“You’re fucking right! You walk in here talking shit, and I’m just supposed to take your word—without checking? I’ve been around this place too long for that,” he said angrily, rising to his feet. “Everyone I talked to, including the warden’s office, says I’m not going anywhere. I don’t know what kind of play you’re trying to pull off, Rideau, but it’s not going to work.”
“I can’t account for what your people told you,” I said evenly, aware that I was unarmed, alone, and outnumbered. “Henderson made it clear to me that he wanted this done low-key. I asked you to keep quiet about it, but you apparently couldn’t.”
“You’re fucking right, buddy!” Brown repeated. “I’m not going to sit back and let you or no-fucking-body else try to fuck me around, not now, not—”
The exchange had gotten out of hand. “I’m not deaf,” I said, cutting him off. “Sorry to have bothered you. I won’t make that mistake again.” I walked out.
I was concerned. Henderson would not appreciate my not keeping the matter confidential, and Brown might instigate violence toward me.
The day I was to have been officially transferred to The Angolite arrived without my being reassigned. An employee forgetting to perform a direct order from the warden was inconceivable. Brown was sure to interpret it as proof that I had been intriguing against him. For the next few tense and watchful days, I did not stray from the ranks of friends. Then I received word that I had been assigned to The Angolite.
Again, I went to see Bill Brown—this time accompanied by several armed friends, who waited outside the door for sounds of trouble.
“Looks like you were right all along,” said Brown. Archer, at the other desk, eyed me with distrust.
“I assume this is my desk,” I said, pointing toward Archer.
“It’s yours, buddy,” Brown said.
Archer picked up a folder and walked out of the room. I sat in the warm chair, lit a cigarette, and looked long at Brown. “Things are changing, as you now know,” I said. “We can work together to make this easy for both of us, or we can make it difficult for each other. We’ve both got a lot to lose—you more than me because you’re hoping to make parole in a few months. The fact that I came to try to talk to you before tells you that I’m willing to cooperate. But that has to be a two-way street, or none at all.”
“There won’t be any problems.”
“Then you’re the editor,” I said. “I’m your associate, and that’s all anyone needs to know.”
Brown accommodated the transition. We developed a good rapport in the office, and he accompanied me to the dining hall, the yard, and various club meetings, introducing me to whites as his friend, allowing everyone to see the formerly competing editors working together. He taught me everything there was to know about The Angolite and gradually got rid of his staffers so I could pick my own. Then he lost all interest in the magazine, leaving the office pretty much to me while he attended cooking school in preparation for his parole or made Jaycee drug prevention speaking trips around the state.
In the past, The Angolite had been hastily thrown together and published whenever its staff got around to it, so I felt no pressure to produce a magazine as long as Brown was the editor. The Angolite was free to report on prison policies but not to be critical of them or to investigate the causes of violence or despair at Angola. I, on the other hand, was free from censorship, so I concentrated on proposing articles to national magazines.
Meanwhile, the violence at Angola continued to escalate. Stabbings rose from 52 in 1972 to 160 in 1974, killings from 8 to 17; 1975 was already the most violent year in modern history, and it wasn’t over yet. Blood stained the Walk virtually every day. Oddly, it wasn’t the violence itself that affected most prisoners, because with some exceptions—rape, extortion, strong-arming—it was targeted at a specific person for a specific reason. Most inmates did not engage in behavior that would put them at risk, so we did not feel personally threatened by it. What did affect us all, though, was the official response to violence: shakedowns, in which security searched an inmate’s body, housing, or work area for weapons or other contraband, or new policies that interfered with our mobility and daily life.
The rumor spread that Henderson would leave and federal penal experts would take over the prison as they had during the 1950s in response to the national scandal following the incident when thirty-one inmates slashed their Achilles tendons. Especially disturbing was the talk that a hard-nosed warden would be coming to wrest control of the prison from the inmates and give it back to the prison employees. The Louisiana legislature, which had consistently refused to appropriate a sufficient sum to operate the prison, had just authorized more than $22 million to hire additional staff and purchase equipment to bring Angola into compliance with a federal court order to curb the violence.
There was a growing consensus among the more responsible inmate leaders that if we hoped to maintain the gains we had won, we had to curb the bloodletting. Even our contact visiting program, which allowed us to visit at small tables in a large cafeteria, was at risk; some security officials wanted to make us visit through a screen or glass. With the cooperation of about thirty club leaders, we took the message to their membership meetings, telling them of the coming crackdown and educating them on what we stood to lose in terms of the quality of our lives. Those involved in activities that fomented violence were warned that unless they immediately became model prisoners, they could expect their enemies to snitch them out.
Not long after I’d settled into my new job, Warden Henderson came to the Main Prison and met with me in the parole board room. He told me he was indeed leaving for Tennessee. He inquired about my efforts to get out of prison. He told me that he had taken notice of my self-education and development as a writer and had read my published writings. “Apart from doing well for yourself, you’ve worked to help make this prison a better place for the inmate population,” he said.
