Book Review: Twice Pardoned

Book Review: Twice Pardoned

Author: Harold Morris

Date: 1986

Publisher: Word

ISBN: 0-929608-01-1

Length: 176 pages

Quote: “Fun is one thing, I thought, but being involved in a supermarket robbery—suppose that man dies!”

When his friends jumped into the car and ordered him to drive, they assured Harold Morris that the man at whom they’d shot was on his feet. The guys scattered in different directions, each in his own pursuit of wine, women, song, and no further questions about the robbery they’d committed to finance their partying. A few months later, they learned that the man had died. The leader of the little gang testified that Morris had fired the fatal bullet. Forensic science in 1968 was not what it is today; Morris went to prison.

He describes his adjustment to life with real felons, who respected him more for being a murderer. He played pranks, smuggling a birth control pill to a pill popper, daring a man to streak past the guard station, or manipulating an ignorant man into paying more for a cheaper wallet in the prison store. “But prison is still prison, and sooner or later, all the laughing stops.” Men already serving life sentences for rape and murder had little motivation not to commit more of the same.

Morris, he says, found salvation. Once he’d sobered up, he recovered his Christian lifestyle and became a Model Prisoner. Some of his friends helped his family locate him. He was released, and found work as an anti-drug lecturer...before he developed cancer.

Twice Pardoned is recommended to anyone studying the history of law enforcement, criminal justice, the spiritual lives of convicts and the hope that their “conversions” may last. The book may also be of some interest to those studying the history of homosexuality in Georgia, although Morris, perhaps for survival reasons, takes the phobic viewpoint that any man who participated in a homosexual act was “ruined.” Twice Pardoned is well enough written to make a good train or airport read. It’s been recommended as an encouraging book for people who feel that “life has sentenced” them to other forms of suffering outside of prison; I don’t find it a particularly cheerful book, but some people do.