Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  I flush the chicken bones and wrappings down the toilet. I turn back to the bunk, pick up the candy, and hide it for later. I light a cigarette and stand at the bars looking out into the night. The rain has stopped.

  A rare sensation crawls over me—amazement at the fact that there are people out there loving and being loved or sleeping peacefully. People who experience joy, peace, and love. There are people out there who know nothing of fierce struggles for survival and sanity, struggles against aloneness, cruelty, violence, danger, rapes, rebellions, and madness. It’s like knowing that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lived in a spaceship on their way to the moon, weightless and floating on air. You can know it as a fact, but you cannot imagine the experience.

  The sensation passes and an old longing surfaces—a longing to escape this harsh, ultra-masculine jungle unsoftened by love or beauty, where everyone is engaged in a perpetual battle to prove who is the toughest, the strongest, the cruelest. I long to get away from this field of pain and misery. Not to the city; that’s just another jungle. I want to flee to the country, where I imagine there is no madness, no hate, no war, no animals save those that walk on four legs. Out where life is simple, peaceful, and clean. Where rippling creeks feed open meadows and green leaves dance on soft breezes to the chirpings of gaily colored birds. I long for the fragrance of honeysuckle in my nostrils, the air of innocence. And alongside the creek, clover matted from tender love-making. This is freedom—to work, to love, to aspire. To find my place in the world. To—

  Then I think: Could I fit into that world out there? So much has changed. I was a boy when I left that world. I know nothing of the world that has taken its place. How could I adjust to that world when I couldn’t even adjust to the world I knew, the world that shaped me, or misshaped me? Having lived in this jungle for so long, could I function in a civilized world?

  Am I really winning my struggle to improve my mind and retain my sanity and humanness, or is my success an illusion? Am I just losing my humanity more slowly than those around me? With no guidance, and no yardstick to measure progress against, I can’t tell.

  I suck angrily on a cigarette. I squash it out, a fierce determination flaring in me. I can adjust, and I will adjust. If I could adjust to the cruelties of imprisonment, I can adjust to anything.

  One … two … three … four … five … turn. One … two … three … four … five. Stop. I lean upon the bars, look about my cell.

  Eat, drink, piss, shit, walk. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like a pendulum. No love, no satisfaction, no friendship, no peace—always lonely, always wanting and never having. This is not living; this is existing, like a head of cabbage on a garden row.

  I look out the window and up at the heavens. It’s difficult to relate to Him. He’s too indifferent to pain and human misery. Most people look to Him with gratitude—for their lives, if nothing else. Gratitude eludes me. He did me no favor allowing me to be born into this world.

  I suddenly feel an overwhelming sense of injustice. I want to disrupt violently the comfort of my tormentors, to impress them with my pain and misery by making them feel something of what I feel. My hands tense up, aching to hit something. I could take it out on the floor, but my knuckles are still half raw from the savage scrubbing I gave it last night. I reach for my cigarettes instead. I smoke and pace until the rebellion subsides. I return to the bars and look out the window.

  The fools. Don’t they realize how much of their trouble comes from making men desperate, driving them to despair and rebellion?

  A heaviness settles on me, as it has before and will again—a sense of death. My chest feels tight; I feel cramped and smothered. I literally ache from despair. Long ago, a cruel world that regarded my ambition as insolence and my claim to equality as blasphemy ignited in me fires of frustration fueled by ignorance. I stand in the ominous silence of this steel tomb and contemplate the utter destruction of life that followed—my victim’s, my family’s, my own. I agonize for what has been lost, what could have been. From this wreckage, I will save something yet, though I cannot see how. I look at the books on my bunk. I know they are the keys to keeping my sanity, and they are also my salvation. If I die in here, I am not going to die an ignorant man. I am going to learn something about the world and taste something of life before I leave it, if only through books. And if I somehow survive this experience, I am going to need all the education I can milk from these books.

