How Can Writing in Your Journal Be a Crime?

Brian Dalton was sentenced to ten years in prison last month because a judge didn’t like what he’d been thinking.

The 22-year-old Ohio man was on probation stemming from a 1998 conviction for possessing pornographic photographs of children, when, during a routine search of his home, his probation officer picked up Dalton’s journal and began to read. In it, Dalton had written a story about three children, ages 10 and 11, caged in a basement, molested and tortured.

The story was purely fictional, and there was never any evidence that he intended to sell the material. But Dalton was nonetheless charged with possessing obscene material involving children, a crime in Ohio as well as a violation of his probation. He is now serving a ten-year sentence for his “crime.”

I’m against child porn. I’m against children being abused or tortured. I even wish people didn’t think about these things. But this case takes the justice system into dangerous territory. As the legal director for the Ohio chapter of the ACLU, Raymond Vasvari, said, “His thoughts may be disturbing and repugnant, but he has a right to have them and write them down.” I agree.

I began my writing career by keeping a journal in a prison cell, and I can tell you that there are benefits to putting mean and repulsive thoughts in writing. My father recently reminded me of the nihilistic tenor of my earliest letters from prison. I was trying to harden myself to make it through my seven years for bank robbery. I railed at the world like the vicious racist I was becoming. I hated all the people I held responsible for putting me in prison, I hated my life behind bars, hated how I was treated, and that hate poured into the letters I wrote. “If I had my finger on the bomb,” I wrote to my father, “I’d push it and start World War III to blow up the planet.”

Then I got a journal. The first time I committed my imagination to the page, the pen in my hand couldn’t keep pace with the words spilling from my head. In those days of lonely confinement, my mind was full of raging clutter. I was plagued by my darker imagination, besieged by aggressive thoughts. My anger didn’t end with my release.

Once, while I was sitting on the patio of a Pasadena cafe with my girlfriend, a clearly disturbed street person began swearing at me and ranting. “You dirty, burrito-eating Mexican,” he yelled. Every eye in the place was locked on him. Then, as one, they all turned to stare at me. In prison, someone would have shouted, “I don’t play much chess, but I think it’s your move.” They seemed to be challenging me to respond. My rage was intense and unreasonable. But under the three-strikes law, if I’d done anything to him it would have meant returning to prison forever. I left the restaurant shaking, feeling helpless and humiliated. In my journal at home, I released the anger. On the page, that transient didn’t survive. They carried his body out of the cafe.

If my parole officer had told me that I couldn’t turn my raging thoughts into fantasy, then I might well have acted them out and gone right back to prison. The force of my angry imagination was so intense that I couldn’t stop myself from entertaining bad thoughts. The best I could do at the time--still with a savage prison mindset and furious at myself and the world--was direct them away from real life. That’s how dark journal writings made the world safe from me. I had an outlet where I could expel my congested rage without victimizing anyone.

Since getting out of prison, I’ve conducted writing workshops in juvenile halls. The boys in the hall are often angry and depressed, and so is their writing. Their essays, poetry and stories can be ugly and racist. They sometimes celebrate sadistic mayhem. Some of them would identify with my juvenile prison desire to blow up the planet.

I accept the language of their inner quarrels without reservation. In fact, I go further: I actually encourage them to commit murder on the page. The famous existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that the greatest emancipation he ever felt was the first time he killed a person in a short story.

The truth is that some of the boys in the workshop are murderers, and I’d rather have them kill fictitious characters on the page than have them kill another human being. I believe they’re learning coping skills as valuable as learning to balance a checkbook or look for a job. They need constructive ways to vent inappropriate desires. To write out fantasies in order to avoid creating real victims is therapy, not pornography.

I once read an interview with horror writer Dean Koontz. His stories are troubling, in part, because they give testament to the fact that someone’s imagination conjured these villains and their horrible acts. Koontz told the interviewer that his stories were a way for him to release some of the darker clutter in his head. He became rich for giving voice to his vilest thoughts. And I suspect he comes out the other end of his stories a less turbulent person.

That’s how the process of liberation through writing works. Troubled people are able to transform the jumbled noise in their heads into compact thoughts, finally expelled onto the page as tortured poems, frightening scenes, terrifying novels. Or, in Dalton’s case, as a repulsive story about child torture.