Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  After the third issue of The Lifer, prison officials shut us down, saying our funds were beyond their ability to audit and regulate, held as they were in a bank by the ACLU; the move only increased my support from black inmates. In the autumn of 1974, I queried Gulf South Publishing Corporation, which owned and operated a chain of black newspapers in Louisiana and Mississippi, about writing a weekly column on prison life for them, and they agreed. I intended “The Jungle,” which is what I called the column, to be different from the usual wail of personal pain or the bitter bar-rattling rage at the system that had historically come out of prisons. I wanted it to be reportorial and, to the extent possible, nonjudgmental. I strove to convey a wider perspective on prison issues than was usually expressed by either prisoners or officials. One of my earliest columns was an insider’s analysis of the internal prison economy and the correlation between the degree of material deprivation suffered by inmates and the degree of violence within the prison, an observation I first made in the Baton Rouge jail, which was reinforced when I entered the general population in Angola. It was a piece that could not have been done by an outside journalist. It reinforced my belief that I could make a significant contribution.

  In preparing the columns, I found facts and statistics to expose racial and class inequities in the criminal justice system—from the staffing of prisons to disparities in sentences, clemencies, and executions. I wrote about the problems of being black in a white-ruled prison. The administration was sometimes embarrassed by things I reported—lack of soap in a prison that produced it, little old ladies delivering cases of toilet tissue to the prison gate in response to my reported shortage of it—and why prison officials stood for it as long as they did, I don’t know. It was probably because it had never been done before, so they had no policy on it, and because few Angola officials read black weeklies.

  In November 1974, however, Deputy Warden Hoyle and Assistant Warden William Kerr learned I had written a column criticizing the annual prison rodeo as exploiting the inmates for the amusement of outsiders, likening it to the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome that used slaves for the entertainment of the masses. Hoyle and Kerr ordered that I be removed from general population and locked up in a solitary disciplinary cell known as the Dungeon. (Warden Henderson was out of state.) A dumbfounded Major Richard Wall, the leader of the “new guard,” appeared at my office door expressing disbelief at what he had been ordered to do. I had been charged with being a threat to the security of the institution, specifically for “stirring racial animosities and instigating insurrection.” The newspaper chain that carried my column immediately published a front-page demand that corrections officials explain why their “correspondent” was in disciplinary lockdown. Black politicians and civil rights groups from Baton Rouge and New Orleans also protested. Prison officials responded that I had been locked up to protect me from inmates who didn’t like my criticism of the rodeo. Eight hundred Main Prison inmates then responded with a petition guaranteeing my safety, resulting in my release from the Dungeon.

  I had won a stunning victory over censorship. I emerged from the Dungeon a hero, my image as a fighter reinforced by the administration’s retaliation. But I was in no mood for celebration. While I was in the Dungeon, word reached me that my old friend Ora Lee had died of a heart attack. I was crushed. I also felt guilty, because Ora Lee, from whom I’d gained so much, had asked only one thing of me—that I write a column about him to help in his struggle to regain his freedom—and I hadn’t done it. I had promised I would, but other things kept getting in the way. Distraught, I got an inmate to smuggle paper and pencil to me in the Dungeon, and I sat down to write the long-promised column, paying tribute to an unlikely teacher who, to the world at large, was nothing more than a criminal:

  He taught me self-reliance by being self-reliant; strength, by being strong; courage, by being courageous; and to not complain or cry about the things I couldn’t change merely by embarrassing me with his own lack of tears and complaints. He was a poor man even by prison standards. He owned one pair of shoes, a change of clothes, and an old coat that was useless against the cold. Abandoned by the world, he had no source of income. He could have easily secured money if he really wanted to; he was intelligent and knew every trick to exploiting others, but he refused to utilize this knowledge because it conflicted with his religious beliefs…. There may have been times that he was scared, but I never knew it. And the knowledge that he was there, like the Rock of Gibraltar, somehow made the going a little easier, made me feel that there was no challenge that I couldn’t stand up to, no obstacles I couldn’t overcome, because he believed in me and I’d remember him saying, “A man can do anything he puts his mind to.” And I knew he was right. How many men are to be found who could lose half of their hand in a grinder as he did and not even cry out, just weep silently? And in a place full of danger, tragedies and bitterness, how many men could retain their sense of humor, greeting each new day with a smile? He permitted nothing to defeat him.*

  When I was released from the Dungeon, I learned that my lockup had been followed by a security search of the office I shared with my friend Robert Jackson, which revealed photos of a female security guard and romantic letters she had sent him. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for such a relationship to take root in the fertile soil of love-starved males competing to make the female employees feel like the most desirable of women. And when staffers rubbed shoulders with convicts day in and day out, they often came to see the inmates’ humanity with fresh eyes. Still, in an us-against-them world, such relationships were viewed as traitorous by the other employees and were forbidden; a guard under the emotional sway of an inmate could aid him in an attempted escape or smuggle in contraband. Robert was locked up in a disciplinary cell, the female guard was forced to resign, and I lost my office.