  On the horizon the first rays of dawn appear, softening the darkened world. I am like the lone soldier trapped behind enemy lines, weary and weaponless, torn between hope and despair. I stare out the window until the flood of morning bathes the world, bringing light, hope, and life—to others. The joint awakens, and I hear the first stirrings of a new day. There are noises in the hall. It’s breakfast time.

  The hatch opens. “Well…hello there, Rideau,” a voice says as I turn away from the window. The mask I wear to conceal my feelings falls into place.

  “I see you’re up early this morning,” the Man says, slipping a tray through the hole.

  I give him a smile that I don’t feel. “Just looking out the window.”

  “It’s a nice morning. Gonna be a real pretty day today.” He leans against the door. He wants to talk.

  I move toward the hatch and the awkward conversation I do not want. “Yeah,” I tell him, “it’s going to be a beautiful day.”

  Months passed and the raw dampness of Louisiana’s winter gave way to the swelter of the Southern sun. Still there was no ruling from the Louisiana Supreme Court. The justices had not yet taken action on my appeal when in June 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Furman v. Georgia decision abolishing the death penalty as it then existed and voiding all death sentences in America.

  In the wake of Furman, the Louisiana Supreme Court began ordering the state’s condemned resentenced to life imprisonment and releasing them from their solitary cells on death row into the relative freedom of the prison at large, where they worked and mingled with other people. It was nearly a year before the court got around to my case. Eight of the nine justices saw no problem with anything that had ever happened in “this case [which] has been in the courts for many years.” On May 7, 1973, they affirmed my murder conviction and, because of Furman, ordered me sentenced to life imprisonment.

  The legal battle for my life was over; there was nothing left to appeal or to do, my lawyers told me. It was the last word I would hear from any of them for more than a quarter century. I was taken from the Baton Rouge courtroom where I was resentenced and ushered back to Angola.

  4

  The Jungle

  1973–1975

  Thursdays were “fresh fish” day at Angola, when new inmates joined the general inmate population. I boarded an old school bus behind the Reception Center to be transported to the Main Prison, where half of Angola’s four thousand inmates lived. The other half lived in four out-camps widely scattered among fields of corn, cotton, and soybeans that stretched as far as the eye could see on the eighteen-thousand-acre prison grounds. The Reception Center housed death row, protective custody, and Closed Custody Restriction (CCR), where inmates were locked up for disciplinary reasons or because they were deemed a threat to security. Perhaps because of my slight build, the Initial Classification Board, which determined housing and job assignments, had offered me the physical safety of a cell in protective custody rather than the brutal, predatory life in Angola’s general population. “It’s a jungle down there,” they told me, “and it can get pretty dangerous.” But after twelve years of solitary confinement, I opted for the jungle.

  I was dropped off behind the laundry building with my bag of personal belongings, along with the other newcomers. Then we set out on the Walk, an elevated, twelve-foot-wide concrete thoroughfare for foot traffic that ran throughout the sprawling Main Prison complex connecting cellblocks, thirty-two dormitories, the dining hall, the laundry, the education building, and various offices. Convicts lined it, leaning on the rail
ing and studying the fresh fish. Some were merely curious; others looked for friends or enemies among the new faces; and the predators were there searching out the weak to enslave.

  Slavery was commonplace at Angola, with perhaps a quarter of the population in bondage. Slaves met many needs in an all-male world shaped by deprivation. They served, of course, as sexual outlets and servants. But as capital stock, they had value and produced income. A slave also conveyed status and symbolized his owner’s power. Whites, especially gangs, would enslave inmates in protection rackets, a nonsexual form of bondage in which the slave—called a “prisoner”—regularly paid money or worked for his owner in moneymaking activities. But most owners had only one slave, referred to as a “galboy,” “whore,” “old lady,” or “wife.” While most prisoners did not own slaves, many used the sexual services of slaves.

