John J. Lennon on Humanity in Prison and the Sensationalism of the True Crime Genre

In 2019, I was editing articles about criminal justice for the website of The Atlantic when a colleague, David A. Graham, sent me an email that started: “I’m passing along this pitch from a fellow writer. He’s an unusual dude.” The fellow writer was a journalist named John J. Lennon; what made him unusual was that he had built an extraordinary career covering prison life, crime and punishment while himself serving a sentence of 28 years to life for murder, drug sales and gun possession. The previous year, Graham told me, Lennon had been named a finalist for the prestigious National Magazine Award, a title I’d been coveting for my entire 15-year career until then but had never won. I wrote to Lennon, intrigued, then accepted a pitch from him about the decline of prison education programs. It turned out his career was about to take off; I’d met him at an inflection point.

The following year, Lennon was accepted to work with me as his mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project, where mentors guide authors in writing and publishing book-length projects. He’d proposed a fascinating project that he hoped would invert the problematic true-crime genre. He wanted to write about men who had murdered and investigate how the crime had taken place, but without the genre’s usual obsession with salacious plotting.

Instead he wanted to investigate the social conditions that both enable murder and inhibit murderers’ genuine attempts to reckon with their crimes. Complicating the narrative, obviously, was John’s own relationship with his subject.

John pulled off The Tragedy of True Crime—a masterful feat of journalism that is both deeply reported and deeply felt—under circumstances far more difficult, both practically and emotionally, than those of most colleagues I’ve met. He spoke to me from Sing Sing Correctional Facility about the book, how he wrote it and what’s next.

*

Vauhini Vara: You write beautifully about details of prison life that show how human beings find ways to be creative and inventive, even in the most horrific circumstances. I loved reading about that artist you’re imprisoned with at some point who sculpts caricatures of guards out of bread and pasta. Later he kills himself. I’m curious about your thoughts on the impact of these kinds of details.

John J. Lennon: I think that’s the paradox of good writing—you put the ugly up against the beautiful, right? For example, the artist has these skills for molding art out of bread like that, and then he hangs himself. I mean, it’s just life. Is that going to cast a negative light on me and my peers? It’s complicated, because we’re complicated souls. When I read criminal-justice pieces, they often humanize people in prison without pushing them to be accountable for their crimes or without capturing the shitty moments. Well, I think that’s just disingenuous. True-crime stories, meanwhile, sensationalize, and they leave little room for humanizing the person who committed the violence. So, I mean, I try to find a sweet spot. If you could find the humanity in these scenes, I think I’m doing my job right.

VV: Here’s another example of ingenuity in prison. You wrote these short sections of your book one at a time using the drafts function of the prison messaging platform that you use, and then you had colleagues on the outside put those together according to your instructions. Can you talk more about the process for putting this book together? I’m especially interested in whether there are ways that you think the constraints that you faced shaped the way the book ended up.

JJL: You go with what you’ve got. At first I wrote on a typewriter. I’d print out a couple of pages. Then tablets came, as you mentioned, and there’s a draft function for messages, and you could cut and paste. I was like, Oh, this is cool.

But it probably wasn’t made for somebody to be writing a book and sending it through messages. It’s not Apple—it’s pretty bad. I had this rubber keyboard that I plugged in, and I had to learn through trial and error. If you pulled out the plug, the work was gone. It’s any writer’s nightmare to lose things. I lost a lot. What I’ve learned, though, is that, at first, you’re huffing and puffing and cursing. But then I rewrote it, and once I got over myself, thankfully, it came out better. It’s like, All right, I’ve got this.

But then there’s the other side. Once I send those fragmented excerpts of the book to the outside, I have colleagues putting it all together, flowing each section together based on my direction. Or mailing me articles about my subjects that I couldn’t access in here. Or mailing me the manuscript. It was so difficult to get a 100,000-word manuscript through the prison mail room. I had several people help with this over the years, but the two that were most involved were Matt Litman and Megan Posco.

VV: Given that a lot of your writing is being sent through a prison platform, I’m curious about the extent to which you ever get pushback from officials who have read what you write.

JJL: I do. It doesn’t stop. It’s all the time. I know that they’re surveilling me. I mean, I  don’t say that negatively—it’s their job to expect the worst out of somebody that’s convicted of murder, serving time in prison, I get it.

Sometimes words are flagged. There are many descriptions in that book that were flagged. There was one scene where I was writing about a prison escape—I don’t even know if I feel comfortable talking about that on the phone right now—but I wrote about that and sent it, not thinking. But as soon as I sent that, my tablet went down, and they locked down the prison and came running, and there was this whole scene.

I think eventually an administrator read it and it was like, Oh, this is the writer, this is not an actual escape that’s happening. I’m a pain in the ass to them. You can appreciate the administrator who has all these people running around and then reads this message and is like, Oh no, this is just Lennon with his fucking stories!

