From the slammer to slam: how one man went from the penitentiary to poetry and back again

Norman Porter Jr. - aka Jacob “J.J.” Jameson – was convicted of murder in Massachusetts 20 years ago before he escaped from jail and fled to Chicago. Here, he lived under an alias as a poet and activist for over two decades until his re-arrest in 2005. Today, CBS news reported that the Massachusetts Supreme Court rejected his appeal, saying he'll have to stay in the slammer until he tries other legal avenues.

A Chicago Magazine profile from 2005 chronicles Porter’s fascinating story - and how his past eventually caught up with him:

J. J. Jameson had been a fixture among Chicago's so-called saloon poets for nearly 20 years. He had published a book. He was about as close to being a public intellectual as an alcoholic day laborer could become: he passionately defended labor rights on cable-access television, discussed poetry on independent radio, and lionized the memory of the Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine from the podium of the College of Complexes, a weekly debate group that attracts outsiders and political obsessives. He campaigned for Mayor Harold Washington's 1987 re-election, arranging for gang members in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood to drive little old ladies to polling places . . .

He also murdered John Pigott in Saugus, Massachusetts, in 1960. And he pleaded guilty in the death of jailmaster David Robinson in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1961. And he escaped from a state prison near Walpole, Massachusetts, in 1985, and fled to Chicago, eluding capture for two decades . . .