On October 8, King transferred Frank Blackburn out of Angola and brought Ross Maggio back as warden. Phelps and Maggio now led opposing factions of employees, and Maggio immediately got rid of Blackburn’s top administrators, who were Phelps loyalists. Peggi Gresham was stripped of much of her power.
On his second night back, Maggio came to the Angolite office. “Been hearing all kinds of rumors about y’all,” he said.
“I’m surprised at you, Warden,” I said, “believing prison rumors.”
He didn’t smile. “Heard y’all also been running the prison.”
“About as much as when you were here. People listen to us, just as you did. You know, we only have as much power as people think we have,” I said.
“Well, there’s some people believe you have too much, that The Angolite has gotten out of hand.” He took a seat. “Hell, I could get elected to public office running against The Angolite. There’s some highly placed people want y’all out of business.”
“Are you putting us out of business, Warden?” Billy asked, handing him a Department of Corrections directive to all inmate organizations suspending “any type of newsletter or magazine.”
“Let’s put it this way,” said Maggio. “I’m not gonna be the warden who shut The Angolite down. If they want to put y’all out of business, they are gonna have to do it themselves.”
King moved quickly against us. On October 16, a Department of Corrections official wrote: “I do not feel that it is in the interest of this department or the inmates to publish derogatory information regarding public officials.”
When an inmate was killed while sitting at the kitchen table in Camp H shortly after Maggio’s return, neither employees nor officials would talk to us for fear of offending the new regime. Nonetheless, Maggio told us to continue to operate as we had in the past, that he—not corrections headquarters—would determine how we operated.
When we threatened to alert the national media about what was happening and take the King administration to court over it, Phelps sent a message advising me not to engage the new powers in a war because they were mean-spirited enough to destroy us. He assured me that whatever his faults, Maggio was his own man.
Maggio warned us that he would have “to trim [our] sails a little to pacify some people,” but at least we’d stay in business. Unfortunately, that put an end to a project Phelps had approved for Louisiana Public Broadcasting, in which they were to give us cameras and train us to produce television reports. Our freedom to travel outside the prison ended, and our telephone communications with the outside world were reduced. We were unable to purchase new equipment—typewriters, cameras, tape recorders—and our yearly budget gradually dropped 40 percent even as the spending for other inmate operations increased.
Jodie Bell’s visits with Billy were ended when Maggio learned of them. She then chose to quit her television job rather than give Billy up. Billy was now so stressed that he sometimes found it difficult to keep his anger under control. During one editorial conference, he was so contentious with Maggio, I was afraid the warden might lock him up. After Jodie divorced her husband, she and Billy refused to ask Maggio for permission to wed, as inmates were required to do. Instead, they married by proxy; then, as his wife, she automatically qualified to visit him.
Jodie had convinced me she was a friend, so I was surprised when one day pardon board chairman Sally McKissack came to the prison, alarmed. “Jodie has an agenda, Wilbert, and it’s to get Billy out,” Sally told me. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is the manner in which she’s pursuing it. In her talks with me and other board members about Billy, she deliberately misrepresents facts at your expense. To hear her tell it, Billy is the one who took over the magazine and made it into what it’s become, and you’re just a figurehead. You would do well to be wary of her.”
Sally, whom I had known for about seven years, wanted me out of prison. Her strategy was to push a clemency application through for Billy first; she had enough votes on the board and felt certain she could get Governor Treen, despite his hard-line stance on clemency, to commute Billy’s sentence. Then the board would issue a similar clemency recommendation for me, putting the governor in the position of having to commute my sentence or explain why he granted clemency to the white Angolite editor but not the black one. Sally was convinced that Treen would do that, particularly since he was making a genuine effort to court black voters, which Louisiana Republicans had never done before.
Billy completely surrendered himself to Jodie, who became the driving force in his life. He would echo Jodie’s ideas about what we should or should not do at The Angolite—to the point that I had to remind him frequently that Jodie was not on the staff, nor was she knowledgeable about the world we lived in.
“The Angolite experiment is dead,” Billy declared solemnly one day. “Jodie agrees. The concept of a free press [in prison] can’t and won’t work because the Department of Corrections wants us destroyed, and the only reason we’re not is because of Maggio, who, while saving us, has also killed our operation.”
“We’re not dead,” I said, urging him to keep things in perspective. The Angolite was still functioning at a higher level and with more resources than when Phelps initially freed the magazine from censorship in 1976. I said that no publication perpetually functioned under ideal circumstances. Important and controversial issues could still be addressed, thanks to Maggio. Billy wasn’t convinced.
Louisiana’s prison publications would not fare well during the King regime. Only The Angolite and the Hunt Walk Talk of Hunt Correctional Center survived. Of course, with the flow of information and physical access reduced, we couldn’t do all that we wanted to. At the day-to-day level we functioned as usual, though employees erred on the side of caution by checking with Maggio before giving us an interview or solving a prison problem we brought to their attention. Billy and I redirected some of our energies into freelance writing for state and national publications, and we even produced a column, “From the Inside,” for the Fortune Society of New York.
