Getting to the Root of Violence in America

Fox Butterfield will return to the Catskills in the next couple of weeks, to a prison that from a distance, he says, resembles a medieval monastery. It is the home of Willie James Bosket Jr., the most feared criminal in New York history.

The first time Butterfield entered Woodbourne state prison was in 1989. The New York Times reporter was ushered through grim corridors and electronically controlled gates to a secluded cell designed to contain Bosket, a self-described monster.

The front of his cell was shielded with a hard, transparent shell to prevent Bosket from throwing excrement at guards. The electrical outlets were removed because of his tendency to eat light bulbs.

Bosket quoted from Mao and Ho Chi Minh when he learned that Butterfield had spent 15 years in Asia as a correspondent for the New York Times. During the next five years, the two of them would spend about 200 hours speaking to each other through tiny holes punched into the Plexiglass window that separated them.

They were from divergent pasts. Butterfield graduated from Harvard. His father was a teacher of American history. Bosket had spent most of his life in institutions. His father was a murderer. One man white, in jacket and tie; one man black, in prison greens and shackles. The two sons became not friends but partners in a book titled “All God’s Children” (Knopf), released last month.

Sharing his father’s passion for history, Butterfield, 56, with little information to work from, began gathering shards of details and weaving together a family history through five generations to a time of slavery and a place of intemperate violence. What he uncovered is reflected in the book’s subtitle: “The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence.”

For Butterfield, the newspaper’s national correspondent covering crime and violence, it was an opportunity to perform a case study on a man who by age 9 had set a man on fire and was stealing cars. By 15, he had killed two men in a New York City subway and laid claim to 25 stabbings and 200 armed robberies. He boasted that he had committed some 2,000 crimes.

He became a poster boy for juvenile crime and deadly streets when he was sentenced to only five years for the murders. In 1978, New York passed its Juvenile Offender Law, allowing children as young as 13 to be tried as adults for murder. It was known as the Willie Bosket Law and remains the toughest in the nation addressing violent crimes committed by adolescents.

For Bosket, 32, the book was a chance to understand how he had become in his words a “monster created by the system.” He told Butterfield that once while lying awake, he felt something within him--separate but a part of him--and he wondered if it was the presence of his father.

Bosket never met his father, but he heard about him and looked like him. When he would misbehave as a child, his mother would tell him, “You’re going to end up just like your father.”

Butterfield was apprehensive at first. He didn’t want to glorify Bosket, didn’t want to become his mouthpiece. “Willie’s crimes were particularly vicious, but I felt that maybe through this story of somebody who was extraordinarily violent, there was a prism here, a way to understand what has happened with violence in America.”

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The choir was rehearsing the day Butterfield pulled up to the rural, South Carolina church in search of the grave of Bosket’s great-great-grandfather Aaron. Butterfield had pieced together Bosket’s paternal lineage but knew few details.

He introduced himself to the choir and explained his mission. A woman told him to wait, and for about an hour, Butterfield stood outside the church as the sun lowered over the tops of pines. A car finally pulled up. It was filled with Boskets.

They were suspicious at first (and later told him they had come with guns), but they helped him fill in the family tree.

Emancipation had freed Aaron, whom Butterfield describes as a “meek and humble” man. His son, Clifton, known as Pud, was different. It was Pud who stood his ground to the white man’s whip. He wanted self-respect and dignity, which led him to violence.

In 1910, according to Butterfield, Pud was working as a sharecropper when the landowner, in an act to demonstrate his authority, lined up the workers before they took to the fields and lashed them with a whip. Pud stood last in line.

He grabbed the whip and pulled the landowner off the wagon. “This is the last nigger you’re going to whip,” he said, and walked away.

It earned him a reputation that made it difficult to find work. Later that year, he broke into two stores and was sentenced to a year on the chain gang. Eventually, Pud would have more brushes with the law. He died in a car crash in 1924.

Upon his death, Butterfield writes, friends gathered around a campfire. One friend proclaimed, “The legend is gone. The baddest man in Saluda is gone.”