  Warden Henderson visited me shortly thereafter to tell me he wasn’t pleased with what Hoyle and Kerr had done. He assured me that it would not happen again, and told me that I was free to write for outside publications. Exhilarated, I began trying to freelance. A couple of small alternative newspapers published me, but the mainstream media still were not interested in reports about prison life, even though Angola was seen by many as the bloodiest prison in the country.

  From 1972 to 1975, 67 prisoners were stabbed to death in Angola, and more than 350 others were seriously injured from knife wounds. The violence affected one of every ten prisoners, not counting those injured in fistfights or beatings with blunt objects. Another 42 died of “natural causes” in a world where the average age was twenty-three. With no doctor or nurse on staff, medical services were provided largely by a handful of employee and inmate hospital workers whose expertise had been acquired through on-the-job training. An inmate who had worked as a mortician was the most adept at suturing.

  Upset by the Louisiana legislature’s refusal to address the problems at Angola, U.S. District Court Judge E. Gordon West halted the flow of inmates into Angola on June 10, 1975, placed the prison under the supervision of the court, and ordered Louisiana to make wholesale changes to end the violence and improve conditions there (Williams v. McKeithen). His ruling would have a significant impact on criminal justice in Louisiana because Angola was the heart of the state’s adult penal system.

  In the wake of West’s order, The Shreveport Journal, one of that city’s two daily newspapers, devoted its entire July 2, 1975, issue to the problems of Louisiana’s criminal justice system. I was invited to be the newspaper’s “inside man” with three features: first, a historical overview of Angola and the state’s penal practices; second, an exposé of the problems faced by military veterans behind bars, including reporting on the nation’s first self-help group to aid them, which I helped establish at Angola; third, a depiction of life in prison. The special edition won the paper the American Bar Association’s highest award, the Silver Gavel, for outstanding public service.

  My reporting in a newspaper that white officialdom read and resp
ected had an impact: I was finally offered a job on The Angolite. But by then I enjoyed greater status and credibility as an outsider independent of the institution, so I declined the offer. Also, to leave my position as senior clerk in the classification department—whose officers approved visitors, escorted tours, and determined inmate housing and job assignments—meant a real loss of power. It was a position from which I had gradually engineered the placement of my friends and allies into key jobs. The control and influence of the Main Prison that resulted, combined with that accruing from our collective political and organizational activities among the prisoners, had quickly made me, to my own amazement, one of the most influential blacks in Angola.

  One warm day in October 1975, Kelly Ward, the too-young, too-blond, freckled-faced director of classification, told me that Michael Beaubouef, his assistant director, would be taking me to Warden Henderson’s office after lunch.

  I had been reclassified to minimum-security custody, which allowed me to work and travel outside the fenced-in Main Prison complex without an armed escort. As a trusty, I regularly accompanied classification officers when they conducted bus tours of the penitentiary for school, church, and civic groups. The “tourists” almost always asked for printed information about the prison, but there was nothing to give them. The authorities had never bothered to compile a history of Angola or information about prison operations. Sensing opportunity, I requested the warden’s permission to produce and sell a tour guide for my personal profit. I hoped that was the reason for the summons.

  The drive to the administration building was short and uncomfortable. I was always ill at ease around Beaubouef. Though he had earned a college degree, as the son of a prison guard, he had been raised on B-Line in the peculiar prison culture that regarded convicts as just a step above work animals. He seemed friendly and understanding when I helped him with the monthly parole board hearings. After I was thrown in the Dungeon because of my rodeo article, however, he took me to his office for a private man-to-man talk in which he tried to persuade me to stop criticizing the rodeo and the prison. When I said I couldn’t do that, he angrily told me that he no longer wanted me working with him and that he was transferring me to the field. I went to Ward and suggested that Beaubouef’s threatened action would make the administration appear to be continuing a vendetta against me because of my writing. After talking with the warden, Ward assured me that nothing would happen to me. Beaubouef didn’t appreciate being overruled; he refused to speak to me for months.

  Henderson offered me coffee and friendly small talk. A gracious host, he treated prisoners no differently than he did others, which made him quite popular among inmate leaders. He explained that one of the immediate effects of Judge West’s court order was that inmate workers in vital roles at the prison hospital were being replaced by female employees.

  “There are going to be many such changes in the coming months,” he said. “Classification is next. Starting the first of the year, inmate clerks will be phased out.”

  Female guards had always been restricted to working in the visiting room and the guard towers. “Security is not going to let women work in the middle of the Main Prison,” I said. “You know that as well as I do.”