I know that they’re going to read it. I don’t care. I don’t. I really don’t give much time to that. I just keep going. What I’m doing is legal, and I pay taxes.

VV: Your book focuses on four men who killed and were incarcerated for it, including yourself and three other men: Michael Shane Hale, Milton E. Jones, and Robert Chambers. As a journalist, you’re in the unusual position of eating, sleeping, working out, showering alongside these subjects of yours. And I’m curious about how that affected your relationship with their stories and your ability to tell their stories. I imagine there are struggles in that, but I’m also curious about ways that it enriches the work.

JJL: Look, I mean, it’s a disadvantage at times. I’ve been told a few times that people didn’t like how I described them in my articles. That’s a light inconvenience, but it’s also a reminder that maybe more journalists should think about how their work affects people. I wrote this whole book, really, because of how I was affected by other journalists coming in and telling my story.

I also think about just being able to observe a subject before you even know their crime. In workshops at Lighthouse, we talked a lot about routines: What’s your character’s routine? What do they do? I observed Shane before even really knowing his crime. Shane’s got 50 years to life. He’s dying in prison, and yet he’s leading a class prepping guys to get out. I mean, I just think it’s such a testament to his character.

Regular journalists writing about people who are in prison—some, not all—are engaging with their subjects after going down a rabbit hole about the worst shit they ever did. Anybody who looks up Shane will read that he’s the gay guy who killed his lover and chopped up his body. But Shane is so much more than that, and I hope I showed that in the book.

Where it gets a little murky is with friendship. I don’t know if I’ve quite figured it out. I have gotten close with these guys when I’ve immersed myself in their lives. It’s a little different when you experience the same conflict that the person that you’re reporting on is enduring. There’s compassion, empathy, shame. It feels almost visceral. Do I know what to do with that? I don’t. I listen to your advice a lot: I just try to be honest with the reader and leave it on the page.

VV: I mean, one thing that surprised me most about the final version of the book after reading some much, much earlier drafts, is that I knew you would reveal things about yourself in the book, but I was really surprised and impressed by just how honest it is, just how much you reveal about your own story. I think oftentimes journalists writing books will try to sort of slip into the background of what they’re writing, almost as if they’re not there at all. You do the opposite. What are you trying to accomplish with that?

JJL: In journalism, it’s like, Only put yourself in the narrative if you’re furthering the narrative. Don’t make it confessional. Don’t make it about you. But I think it’s a little different when you’re carrying the  same things that your subjects are carrying. I think it’s important for the narrator to be a trusted narrator. And, look, I’m a convicted murderer, too. The way I can be trusted is telling on myself. When I think of a 17-year-old like Milton Jones who is struggling, maybe scratching the door of mental illness, and I compare it to my own crime, I think I have more culpability. What I did was intentional, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that. These are things that most journalists don’t have to contend with. I do.

VV: There’s this part in the book where you’re writing about the son of one of your subjects: Kevin, the son of Milton Jones. He’s pretty convinced by this backstory for his dad’s crime that probably just isn’t true. And in the context of writing about that, you suddenly bring yourself in: “I made my mother the mother of a murderer. My ex wives were married to a murderer. My brothers were the brothers of a murderer.” You tell the story about your brother – Joe – going to church on Sundays, but then seeing the family of the man you murdered and never going back. It was about you, but it actually helped me better understand Milton’s son’s rationalization.

JJL: I appreciate you pointing that out. What he experienced, in a sense, had nothing to do with me. But it had everything to do with me, too. When I heard Kevin rationalizing—he loves his father and appreciates that his father is trying to overcome so many things: prison, mental illness, getting through his education. It’s so complicated, the connection between his rationalization and the emotional complexity of being the son of somebody who committed murder. He’s also a victim. He’s connected to the crime, he’s affected by it for his whole life.

VV: I’m curious if any of the three men you wrote about in the book or their family members have read it yet, and if so, if you’ve gotten any feedback from them.

JJL:  Shane read the book. He loved it. I mean, he showed me grace. There was some rough stuff to read about his life. I came to this project having seen a story about me that I feel got a lot of things wrong, at least with the theme and the tone of it. You’re like, Oh, you motherfucker. I would have hated for any of my subjects to read the book and be like, like, Oh, you motherfucker. [A recorded voice warns that time is almost up.]

VV: I can let you go, because I feel like we’re going to get cut off, but I want to ask you if you know what your next project is yet. For the record, I hate that question when I get it. But I’m curious.

JJL: The next big thing in my life will be freedom. I think I’ll write a memoir. Another idea would be a kind of travelogue that starts with release. I’d be reporting what freedom is like after a generation inside.