Lo, how men blame the gods! From us, they say, comes evil. But through their own perversity, and more than is their due, they meet with sorrow . . .
Thus spoke Zeus, the father of men and gods, through the mouth of Homer.
To understand the evil of one man is to understand the evil of all men. For evil has but one root, but one cause, but one purpose. If they hope to survive, men of good will must learn this lesson soon and well: Evil seeks but the opportunity and the means to destroy itself; only when frustrated and denied its birthright does it turn with savage violence against its tormentors.
Today a dreadful dagger is pointed at the heart of Christendom. And from within a many-faced evil swaggers at noonday, strikes swiftly and terrifyingly during the midnight hours. Our label for this internal evil is Crime.
We know that there are those who walk among us who seemingly are not of us. And because some of them rob and hate and kill and throw away their lives we call them children of the Devil. Quite often they regard themselves as such. But we, as well as they, are wrong, and when we wreak blind vengeance upon them we do a futile and a tragic thing. Unwittingly we seek to propitiate a malignant god whose goal is to rob us of our humanity.
A familiar proverb tells of a blind man who, coming to a wall, declares himself to be at the end of the world. From diat proverb is drawn my book’s pervasive theme—even a society with excellent vision sometimes has a perverse and tragic tendency to follow the example of the blind man.
I asked myself: Why?
Cell 2455, Death Row is an earnest effort at an answer.
I feel impelled to add that the book has been written for one purpose only—because its author is both haunted and angered by the knowledge that his society needlessly persists in confounding itself in dealing with the monstrous twin problems of what to do about crime and what to do with criminals. Pled, consequently, is the cause of the criminally damned and doomed. It’s time their voice was heard. And understood.
Caryl Chessman
San Quentin, California