“I’ve got a mission,” I said. “The biggest obstacle to meaningful reform is the popular misconceptions about criminals and society’s misguided efforts to cope with them. Since I’ve got to be here, I felt I could do a little good by clarifying a lot of that.”
“You’ve done that, but there comes a time when you need to be a little bit selfish and concentrate on getting out of this place,” he said. “You don’t belong here.”
Louisiana had ratified a new constitution in 1974, and with it came a new system of pardons that eliminated the review by the attorney general, lieutenant governor, and the inmate’s sentencing judge. The 10–6 release mechanism had been suspended pending the creation of a new five-member pardon board of “professionals,” all appointed by the governor, to review applications and recommend action. The ultimate power to grant or reject commutations of sentences lay solely with the governor, who, like the board, was bound by no criteria and rules. Henderson advised me to seek the services of Camille Gravel, executive counsel to the governor and one of the state’s most influential lawyers. He also informed me that he intended to recommend my release to the pardon board and guarantee me employment and housing in Tennessee, where he was going to head that state’s corrections system.
I filed an application to the board for a commutation of my sentence. In preparation for the hearing, Classification Officer Mike Schilling created an official profile of me, and my former supervisor, Kelly Ward, mailed copies of my published works to several journalism schools around the nation, requesting a professional evaluation of my writing ability. Professor William E. Porter of the University of Michigan’s Department of Journalism said, “I’ve seen a certain amount of writing from prisons and I suspect he’s the best I’ve ever seen.” Acting dean David Littlejohn at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “Though he is evidently a man of strong convictions, he is no mere propagandist. He seems imbued by an obligation to be true to the facts—the realities—of whatever he writes about. This is a prime attribute of a real journalist.” All the responses were
similarly positive. I was both gratified and humbled by them, and I hoped they would show the pardon board that I had spent my years in prison wisely preparing for a successful return to society.
As we approached year’s end, The Angolite, for all practical purposes, had been shelved. Brown was preparing for his upcoming parole hearing, and I for my pardon board hearing. The head of the NAACP in Lake Charles, Florce Floyd, had checked with Frank Salter, who assured him, as he had Freeman Lavergne before, that he would not oppose my release through executive clemency. Since I was a model prisoner, had been confined almost fifteen years—far longer than the 10-6 life sentence—and had Henderson’s personal recommendation and guarantee of housing and employment in Tennessee, my application to the new pardon board was impressive. Not only did I have every reason to expect to get out, but I realized that I needed to get out. When the governor announced that Henderson was leaving and would be replaced by a penologist on loan from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, some guards began gloating. Life was going to be much more difficult at Angola. And who knew what the new warden would think of me?
* I had given my manuscript on the criminal mind, written when I was on death row, to one of my attorneys, James Wood, in 1969, to have it typed and prepared to be submitted
* Excerpted from “The Jungle,” December 8, 1974, Gulf South Publishing Corporation.
5
Mentor
1976
I was typing a letter in the Angolite office on December I, 1975, when there was a knock on the door. A neatly dressed, pleasant-faced white man in his forties walked in, stood in the middle of the room, and looked around. He asked me if I was the editor.
“Bill Brown is the editor, but he isn’t in right now,” I replied.
“You’re Wilbert Rideau, aren’t you?”
I nodded. The man began to pitch me an idea for a story. I cut him off. “You should talk to the editor about that.”
“He’s not here. And I’m talking to you.”
“And I said you should talk to the editor,” I said, turning back to my typewriter.
“What if I told you to do it?” the stranger asked, studying me.
“And you would be?” I asked, with an edge.
The man looked at me curiously. “You don’t know who I am?”
I didn’t.
“What if I told you I’m C. Paul Phelps?”
Holy shit! Phelps was second in command of the state’s penal system. Elayn Hunt, the corrections director, had named him acting warden of Angola until a replacement could be found for Henderson. Phelps was virtually unknown to Angola inmates and personnel. This was his first day on the job.
“That changes things, doesn’t it, sir?” I said. I stood up, thinking I’d probably just lost my job.
“Relax,” he said, taking a seat. “I’ve been keeping up with you. Read all your columns in that newspaper and the articles you did for the Shreveport paper.”
“Did you have anything to do with my being locked up last year for the article I wrote about the rodeo?”
“No. The first I knew of it was when I read the headlines on the front page of the paper you were writing for. No, I’ve followed your writings because I like the things you say. You have a pretty good grasp of what prison is all about, and you’ve said things that need saying. You got locked up because some people don’t want you writing anything negative about Angola. But you knew that before you wrote your column, I’m sure. The fact that you wrote it anyway impresses me.”
I was relieved. “Warden, as I see it,” I said, “the biggest problem out there is that the general public and those with the power to change things are seriously misinformed about what prison life is all about, thanks to the bullshit they’ve been fed by prison administrators, convicts, reform activists, and movie producers. Too many people role-play, have something to hide, or are afraid to say anything.”
“You’re pretty close to the truth,” Phelps said. “I was involved in the federal mediation negotiations in 1972 and ’73, and as I sat there every day listening to the testimony, what I was most struck by were the misconceptions about each other that inmates and staff both had. The distrust between them was made worse by the fact that the inmate population is mainly black and the guards have always been white.”
