Perry’s imprisonment at Lansing State Penitentiary

Perry Smith’s imprisonment at Lansing State Penitentiary was a formative interval in his life: it imposed a five-to-ten-year sentence for property offenses, altered his correspondence with his father, and brought him into the same cell as Dick. Perry later left the prison on parole, but the connection formed there mattered beyond his own sentence. Dick spoke of Perry as someone he could rely on for a major criminal undertaking, making the prison both a place of confinement and the setting in which their future partnership took shape.

Sentence and Arrival

Perry’s route to Lansing ran through an arrest in New York and extradition to Kansas. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took him from a hotel and returned him to Phillipsburg, where the charges included larceny, jailbreak, and car theft. He received a sentence of five to ten years at Lansing State Penitentiary. The account presents the sentence as the result of his offenses, while Perry’s own retrospective language, reported in the narrative, framed the punishment as a harsh reversal of the freedom he had sought while moving from place to place.

The imprisonment also followed a period of instability. Perry had gone to Worcester looking for an Army friend who was no longer there, was arrested for vagrancy, and later found night work in New York near Forty-second Street. That precarious urban existence ended when he was arrested and sent back to Kansas. Once in Lansing, he notified his father and his sister, Barbara Johnson, of his situation. In his recollection, the family he could still turn to had narrowed to those two: his mother was dead, and his siblings Jimmy and Fern had also died. The news of prison therefore carried both a legal consequence and a stark accounting of who remained in his life.

The Father’s Account and Perry’s Letters

Perry’s father, Tex John Smith, tried to intervene on his son’s behalf through a document titled A History of My Boy’s Life. Written to support a parole application and sent to the Kansas State Parole Board, the manuscript described Perry’s childhood, work habits, temperament, and family history from his father’s perspective. Perry had read it repeatedly. While sorting personal keepsakes in Mexico, he chose the manuscript among the letters, photographs, and clippings he considered too important to leave behind. Its place among those selected belongings shows that the father’s account remained emotionally charged for him, even as it recalled a childhood marked by separation and hardship.

The manuscript presented Tex as a father who believed Perry had been taught responsibility and honesty, and who continued to offer him practical support. It recalled Tex’s return to find his children in San Francisco and Perry’s wish to leave with him; later, after Perry became seriously ill in a children’s institution, Tex came back and took him away. Father and son then lived together for nearly a year before traveling around the country. This history complicates the prison correspondence: Tex’s appeal was not simply an argument about a sentence, but an attempt to describe a continuing bond and a future in which Perry might again live independently.

In the same account, Tex interpreted Perry’s letters from prison as evidence of change. He believed his son regretted his conduct, felt ashamed to tell acquaintances where he was, and wanted his incarceration kept from friends. Tex also reported that Perry had asked him to take care while driving, repeating advice his father had once given him. Tex read that reversal as a sign that Perry had learned from experience. These were the father’s judgments, not an independent record of Perry’s inner state, but they show how he understood the sentence: as a painful lesson that might prevent further theft and make his son value freedom more deeply.

Tex’s hopes were practical as well as moral. He described Perry as disabled and approaching middle age, and worried that contractors would not hire him for heavy-equipment work. He believed Perry was beginning to consider a less strenuous way to support himself, while promising to share what he had and to leave him life-insurance proceeds if necessary. In this vision, release from prison would require more than an end to confinement; it would mean finding work compatible with Perry’s physical condition and rebuilding a life outside the institution.

Prison as a Meeting Place

Lansing also connected Perry to Dick. Floyd Wells, who entered the prison in June 1959 after breaking into an appliance store, later recalled sharing a cell with Dick for about a month in June and July. Perry was not present for that conversation: he had already left Lansing on parole. But Dick talked about his former cellmate, describing Perry as a half-Indian man with whom he expected to undertake major schemes if a suitable opportunity arose. Wells had never met Perry and had never seen him; his knowledge of Perry came from Dick’s repeated references to him.

Dick’s talk made the prison relationship consequential before Wells knew the outcome. He spoke both of plans of his own and of the criminal ventures he and Perry might pursue together after reuniting. Wells recalled that Dick believed he could count on Perry as a partner for a sufficiently large score. The narrative links the men’s future association to this earlier period of shared confinement: Lansing brought them together, and Dick carried the prospect of their partnership out of prison. Perry’s sentence thus had an unintended consequence beyond punishment and separation from ordinary life, placing him in the orbit of the person who would later seek him out for crime.

Parole and the Meaning of Confinement

Perry’s release on parole marks the boundary of this period, not a clean resolution of it. By the time Dick was sharing a cell with Wells, Perry had already left Lansing. Tex’s account suggests that prison continued to shape the father-son relationship through letters: it gave Tex reason to offer counsel, assess Perry’s changing outlook, and make plans for his support after release. At the same time, Perry’s concern about concealing his imprisonment from acquaintances suggests that the sentence carried a social burden as well as a loss of freedom.

The prison episode therefore holds two outcomes in tension. In his father’s reading, confinement had taught Perry to fear a return behind bars and to reconsider how he might live; in the account of Wells’s recollections, the same institution had fostered Dick’s expectation that Perry would join him in another criminal enterprise. One is a hoped-for break with theft, the other a link to renewed crime. Lansing did not determine which future would prevail, but it brought the question into focus: what Perry’s release meant depended not only on the lesson his father believed he had learned, but also on the partnership Dick expected to resume.