To be the baddest man in Saluda, S.C., was to be the baddest man in what was, historically, one of the most violent counties in America, Butterfield found. Edgefield County was a place of massacres dating back to its first settlers.

One study determined that from 1800 to 1860, the murder rate in South Carolina, which was largely rural, was four times that of Massachusetts, then the most urban, industrial state.

The vast majority of murder defendants during that period were white, Butterfield states, as “the slaves were thought to be a gentle people.” There was a fine line between murder and violence used as an accepted means of defending one’s honor.

“Violence is not, as many people today presume, a recent problem or a peculiarly urban bane; and in its inception it had little to do with race or class, with poverty or education, with television or the fractured family--in short with most of the usual suspects,” Butterfield writes. “Rather it grew out of a proud culture that flourished in the antebellum rural South, a tradition shaped by whites long before it was adopted and recast by some blacks in reaction to their plight. For its adherents, it served almost as a way of life. And at its heart was a lethal impulse.”

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Pud had a son named James, Willie’s grandfather, who was born in 1922. Following Pud’s death his legend lived on. Young James told relatives, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a bad man, just like my father.”

James married and, indeed, turned to crime. He was arrested in New Jersey in 1942 for armed robbery. His son, Willie James Bosket, nicknamed Butch, also became a criminal, killing two people in a Milwaukee pawn shop in 1962.

Butch already was incarcerated by the time his son, Willie Bosket Jr., was born. Butch earned a college degree in federal prison and became the first inmate to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa while in prison. He was killed during an escape attempt.

Willie Bosket Jr. grew up in Harlem. In the second grade, he tossed a typewriter out of a third-story school window, just missing a teacher. He was ordered to be tested at Bellevue Hospital, where both his father and grandfather had been sent.

By age 9, he had been sexually abused by his grandfather. He rarely went to school and often carried a knife. In 1972, before he turned 10, Bosket stood before a judge for the first time.

One of 52 cases on Judge Harold A. Felix’s docket that day, the tiny youngster was placed in a school for boys. He stole a van and escaped. He was transferred from facility to facility, but none of them could control him; some refused to take him.

In 1978, Willie was back out on the streets and robbing people in the subways. With a gun he bought from his mother’s boyfriend, he killed two people.

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The book describes not only Bosket’s journey from one institution to another, it describes America’s struggle to deal with serious juvenile offenders. The answer, Butterfield says, is not to build more prisons. “Prison doesn’t scare young people. It becomes a right of passage. In Willie’s case, it’s where he expected to go.”

The book will be discussed today in Boston at the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology. Jeffrey Fagen, a professor in the School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the school’s Center for Violence, Research and Prevention, will be on the panel.

“The book shows the interplay of individual and situational and social and cultural forces that shape the violence that one individual can commit,” Fagen says. “What he shows is the socialization to violence that occurred to Willie throughout his whole life.”

Fagen says he disagrees with Butterfield’s summation regarding the role of honor in causing violence. “Honor has been incorporated into the scripts of violence that people use in the streets. I don’t know that honor serves as a very strong contributing factor in motivating violence. I think self-defense is probably just as strong.”

While he praises the book, Fagen also says the book has potentially dangerous implications. “I think one inclined to look for genetic explanations can look at this book and say, ‘Boy if there was ever a case of the bad seed, here it is.’ The book attempts to caution people against arriving at that conclusion, but one inclined to look for that will find it.”

It is the second book written by Butterfield, who was a member of a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for publication of the Pentagon Papers. He also wrote “China: Alive in the Bitter Sea” (Times Books, 1982), winner of the American Book Award, now known as the National Book Award.

In 1993, a television movie, “Born Too Soon” was made based on a book written by his wife, Elizabeth Mehren, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. The movie was about the short life of their baby, Emily, who was born 15 weeks prematurely and the couple’s struggle to cope with Emily’s fight for life.

Butterfield has not talked to Bosket since “All God’s Children” was published. In a week or two, when he returns to Woodbourne, the two sons will sit once again and discuss the book, the response and the monster within.