Victor Folke Nelson

Victor Folke Nelson was born in Malmö, Sweden on June 5, 1898 Victor's parents emigrated to the state of Massachusetts, US, with him and his three siblings when he was three years old. ==Incarceration==

Victor Nelson's first charge of larceny occurred when he was 18 years old, but was discharged by a grand jury in New York City. Nelson received a dishonorable discharge from the US Naval Reserve in 1920. primarily for robbery and larceny crimes. He spent some days planning his escape, even modifying a pair of prison-issued shoes, replacing the heavy soles with homemade felt soles to enable both speed and silent running. He made his break from a line of 13 prisoners after attending evening school in the prison chapel. Despite an attempted intervening tackle from a prisoner trusty and bullets from a guard's gun, where he managed to catch hold of the false coping of a small building in the corner where the south wing joined the main wall. He remained in Boston for ten days, then traveled through Massachusetts, West Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania before heading to Ohio. After just a short time in East Liverpool, Nelson was nearly apprehended by a team of Pennsylvania and Ohio detectives, but he managed to escape across the state line into West Virginia where none of the detectives had jurisdiction to make arrests. Osborne also bemoaned those prisoners who had given innovative prison reform programs a bad name by failing to live constructively after release from prison. During a 1931 hiatus from incarceration Nelson lived with friends in New York, who expected Nelson would work as a writer. Nelson instead picked up odd jobs around the neighborhood, but "failed to do satisfactory work." Nelson's friends subsequently paid his way to Sweden in hopes of getting him out of the neighborhood setting, but Nelson was sent back to the United States by Swedish relatives after one month and soon recidivated. Throughout his years of incarceration and paroles, Nelson at times struggled with morphia addiction and excessive drinking, and he later published writing giving personal insight into the patterns of drug use and recidivism to which many prisoners fall prey. Nelson's final prison sentence was from 1930 to 1932, after which he paroled under the supervision of Abraham Myerson, though he would have additional encounters with the law in his troubled later years. ==Writing career and marriage==

Progressive prison official Thomas Mott Osborne and neurologist Abraham Myerson both recognized Victor Nelson's potential as a writer. In 1929 he published a review on The Mårbacka Edition of the Works of Selma Lagerlöf in The Saturday Review of Literature. Nelson also cultivated skills in art and regularly illustrated criminology articles for local newspapers, including his own articles in The Boston Record. The book was reviewed in newspapers across multiple states. Nelson's publications would continue to be cited in 20th and 21st century criminal justice and sociocultural writing and research, though he would never complete the second book he had begun writing, which was on the topic of alcoholism and was to be called Mornings After. ==Later life and death==

In 1936 Nelson suffered a broken neck in a car accident. After this injury, which caused him ongoing pain and discouragement, he struggled with depression and began drinking heavily. His wife, Pearl, remained a consistent support to him, despite his growing challenges. In March 1937 he was sentenced by Judge Elmer Briggs of the Boston Plymouth District Court to Bridgewater State Farm (where chronic alcoholics were often sent at the time, and which later became the Bridgewater State Hospital) after assaulting an elderly neighbor while intoxicated. On December 8, 1939, at the age of 41, Nelson phoned his wife after leaving home, telling her he intended to leave the state and that he was contemplating taking his own life. Police had received a call from an anonymous woman Medical examiner William J. Brickley reported that Nelson had told three different people on previous occasions that he intended to take his own life using drugs. Brickley deemed the cause of Nelson's death "self ingestion of poison." Further investigation by Boston police Captain William D. Donovan and Sergeant Joseph Maraghy revealed that prior to his death, Nelson had registered and left two suitcases filled with writings, personal papers, and clothing at a house on Derne St. in West End Boston. Nelson had been writing a book on alcoholism at the time of his death, which was to be called Mornings After. == Written and translation works ==

• "Is Honesty Abnormal?" (nonfiction article in Welfare Magazine, The Welfare Bulletin Official Publication of the Illinois Department of Public Welfare Printed by Authority of the State of Illinois, Vol. 18, 1927; reprinted in Copy . . .1930: Stories, Plays, Poems, Essays, Columbia University, University Extension, 1930) • "The New Penology" (nonfiction article in Welfare Magazine, The Welfare Bulletin Official Publication of the Illinois Department of Public Welfare Printed by Authority of the State of Illinois, Vol. 19, 1928) • "Code of the Crook" (nonfiction article in Welfare Magazine, Vol. 19, Issue 3, 1928) • "Anne and the Cow" (English translation of Johannes V. Jensen's "Ane og Koen", 1928) • "The Mårbacka Edition" (review of The Mårbacka Edition of the Works of Selma Lagerlöf in The Saturday Review of Literature, January 19, 1929, issue) • "In a Prison Cell I Sat" (series for The Boston Record that ran in 24 instalments from December 1932 to January 1933) • "Ethics and Etiquette in Prison" (nonfiction article in The American Mercury, December 1932, pp. 455–462) • Prison Days and Nights (nonfiction book, 1933) • "Prison Stupor" (nonfiction article in The American Mercury, March 1933, pp. 339–344) • "Addenda to 'Junker Lingo'" (nonfiction article in American Speech) == References ==