Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  Though Cain loved attention, he didn’t fancy sharing the limelight. Shortly after he had become warden, Baton Rouge’s WBRZ-TV featured the plight of Nicholas Carter, a local fourteen-year-old boy who would die without a bone-marrow transplant. I phoned reporter Margaret Lawhon, whose televised appeals had gotten a dismal response from Baton Rouge’s black community, the youth’s best hope for a suitable donor. I told her that Norris Henderson and I wanted to try to find a donor among Angola’s five thousand predominantly black prisoners. I worked with Margaret, the medical personnel, and prison authorities while Norris recruited about fifty inmate leaders to help. Margaret got a local riverboat casino to donate $5,000 to cover the cost of bone-marrow testing of the inmates and suggested that Cain and Norris go to Baton Rouge to jointly accept the check on TV. Cain agreed, and Norris waited for him in the Angolite office at the appointed time, only to watch the warden accept the check on TV by himself.

  Cain had a flair for endearing himself to people and making them feel like old friends. His passion in life was politics and the pursuit of power, and, I think, acceptance. To that end he became acquainted with all manner of people—rich, poor, classy, even outlaw motorcyclists.

  As leader of a group of wardens of satellite facilities, he had persuaded gubernatorial candidate Edwin Edwards that they could deliver the 1991 vote of the prison employees—in exchange for the appointment of Richard Stalder, Cain’s former deputy warden, as corrections chief. Intelligent, well educated, and personable, Stalder was a repressive administrator and heartless bureaucrat. Given to control and censorship, he was no fan of The Angolite. After Edwards won, Stalder took office in 1992, and he let us know that he was displeased that we had never published anything favorable about the American Correctional Association (ACA), whose standards he intended to employ as a way to wrest control of the state’s prisons from federal judge Frank Polozola’s oversight. Court supervision pretty much guaranteed that he got what he wanted from the legislature, but he had plans for the prison system and didn’t want the federal courts telling him what to do.

  I didn’t have a high opinion of the ACA. Phelps had told me it was “about building bureaucracies, covering their asses against liability, and managing prisons with paper and pen …and there’s no evidence that their way is better than ours.” In fact, the worst massacre in modern times was in an ACA prison in New Mexico. And in another ACA facility, in Lucasville, Ohio, a riot had recently taken place.

  As long as Whitley was warden, we didn’t have to worry about Stalder. But Cain was his political benefactor and seemingly bulletproof, despite having arrived at Angola with a reputation for shady dealings. The Baton Rouge Advocate had just written about questionable dealings involving a chicken-processing operation that used inmate labor at his previous prison. Scandals and rumors of corruption would dog Cain more than any warden in Angola’s history.

  Cain was about power, control, and money. His political power would enable him, as warden, to bring in unprecedented funds from the legislature, where his brother was a senator. If any reason could be found to build, repair, or replace something at Angola, money was designated for it.

  Cain was like a king, a sole ruler. His favorite analogy was, “I’m like the father, and y’all are like my children.” He enjoyed being a dictator and regarded himself as a benevolent one. His subordinates loathed his going into the inmate population, because if a prisoner complained or asked him about anything, he’d order it corrected instantly. Disciplinary actions were undone on the spot, as were job assignments. He wanted to be liked, and prisoners knew that.

  He could also be a bully—harsh, unfair, vindictive. Subordinates who questioned his orders suffered instant demotions and transfers. Despite his spontaneous generosity to individual inmates, his idea of managing prisoners was to punish everyone for the act of one. That, he explained, was the way to “make everyone his ‘brother’s keeper.’”

  The first significant moment that defined my relationship with Cain came one night shortly after he became warden. He took me for a ride in his Chevy Suburban out along the lonely levee that protects Angola from Mississippi River floodwaters. He wanted me to tell him who among the ranking employees were his friends and who were his enemies. I told him I wasn’t a snitch. He wasn’t pleased.

  Matters didn’t improve when I rejected his religious entreaties. A number of employees told me he wanted to bring me “to Jesus,” because it would be a sensational coup for him. Once, when there was a big revival at Angola with media in attendance, Cain buttonholed me and said, “Come on, Wilbert. Come into the service with me,” to which I replied, “No thanks, Warden.” I knew he just wanted to exploit me, and he knew I knew.

  The new editor of The Angolite introduced Cain to readers as “The Christian Warden,” which was how he wanted to be seen. Under his tutelage, religion and moral transformation were to be the cornerstones of Angola’s penal philosophy. Indeed, his wife was one of a group of visiting religionists teaching the Bible to some inmates at the start of his administration. After Cain was caught having sex with his female assistant, his wife was never again seen at the prison.

  Cain, however, wouldn’t let a little immorality get in the way of making Angola the focal point of an unparalleled religious crusade. He pressured inmates to participate and forced their organizations to pony up money to support it. He acquired a dubious degree from an unaccredited Bible college in Shreveport, and threw open the prison gates to churches, evangelists, and their ministries. Eager for a toehold and, dare I say, their own legitimacy as saviors of the wretched, they embraced him with evangelical fervor, singing his praises.