Phelps believed that the inmates’ readiness to think the worst of prison authorities was largely due to administrative secrecy and the entrenched attitude that inmates do not deserve explanations. “If the administration can’t do something—if you don’t have dentures or underwear to give an inmate—what’s wrong with telling him that? He already thinks poorly of you, so what’s the worst that can happen? That he might understand you don’t have it to give, and that you’re not just trying to be mean to him? Hell, that would be a plus.”
“Well, as warden you have the power to change things,” I said. “What do you plan to do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a plan.”
I stared at him. “You’re taking charge of the bloodiest prison in the country, and you don’t know what you’re gonna do?”
“I answered your question truthfully. As you come to know me, you’ll learn that I’m not going to lie to you. That doesn’t mean that you’ll always like what I tell you. But it’s always going to be the truth. And the truth is that I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I don’t know enough about prisons in general and Angola in particular to formulate any plans. I need a little time to educate myself first, find out what’s going on here and what the problems are. Then I’ll be able to be more definite about what I’m going to do.”
I could not believe my ears. This forty-three-year-old warden was unlike any I’d met before. I would come to realize that his friendly, laid-back manner belied the force of his character and an intelligence as penetrating as an X-ray. Although he was only a decade older than me, he was worldly and educated. He was a sociologist with a master’s degree from Louisiana State University in social work, an air force veteran, and a career corrections bureaucrat with no actual prison experience. He had worked ten years in the probation office before being tapped to head the state’s juvenile corrections system in 1967. His background in juvenile corrections, he observed wryly, would be a great help to him at Angola because he already knew many of the inmates by name; this was his way of saying that the state’s juvenile corrections system was ineffective in deterring youthful offenders from becoming adult felons. Unpretentious and mild-mannered, Phelps boldly roamed Angola’s violent world, chatting with inmates and employees. Warned of the danger of his forays, he said, “I’m not going to learn anything sitting on my ass in an office.”
In the prison’s dining hall during the noon meal one day, Phelps stepped in line, got a tray, and came over to the table where I was eating with friends. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.
My friends and I exchanged glances. We knew the whole room was watching. “Not at all,” I said. “Pull up a chair.”
Phelps made small talk and picked at his food while we prisoners hurried through our meal. He asked why everybody was watching us.
My friends laughed. “Chief, free people don’t eat with the inmates in here—neither the warden nor the security officers,” I said. “Inmates are inmates and free people are free people, and they live on different sides of the fence. What you just did, nobody does.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Have I jeopardized you all in some way?”
“It’s kind of late to start worrying about it. You’re through eating?” I asked. He nodded. “Then let’s get out of here.”
Outside the kitchen, my friends headed back to their jobs as Phelps and I made our way through the throngs of prisoners on the walkway. In the Angolite office, Phelps fell into a chair. “I’m sorry if I’ve made things uncomfortable for you as a result of what I did in the dining hall,” he said. “I didn’t see anything wrong with it.”
I stared at him. “Warden, there are certain rules of behavior, certain appea
rances, we’re all expected to observe—both inmates and employees. It doesn’t matter what you think of them. The normal rules of conduct in your world don’t apply here.”
“I don’t know how people live in here, what’s acceptable and what isn’t,” he said. “It’s an entirely new experience for me. We’ve talked about a lot of things during my visits, and the more we talk and come to understand each other, the more that I see that we—you and I—basically want the same things. You tell me you don’t like the corruption, the brutality, and the violence in here. I don’t either, and I want to change it. But to be effective, I need to know what I’m dealing with. Why do you think I come here every day? You’ve been here longer than most of my employees, and you’ve made it your business to know this place and its problems, to understand what makes it tick. I can’t change things overnight, but if you help me understand what needs to be done, I assure you I’ll give it my best shot.”
“If you’re going to be pulling off stunts like you did in the dining hall, I don’t see where you give me much choice,” I said with a smile.
“You have a choice,” Phelps said. “Anytime you get tired of me coming ’round to visit you, for whatever reason, all you have to do is tell me to stop, and I won’t come anymore. But I don’t mind telling you that I enjoy my visits to this office. It’s the only place I can go in the prison where I’m not asked for personal favors.”
Either Phelps was as sincere and uneducated about prison life as he appeared or he was conning me. But I liked the man. I enjoyed our discussions, which ranged beyond prison to life, state politics, and the events of the day. And, to be honest, I knew that Phelps would soon return to his full-time job as deputy director of corrections; being on good terms with him could only help.
We often talked of the need for meaningful communication between inmates and prison authorities, of the need to disseminate information about things that affected inmates. Phelps believed that the single biggest source of inmate hostility toward the administration was rooted in secrecy on how decisions were reached. He thought such secrecy sowed distrust and paranoia among both employees and convicts. Having read my newspaper articles, he had also begun wondering how the inmate press might facilitate meaningful communication.
Wilbert Rideau Page 14