The Convictions of an Ex-Con

MY SHADOW RAN FAST by Bill Sands. 212 pages. Prentice-Hall. $4.95.

Mother was a coldly sadistic disciplinarian. Father was a well-intentioned fuddy-dud. Except for the fact that Father was also a judge, the story sounds like the childhood of thousands of people who end up in psychiatrists' offices. But Bill Sands ended up not on a couch but on "the Shelf"--jailbird slang for the solitary-confinement cells at San Quentin prison. Before he was 21, Sands was serving time on three convictions for armed robbery, with sentences in each of from one year to life, and had won a reputation as a con so "solid" that not even brutal beatings by guards could bend him to prison rules.

Not Like Chessman. What beatings could not do, personal interest and kindness did. While in solitary, Sands was visited by crusading Warden Clinton T. Duffy. Duffy convinced the rebellious young prisoner that true rehabilitation would swing open "the Front Gate." Almost overnight Sands became a model prisoner and earned the right to work in the prison office and share a cell with another model prisoner--Caryl Chessman, who was then serving his first hitch at San Quentin. Years later, Chessman returned to San Quentin as a convicted kidnaper and rapist, and was executed. But Sands's reform was for real.

Paroled in 1943 after serving only 2 1/4 years, Sands, then 23, embarked on a lusty round-the-world odyssey. He sailed the wartime Pacific as a merchant seaman, made up for the years of prison-enforced sexual abstinence in a ten-day romp with an American Red Cross girl in Calcutta, worked for Aramco in Saudi Arabia, dug for diamonds in Venezuela, managed five jungle airports for Panagra in Bolivia, became a skilled pilot and a top-rated sports-car driver.

Square Johns. As his lust for speed and adventure finally lessened, Sands settled into a series of jobs as a sales executive and sometimes as a song-and-dance entertainer. Though financially successful, Sands felt drawn back to prison to try to teach convicts something 80% of them fail to learn--how to stay out of prison once they are released. Making ends meet by part-time work as a writer and speaker, Sands has been crisscrossing the U.S. for the past three years, addressing convict audiences and setting up rehabilitation programs in prison.

The problem, Sands holds, is to unscramble the convict's twisted values of what is smart and what is dumb. "I've been a con, as smart and tough as they come," he tells the prisoners, "but I'm not a wise guy any more. All the wise guys I know are in here--the smartest ones of all didn't even come to the show, they're in the hole. They call guys like me square Johns, dummies. Yeah. All us square Johns are on the outside."

As an ex-con, Sands believes all sentences for major offenses should be the same: one year to life. After the first year, release would come as soon as a prisoner had truly rehabilitated himself --or never, if he failed to reform.

Sands's book shows the awkwardness of an amateur and a touch of egoism. But beneath the blemishes, it bears the earnestness of a man who has seen it all, and is trying to make others see.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.