  “I expect there to be problems, but the male security force is going to have to accept the fact that women are going to work there—just as you have to accept it, if I’m to help you,” said Henderson. “I’m interested in what happens to you, as you know. At the moment you have a job you like. Before you lose it and end up in a position that you won’t like, I wanted to let you know what’s about to happen, so you’ll have a chance to try to get another job that you might like.”

  “Thanks, Warden. I appreciate that.”

  “You have anything in mind that you think you might like?”

  I shook my head. “I’d have to take a look around.”

  “Well, if you don’t already have something specific in mind, perhaps you could help me on something and help yourself in the process,” Henderson said. “You’ve made quite a name for yourself as a writer and, to be frank, it’s somewhat embarrassing not to have our best-known writer on the prison paper. Besides, The Angolite has always been white and, with eighty-five percent of the prisoners here being black, that’s not right. It’s never been right. But one of the ugly facts about prison is that you can’t always do what you want to do or what you know is right…” His voice trailed off, his eyes reflective.

  “You’re right, Warden,” Beaubouef injected, speaking for the first time. “I’ve always felt that it was wrong for the paper to be all white when the majority of the inmates here are black. It’s not fair to the black population and it’s not fair to the administration because it gives the public the wrong impression about us, making it appear that we’re racist when we’re not.”

  Beaubouef’s words rang false to me. Henderson’s, I believed. I had found him to be a compassionate man. I figured I was a continuing embarrassment for the administration. The New Orleans Times-Picayune had just published a story on October 5, 1975, “The Word-man of Angola,” comparing me and my writing to Robert Stroud, the legendary Birdman of Alcatraz who taught himself ornithology by studying the birds that flew into his cell. What neither man knew was that a feature about incarcerated veterans was scheduled for publication in the April 1976 edition of Penthouse magazine, my first national forum. I was paid a $1,000, the most money I ever legitimately possessed in my life. I took it as heady affirmation that I could write.

  “That office has got to be integrated; the black population must be represented in it, and you’re the logical person to do it,” Henderson said, his voice forceful.

  “You want me to go to The Angolite,” I said flatly.

  Henderson nodded. “You need a job, and you’d have the best one in the prison. You’d have a typewriter, privacy, and all the time you want to do whatever writing you desire. I can’t imagine a better job for you. And, as editor, you’d be your own boss.”

  “Bill Brown is the editor,” I said.

  “Not if you want the job,” Henderson said.

  With my job in classification ending, becoming editor of The Angolite was the best move I could make. But replacing Brown, the prison’s most visible white inmate, with one of its most visible blacks, troubled me. For the past few years, blacks had been gradually taking over jobs, self-help organizations, rackets, and power previously held by whites. Black inmates outnumbered whites, but there was more unity among whites—and they were better armed, believed even to have guns. Most black leaders did not want a race war, especially when the security force was still almost all white and mostly racist, despite the hiring of seventy-five black guards during the past two years, many of whom had already quit. The total number of guards was only four hundred, divided into three shifts, to oversee two thousand inmates in the Main Prison and another two thousand spread among camps A, H, I, F, RC, death row, and the hospital.

  Brown had support among white prisoners and employees. An abrupt changeover carried the potential to precipitate a larger racial conflict.

  “I’ll take the job, but I don’t want you to move Bill Brown.”

  “Well, it’d be best for you,” Beaubouef said. “You’d be able to pick your own staff and have a free hand to do what you want to do as editor.”

  “The problem with that is, while I can write, I don’t know the mechanics involved in producing The Angolite,” I said, not revealing my real concerns. “Brown will have to show me. But I don’t expect him to be very cooperative once you’ve fired him.”

  “That’s true,” said Henderson.

  “I’d prefer that you simply assign me to The Angolite and leave him in his present position. That’ll allow me to learn the operation through working with him.”

  “Mike, you see to it that he’s assigned,” Henderson said, turning to Beaubouef. “And, Rideau, when you’ve learned the operation, let Mr. Beaubouef know and he’ll move Brown out.” He looked at us, adding, “I d
on’t see any need for us to discuss any of this with anybody else.”

  I returned to the classification department, where I told Ward about my going to The Angolite. He was pleased.

  After work, I joined several friends for the walk to our dorm, listening as they related the news of the day. There had been a bloody fight with machetes in the field that morning. In a second-story toilet in the education department—where only about a hundred students attended basic academic classes in pursuit of a GED or the one college-level course, in drafting, offered there by Louisiana State University—a new inmate had been turned out and marked as a galboy. And at the industrial compound, where inmates fabricated mattresses, license plates, traffic signs, and dentures, a cache of weapons had been discovered by guards, fueling speculation that an armed confrontation was brewing.