at Ingleside jail, not the twenty-five-year sentence handed down in 1904 being appealed; Jack and his lawyer knew this, of course, but kept mum about it for the time being. Such were the idiosyncratic legal shenanigans at court that was part and parcel of the citywide chaos following for many years in the wake of the disastrous earthquake and fire.)

The big wheel newspaperman Fremont Older, tireless champ of the city’s underdogs, came almost immediately to see Blacky in jail when he heard the news he was back in. Jack was afraid Older would hold it against him that he’d escaped when he, Older, was trying all he could to help him. But the fighting editor understood that it was going against Black and said he thought Jack had a right to do what he did. “It was the only way out for you,” Older told Black then. “I would probably have done the same thing myself.” These two very different men were trying hard to understand each other and were succeeding.

Older, a big man with a big hat, remarked on Jack’s healthy aspect and Black was pleased to tell him he’d kicked the hop. Then Older said he’d see what could be done now for him, believing he thought it possible, on account of the complications of the case, that an amended sentence could be worked out if Jack would stop his fighting and plead guilty. Jack admitted to his new friend of having little hope that any such thing could be done but even so he readily agreed to give it a try.

When a man from the city district attorney’s office (deputy district attorney Maxwell McNutt) came to see him, Jack repeated what he’d said to Older about escaping because he’d felt he had no choice at the time. The man told him he’d spoken to Older and Jack’s lawyer too and it was believed by them all that he’d done nearly enough time as it is. Jack was dumbstruck to hear this. In all his considerable experience he’d never heard a representative of the law say he thought a criminal had served enough time. Then McNutt told Jack that if he’d dismiss all matters with regard to his case before the court and plead guilty, as Older had suggested as well, the DA would ask for a sentence of no more than two years.

Naturally this started Jack to thinking what kind of double cross they were trying to hand him. He’d never gotten any leniency in any court and it was simply unbelievable to him. He spoke once again to both his lawyer and Mr. Older. They tried hard to convince him that he was to be dealt fairly with. Jack confessed freely that this was quite a revelation to him. He hadnt expected it at all. “It was the first time I ever got any better than the worst of it,” he said. He saw himself getting out from under that twenty-five-year death sentence and he found it difficult suddenly to keep from hoping for the best.

Jack was tired. His feet were on the downward path. He was fed up with waiting for the courts. If he could take a plea for a certain reduced sentence well okay then. He wanted to quit the life, all right, but it had seemed so far away it wasnt worth the while to get it. He’d seen nothing ahead of him but more of the same, a violent life that would inevitably come to a violent end. And the sooner the better, it was all the same to him. Of a sudden he had a friend in the court. He realized that people were taking a chance on him and as a consequence it was up to him to make good of it,  “to square myself,” when he came out of it. He said to himself he’d even be willing to go to work.

He didnt mention this to anybody, of course. He hated to hear a guy say he’d do this, do that when he was in jail. It just doesnt look right for a fellow to whine and repent saying he’d never go wrong again when he got out. Jack was not the type to put the talk on work and reformation, no sir. If he made the promise to himself, well that was enough. He didnt have to broadcast anything.

It was a tight context, though. “My views had not changed a bit about stealing,” he felt compelled to state later. “It was only that I had got into a hole where in order to play square with men that had been friends to me I had to quit.” He meant Mr. Older and, later, Judge Dunne. “However, I would not claim credit for this, as though it was a sacrifice on my part.” Hell, he said to himself again, by now he wanted to quit the life.

Fremont Older suggested to Jack that he give a little talk in court on the day of his case being heard in the way of offering his experiences in the life of a criminal as a kind of instruction to those in a position perhaps to help others who would find themselves in the circumstances he had. Older had listened to Black talk enough to know he had plenty to impart. Jack was reluctant initially but he thought that, yes, he supposed he could offer something, for he had after all many experiences outside the law and if what he had to say was of any use to just one person then it was all right. He wrote out about 300 words, according to Older, but then decided he would rather just get up in court and ramble. He saved it for after his sentence was read, however, ever sensitive that it not appear as if he were falsely caterwauling to a softer term.

On December 24, Christmas Eve, 1912, Jack Black was resentenced by Judge Frank Dunne to a term of one year for the highway robbery crime committed more than eight years earlier, the most of which he’d spent in jails in the city of San Francisco. This was even more than he could have hoped. One year! He looked at Judge Dunne, who had suddenly given him this last chance, just at the point when he’d all but given up. He’d always liked to watch people and wonder why they did the things they do. He’d had lots of time to think things over in jail in the past eight years and more. Well, he thought now, it isnt asking much of a man to try and stay out of jail, and in return for such kindness and trust as he was shown here today, he ought to do so.

“I would not make this statement if I ever expected to appear in court again as a defendant,” Jack pronounced with the stoutest of hearts, and he went on to detail at length (close to an hour, per a court reporter’s report!) his prison experiences as well as attitudes regarding the criminal life and the life of brutality, on the run from the law and from himself. He confessed his despair and near defeat right up to the moment of reprieve, which impressed him as nothing else ever had. In closing, pale and stoop shouldered, Jack made a heartfelt declaration, and it is worth repeating in full: “I have promised myself, and I promise the court, that when I finish this sentence I shall look for the best instead of the worst, that I shall look for kindness instead of cruelty, and that I shall look for the good instead of the bad, and when I find them I shall return them with interest. I am confident when I promise the court this that I will not fail. I imagine I have enough character left as a foundation on which to build a reformed life. If I had no character, no will power, no determination, I would have been broken long ago by the years of imprisonment and punishment; and I would have been useless and harmless and helpless, a force for neither good nor bad.”

A reporter from the San Francisco Bulletin was in the courtroom that day and he took down what Jack said and had it printed (in several parts, beginning that afternoon, December 24, 1912), which was editor Older’s intention. The headline read: “John Black, Who Broke Prison, in Dramatic Scene.” The newspaper, at the time attempting to influence the state penal system, included this final word from Jack’s long statement, which he declined to print in his remarkable autobiography You Can’t Win years later: “This marks the close of my statement, and there may be something wrong in my philosophy. I have picked it up in jail and outside in worse places, and if there is any error in it, or in my logic, I would be glad to have them pointed out to me now, so that I might write [sic] them.” This last I believe is the reporter’s error in transcription, as it seems to me Jack meant “right” though it would not be long before “write,” unpredictably enough, would also be operable.

The judge was duly impressed, and he admitted aloud that “few men who have passed through what you have seem to realize and feel their work of redemption lies largely in themselves and that their future is in their own hands…I believe there is still hope for you.” Dunne had helped Jack grasp his own future, and with that chance on this prisoner it gave Jack Black the opportunity not only to change his life but to write his life, and for that we can thank Judge Dunne deeply as Black had.

Finally, oddly enough, Dunne asked Black if he had any choice of prisons. He said he preferred San Quentin because he’d already been in every other prison in the state of California. What he meant of course was that he would never again set foot in the only other state pen, Folsom, if ever he could help it. He got what he wanted and he walked out of court that day with the greatest Christmas gift he’d ever received, or would ever receive.

by Don Kennison