UBC: Kreck, Anton Woode

[truepenny]

Anton Woode: Boy Murderer by Dick Kreck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book reminded me immediately of Joan Jacobs Brumberg's Kansas Charley. The subject matter is very similar: a boy who commits murder, is tried as an adult, and--in Charley's case--is hanged like an adult. Anton was simply sent to prison for life at the age of eleven.

Kansas Charley is a better book, but Anton Woode is quite good. Kreck writes well, is obviously a passionate historian of Colorado, and he addresses the wider questions about children in the justice system thoughtfully, if rather briefly. Anton's story is less dramatic than Charley's: he determinedly self-educated himself in prison, petitioned relentlessly for parole/pardon, leaving thus some eminently Victorian letters, both eloquent and sentimental; he was paroled at the age of 23 (and pardoned a year later), changed his name, got married, became a bookkeeper (also an artist and apparently a quite good violinist), first in New York State, then in Menomonie, Wisconsin, finally ending in Minneapolis, where he died of lung cancer at the age of 68, having lived a spotlessly respectable bourgeois life.

I would have liked, I think, a little more digging on Kreck's part about what Anton's case says about juvenile criminals. Anton shot and killed a man because he coveted his pocket watch, which as crimes go is pretty heinous. (Also clearly a crime of impulse, not malice aforethought.) And yet he did reform himself. He did live up to the promises he made to the people who helped him get his parole. And the question of how he did it is a question that is burning a hole in the pocket of America's justice system right now. We need to figure out how rehabilitation happens (for both children and adults) and how to foster it, because the strictly punitive system doesn't work and hasn't worked for more than a century.

This book is interesting as a history of the penal system (specifically in Colorado but with broader application), as a case study of a child murderer, and in the background a history of Colorado politics at the end of the 19th century.



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