And we focused on getting out of Angola, which required patience. Because we no longer traveled outside the prison, opportunities to meet new people and advance our cause had been greatly curtailed. Jodie got a high-powered New Orleans attorney, Jack Martzell, to represent Billy before the pardon board, but we were relying primarily upon Sally’s strategy.
One afternoon following Billy’s clemency hearing, Tommy entered the office with a wide smile. He waved a letter and told us the pardon board had recommended that the governor commute his life term to thirty years, making him immediately eligible for parole since he had already served one-third of that term. “You have a letter from the board, too,” he said to Billy, handing him the letter as he left.
Billy tore open the envelope. He looked surprised as he read, then puzzled. “I don’t understand this.” The pardon board had recommended a reduction in his sentence to sixty years, which, if approved by the governor, would make Billy eligible for parole in a few more years, after he had served twenty.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “They’re going backward.” In 1979, a clemency recommendation urged that his sentence be reduced to forty-five years, but Governor Edwards had not approved it. “The only thing that’s different is that I’ve won national awards since then. It’s like I’m being punished for doing more. I’ve been locked up longer, and I’ve accomplished more than Tommy and all these others who’re getting recommendations that will free them right away.” He became distraught. “How am I going to explain this to my wife? Jodie’s been preparing for my release, buying furniture and making a home for us.”
I was surprised. The typical commutation recommended for someone serving a life term was for thirty or thirty-five years, maybe forty. Sally was scheduled to address an inmate organization that evening in Angola, and I suggested he ask her what happened before phoning his wife. As the day wore on, he grew angrier. He saw himself as a victim, discrimin
ated against. There was no reasoning with him.
That evening, Sally explained to him that the board felt a recommendation for a commutation to sixty years was all the current governor would sign for him. Billy stormed away. Sally then turned to me. “Prepare yourself, Wilbert,” she said. “You’ll get a seventy-five-year recommendation, which will parole you out in a few more years.” She saw my disappointment. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but at least you’ll be getting out, just not now.”
A few weeks later, Billy showed me a lawsuit he had filed against the pardon board. In it, he argued that the recommended cut to sixty years was more severe than a life sentence, which traditionally had given an inmate parole consideration after ten years and six months. He also included a list of clemency recommendations for other inmates as a means of comparison. Tommy’s name was among them. He told me that Jodie had “heard through a source” that the governor’s office was investigating the pardon board.
“If that’s true, then your putting all these guys in your lawsuit will put political heat on their recommendations. The governor won’t touch them,” I said.
“I can’t help that,” he replied harshly. “Those are the facts that show I’m being discriminated against. Besides, if I can’t get out, why should they?”
“What are you doing, man?” I asked. “Sally’s plan calls for me to go up next. You could be screwing things up for both of us.”
“And what am I supposed to do? Keep my mouth shut and let ’em fuck over me and my wife? I can’t do that, and I won’t do it. I have a constitutional right to express my grievance and pursue redress. Like Jodie says, if Sally and the governor want to do something for you, they’ll do it regardless of what I do.”
But that’s not how things worked. Sally and fellow board member Louis Jetson, a longtime black supporter, visited me soon afterward to advise me to postpone applying for clemency until some of the hard feelings among the board members had died down.
“Jodie tried to pressure the board to change their decision with threats that she and Billy might commit suicide to embarrass the board,” Sally told me. “And Billy has sued the board, which makes absolutely no sense at all because he doesn’t have a right to anything. Clemency is a gift of mercy.” She paused.
My dream of freedom was dissolving.
“We no longer have the votes,” Jetson said, shaking his head. “Those on the board who were receptive to doing something for you and Sinclair are pissed. We’re hoping to salvage you, but I have to tell you, at this point, it doesn’t look good.”
There was no clemency hearing for me during the four years Dave Treen was governor.
I continued to work alongside Billy, though it wasn’t easy. I swallowed my anger, but my friendship with him was over.
Governor Treen turned out to be so stingy in granting clemency that some of the state’s newspapers charged him with abdicating his responsibilities as governor. By the end of his second year in office, he had granted only nine commutations. When he ran for reelection in 1983, he boasted of having issued only forty clemencies to prisoners as compared with the thousands granted by Edwin Edwards, who was making a bid to become governor for a third time. Treen was executing a callous political strategy, but it fueled hopelessness among the prisoner population. The situation at the prison became so incendiary that Maggio, who had never asked for the release of a prisoner, suggested to Sally that the governor commute the sentences of a couple of deserving lifers to relieve tensions at Angola. The debate over clemency took center stage at the height of the gubernatorial campaign when Edwards’s brother, Nolan, was shot to death by an ex-felon whom Edwards had previously freed. Edwards nonetheless steadfastly maintained that executive clemency was an integral part of Louisiana’s justice system and indicated that if elected he would again grant clemency to deserving persons.