  The enslavement process was called “turning out,” the brutal rape symbolically stripping the inmate of his manhood and redefining his role as female. A prisoner targeted for turn-out had to defeat his assailant; otherwise, the rape forever branded him as property. In a violent world that respected only strength, the victimized inmate had to satisfy his master’s every whim, as a displeased owner could brutalize or prostitute the slave. It was a role the victim played for the duration of his imprisonment. As property, slaves were often sold, traded, used as collateral, gambled off, or given away. They were even used as mules to transport contraband for their owners. They had no recourse. Everything in Angola reinforced the slave trade, including the security force, which benefited enormously from the oppression of one segment of the inmate population by another and the junglelike atmosphere that kept inmates paranoid and divided. These relationships were generally regarded as “marriages,” and a complaining slave was more often than not returned to his old man and “counseled” by guards to be a better wife. The slave’s only way out was to commit suicide, escape, or kill his master, the latter two actions drawing additional punishment.

  That’s what happened to James Dunn.

  Dunn arrived at Angola in March 1960 at age nineteen with a three-year sentence for burglary. He was beaten and raped in the prison library by two inmates, one of whom wanted him for a wife. Since he wasn’t doing much time and looked forward to making parole, he decided to make the best of it. He became a good wife, doing his old man’s laundry, keeping his bunk area clean, preparing his meals, popping pimples on his face, giving him massages, and taking care of his sexual needs. He paroled out but returned to Angola at age twenty-one with a five-year sentence for burglary. His former owner was still there. “[He] let me know in no uncertain terms that things hadn’t changed, that I still belonged to him, and that I was still his old lady,” he told me. Eligible for parole again in two years and not wanting to ruin his chance of making it, he became an obedient wife once more. All went smoothly until his master became eligible for release. If his master was released, Dunn wanted out of enslavement. He shared his feelings with his owner, who, instead of selling or giving Dunn to a friend upon his release, gave him his freedom. In an attempt to reduce his attractiveness to others, he stopped showering and cultivated a filthiness that earned him the nickname Stinky Dunn. But it wasn’t enough. He fought off a number of attempts by others to claim him, finally killing Coyle Bell, a rapist. Dunn was punished with an eighteen-month stay in a cell by himself and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

  While other inmates facing the prospect of going to Angola often fought and raped each other in jails to build a reputation for dangerousness that might protect them when they got to the feared prison, I was less anxious entering general population than I had been when I first stepped into the inmate bullpen in the Baton Rouge jail in 1964. Twelve years spent contemplating the prospect of being executed had brought me to terms with dying; prison had taught me not to be intimidated. I knew that I’d probably be tested and I’d probably have to fight, but I was determined to stand my ground or die on it. My eyes scanned the Walk for a familiar face, someone from whom I might be able to obtain a weapon. If I knew nothing else, I knew I would need a weapon.

  In 1973 in Angola, everyone needed a weapon. Not only was the prison in the throes of major systemic change precipitated by the civil rights movement, it was also seriously overcrowded and underfunded. C. Murray Henderson, a progressive penal expert and former head of prisons in Iowa and Tennessee, was the warden. Elayn Hunt, an attorney and reformist, was the new director of corrections. “I’m hoping I’m just overreacting,” she told the state’s largest newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “but my concerns now are food and clothing; I don’t even know what rehabilitation is anymore.” Shortages of basic needs guaranteed violence, as convicts sought to redistribute existing goods and resources by whatever means possible. The prison was seventy guards short that summer. Sixty-seven inmates were stabbed, and five died. The clanging of steel was a familiar sound emanating from behind dormitories as men fought like gladiators with handmade shields and swords, pieces of wood, or mail-order catalogues strapped to their chests. Even in maximum-security cellblocks, men tied their doors shut for an extra measure of safety. Survival of the fittest was the only law, and fear was the supreme ruler of all.

