Killer Poet to Be Paroled?

According to Jacket Copy's Carolyn Kellogg, Norman A. Porter Jr. (also known to the Chicago literary community as "J.J. Jameson") is up for parole. Hopefully this opportunity is less of an intermission and more of a fresh start. We'll see! In the meantime, keep hold of your stanzas. From Jacket Copy:

The underground Chicago literary community knew him as J.J. Jameson; the Massachusetts penal system knew him as Norman A. Porter Jr., a murderer who escaped in 1985.

Porter was a lawbreaking young man who, with a partner robbed a Saugus, Mass., clothing store in 1960. A clerk was shot and killed. The next year, awaiting trial in Cambridge, Porter and a partner tried to escape, shooting and killing the jailer.

In both cases, Porter pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to consecutive life terms. While in prison, he earned his high school diploma, started a prison newspaper and radio station. He also began writing poetry.

"He was quite talented," his Boston lawyer Gordon T. Walker said after his 2005 arrest.

One of Porter's life sentences was commuted in 1975; he was serving in a low-security facility, where he was a model prisoner who earned furloughs and dutifully returned. After he failed to secure parole, depressed, he walked away in 1985. [...]

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