The hope that Edwards might win staved off serious prison disturbances during the latter part of Treen’s administration. Inmate organizations provided resources for the prisoner population to conduct letter-writing campaigns encouraging friends and relatives to vote for Edwards. And, for perhaps the first time in history, the entire inmate population and employee force watched the televised election results. When Edwards was declared the winner by a landslide, cheering by both the keepers and the kept erupted throughout the prison. The seething despair eating away at the Louisiana State Penitentiary was quieted overnight as hope, the balm of the prison world, was restored. Edwards reinforced it by establishing a Forgotten Man Committee to look into the increasing number of long-termers in prison.
Prisoners’ expectations soared when Edwards appointed the state’s first majority-black pardon board. Its chairman, Howard Marsellus, a brash, streetwise high school principal, roared up to Angola on a motorcycle, “bringing hope,” he declared. “There are guys up here who deserve a second chance, and I’m gonna try to see that they get it.” This had special significance to blacks, who constituted 80 percent of the state’s prisoner population.
Marsellus came to personify hope to everyone—except Billy. After shaking hands with Billy during a meeting in our office, Marsellus reached for my hand and introduced himself as “the man who’s gonna get you out of here.”
“What about me?” Billy asked, smiling.
“Those white folks under Treen already took care of you. You got your issue,” he said, referring to Billy’s still viable recommendation for a reduced sentence of sixty years. Marsellus then told Tommy that his thirty-year recommendation was also still good. Looking back at me, he said, “It’s this brother’s turn. And this is the board and the governor who’ll do it.” He instructed me to file a clemency application. “We’ll try to have you out of here for Christmas.”
I fought to contain my exhilaration, and could see Tommy struggling to do the same, because we could see that Billy was ready to explode.
“I’m not accepting that shit he’s talking,” Billy said after Marsellus left. “He’s gonna free y’all, but fuck over me because I’m white? What does he take me for?” He stormed out of the office, slamming the door.
Governor Edwards brought back C. Paul Phelps as secretary of corrections, which meant the return of freedom of expression for inmates and staff throughout the system, and the resurrection of The Angolite to its former status. A few months into Edwards’s term, Ross Maggio retired, and Frank Blackburn returned as Angola warden. Our May/June 1984 issue reflected our restored access to information and officials: I did a major investigative report, “Dying in Prison,” which revealed how terminally ill prisoners at Angola met their end—chained to a hospital bed if they were sent for treatment to one of Louisiana’s charity hospitals—and, for those whose bodies went unclaimed by family or friends, a trip to a local funeral home, where the corpse was placed in a pressed-cardboard box and returned to Angola for burial in a service presided over by the prison chaplain and attended mainly by inmate gravediggers.
I resumed traveling outside the prison for speaking engagements and to pursue stories. On advice from his attorney, Billy declined trips as part of an effort to stay out of the limelight and to distance himself from me in the public mind, since I was high profile. He refused to talk to the media, leaving me to speak for The Angolite and about prisoner issues.
I went around the state talking to at-risk teenagers and young adults on probation about the horrors of prison life. I lectured at schools, universities, and churches, to civic and professional groups, and made numerous appearances on television to talk about prison, including a June 19, 1984, appearance on Nightline; unable to resist the lure of trading views with U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger on national television, Billy joined me.
Once again I had access to the inner sanctum of corrections management. Phelps took me to meetings where I learned that everything about inmates in corrections was tied to dollars, that every day an inmate wasn’t working translated into money lost to Prison Enterprises, which accounted for the constant administrative pres
sure on prison medical authorities to be conservative in issuing work exemptions to inmates because it reduced the available labor pool for agricultural and industrial operations. I also attended regulatory standardization meetings where top officials of every prison met to review practices to achieve system-wide uniformity and end costly duplication. I learned that prison was becoming a vast business, which was a boon to some politicians, who demanded more “law and order,” which meant more arrests, more convictions, longer jail terms, and more jobs and contracts for goods and services they could dole out to supporters.
Where there had been only three state prisons in Louisiana when I became editor of The Angolite in 1976, there were now six, with more on the drawing board and thousands of state prisoners backlogged in local jails around the state. Historically, jails and prisons had to be built with voter approval, but in 1985 Governor Edwards got the legislature to create the Louisiana Correctional Facilities Corporation, which allowed the state to expand and build prisons without public consent. That created a monster with an insatiable appetite for growth. The most basic law of the prison system is that as long as there is a cell, someone will be found to put in it. In Louisiana, the “product” would be primarily black males, while the beneficiaries of this prison industry were almost all white. Phelps began to despair of any meaningful change in the way the state pursued justice. He foresaw that corrections, driven by profit and politics, would ultimately be reduced to simply warehousing people for increasingly longer periods.
If Edwards’s return as governor brought hope to those in the penal system, it did not extend to the condemned. As he was leaving office, Dave Treen had resurrected capital punishment in Louisiana by signing off on the executions of two men. Only a couple of weeks after Edwards moved back into the governor’s mansion, his new pardon board convened at Angola on April 1 for its first full clemency hearing: Elmo Patrick Sonnier received a death sentence in 1977 for the kidnapping and murder, with his brother Eddie, of two St. Martin Parish teenagers (Eddie received a life sentence).
Wilbert Rideau Page 22