  As I stepped onto the Walk, the first familiar face I spotted was Ora Lee’s. It was hard to miss his big, muscular, six-foot-seven-inch frame as he waved his arms to get my attention. I was enormously relieved. Near him I saw several death row alumni, all friends. They were waiting for me, “just to make sure you didn’t have problems with any of these old bitch-ass niggers,” Daryl Evans said loudly for all to hear. The slender, gregarious youth was my best friend after Ora Lee. He and Bernard “Outlaw” Butler had been sent to death row for killing a man during a New Orleans robbery. Like all the others except me, they had gotten off death row the year before and had established themselves in general population. Outlaw had earned the distinction of being a fearless fighter. Daryl, a loud but responsible-minded individual, was a popular leader and athlete.

  They assured me that I had little to fear.

  “These dog-breath motherfuckers not crazy,” Daryl said. “They ain’t challenging nobody coming off death row, not with the kind of charge you’re carrying. They know who you are, and they ain’t gonna fuck with you—not unless you get to messing with galboys or dope, or you let these fools think you’re weak. But you not gonna do any of that. You got what you prayed for—a second chance. You don’t want to blow it by getting caught up in all the dumb shit going on around here.”

  “Dumb shit” hardly covered what was going on at Angola, which was in turmoil on every front. In an effort to stave off a federal court order after prisoners murdered security officer Brent Miller in 1972, corrections officials and inmate representatives negotiated changes in policies and procedures, in sessions mediated by the U.S. Department of Justice, to improve conditions at Angola. The Department of Corrections agreed to improve medical care and to allow inmates to marry their outside girlfriends and wear long hair and beards. They also implemented a host of other quality-of-life changes, many opposed by security: They agreed to remove restrictions on inmates’ correspondence, magazines, and literature; to install unmonitored “collect” phones for inmates to use; and to allow full media access to the prison, its inmates, and its employees. Mail between prisoners and the media was granted confidential status, the same as legal mail—meaning the inmate could seal the envelope himself and authorities could not read its contents—which was, to my knowledge, unprecedented in any American prison. Most significantly, the disciplinary system—the foundation upon which prison security, order, and stability rests—was changed. Whereas historically inmates had been locked up and punished at the whim of authorities, with no appeal, under the new system, rules would govern lockdown, the disciplinary process, and punishment, and inmates were given meaningful appeals.

  Corrections director Hunt ordered an end to the racial segregation of inmates in housing, jobs, visiting, and reh
abilitative programs. She banned the word “nigger” from the everyday language of prison management and decreed that blacks had to be permitted to join the prison workforce. That was apparently too much for security warden Hayden Dees, who resigned.

  Workers who lived with their families in a residential section of Angola called B-Line—so named because it was built adjacent to Camp B, now defunct—formed the backbone of the security force and power structure that for generations had ruled the prison; they regarded the changes as a repudiation of them and a diminution of their authority vis-à-vis the prisoners. As if that weren’t bad enough, Warden Henderson had succeeded in getting money from the state to hire three hundred new guards to replace the army of gun-toting inmate khaki-backs, which introduced a new element into the struggle for power and control of the prison. Many of the old guard, alienated and feeling threatened by the changes, abandoned the personal responsibility they had formerly taken for prison affairs, opting to “let the prison go to hell” and just collect their paychecks. They were certain the prison situation would get so bad that the governor would ultimately oust Hunt and restore power to the old guard. The new guards, who got on-the-job training and, if lucky, guidance from responsible inmates, had no stake in the old ways of doing things and were mostly open to change. The personnel, like the inmates, formed factions vying for power. Angola was a prison at war.

  Daryl, despite the assurance he gave me that I would not need a weapon, owned one himself. So I followed suit, ordering a custom-made knife from an inmate who worked in the tag plant, where they turned out license plates, street signs, and other items made of metal. My knife was the length of my forearm, and I fashioned a sheath to strap it on under my sleeve, which allowed me to appear to be unarmed, unlike many inmates who wore long coats to conceal (and thereby announce) their weapons even in the summer heat. Like others, I armed myself only when there was the prospect of danger, but followed the Angola inmates’ credo: I’d rather be caught by security with a weapon than by my enemy without one.