  When Cain arrived at Angola, he assured us and the outside media that he wanted The Angolite to continue without censorship. “The magazine contributes so much to the prison’s stability and security,” he told the Baton Rouge Advocate. “I support what they’re doing and I want them to keep doing the same job.” We quickly learned that there was a wide chasm between what he said and what he did.

  First, he prohibited prison employees from talking to the news media, including The Angolite, without prior permission. All information had to come directly from Cain or his office. The reason for this, we were told, was to ensure the accuracy of information, not to censor it. But, of course, this gradually strangled our ability to gather information independently.

  All Angolite phone calls to people outside the prison could now be approved only by Deputy Warden Sheryl Ranatza, who was placed in charge of The Angolite and all media matters, the daily management of which she left to her too-young assistant, Cathy Jett. A recent criminal justice graduate, Jett was inexperienced, trusted no one, and was dedicated to covering her ass and getting favorable publicity for Cain. She could not be reasoned with. Cain’s administration was concerned only with outward appearances.

  The Angolite’s fate was made even more precarious because of another scandal involving Cain. In October 1995, William Kissinger, a trusty who worked as an inmate lawyer, wrote a letter to federal health officials about a canned-milk and canned-tomato operation Cain was running at Angola in which inmates would scrub the rust off outdated cans and relabel them for use on the open market. When Cain found out about the letter, he had Kissinger thrown in the Dungeon, transferred from his job in the law library to fieldwork on the farm lines, and moved from his trusty dormitory to one on “the wild side” where non-trusties lived. The matter ended up in federal court, where a judge told Cain not to harass the whistleblower. The can-relabeling plant was shut down, but the whole prison got the message that Cain would not tolerate anything negative being said about Angola, even if it was true.

  Michael Glover was shaken by the Kissinger incident and believed The Angolite would be shut down. I didn’t think so, but we all recognized that we were reaching the point where we would no longer be able to do investigative exposés, the gold standard in journalism. Because of the Kissinger incident, everyone was reluctant to talk, even off the record. I felt that
The Angolite could still serve our constituency well by doing whatever reporting we could, and analyzing things for them, while educating the outside world about life inside prison. I reminded the staff that the magazine had gone through rough times between 1981 and 1983, and we had survived by changing. We would do so again.

  The end of 1995 brought more depressing news. Republican Mike Foster, who promised to end clemency for anyone convicted of a violent crime regardless of rehabilitation or the amount of time served, was elected governor. His ascension to power was a near-fatal blow to hope at Angola.

  Foster reappointed Stalder, perpetuating the conversion of the corrections system into a self-serving political and money machine. Here’s how it worked.

  Louisiana had the nation’s largest backlog of prisoners being held in local jails because of lack of space in the state penal system. Since 1992, Stalder had been partnering with sheriffs—the most powerful political figures at the local level—to house state prisoners in their jails rather than build more state prisons. The effect of this was to merge the two systems into a vast inmate-warehousing jail complex that would funnel huge amounts of state dollars to sheriffs.

  Local jails were lucrative power centers for local sheriffs, who generally could not get taxpayers to fund new jails. Stalder said he would “house forty percent of the capacity” of any new local jail with state inmates. That state money would allow sheriffs to borrow the rest. “This was how, in fourteen locations, new jails have been built,” Stalder told us proudly after his first four years in office, adding, “There are ninety-five local facilities in which we house state inmates.”

  Stalder and Cain were thus creating their own prisoner-for-profit industry. Local facilities operated at minimal expense, leaving inmates devoid of virtually all health services, legal aid from trained inmate counsel substitutes, and educational, recreational, and work opportunities available in state prisons. The state paid the jailers up to ten times the rate paid by the local parish for a prisoner. The substantial profit paid for the new jail. The more jails there were, the more jobs the sheriffs had available to fill, which increased their political manpower and their chances for reelection. New or expanded jails also meant a greater need for private contractors to provide a host of services, including telephones for inmates, and clothing, cigarettes, and snacks sold in the jail commissary. The contracts were worth big money, and the bid requirements could be tailored to effectively eliminate all bidders but one, resulting in a grateful contractor at reelection time. Once local officials became dependent upon the state-inmate funding stream, they were locked into the Cain/Stalder power network, because Stalder had the power to withdraw inmates for almost any reason and, if he did, the affected sheriff would lose the state income he now relied on as well as the political benefits that flowed from it.

  As architect of this expanded system, Stalder was caretaker for the political and moneyed interests feeding off the now-fattened corrections tit. Those special interests transformed the corrections department from what had historically been the weakest state agency into a statewide political power base that would act to enlarge the penal system and keep Stalder and his patron, Cain, in control longer than anyone in the system’s history. And it was an industry dedicated to physical expansion and increased political power, which meant there was no incentive to release inmates—the longer an inmate was incarcerated, the more bloated the prison population became, the more facilities were needed, and the greater the profits and political dependency of the local officials. Stalder’s administration promoted incarceration by encouraging guards to increase the number of disciplinary citations, which hampered early release. The pardon and parole boards, now staffed with Foster appointees, became stingier in granting freedom, and formulated policies that reimprisoned probationers and parolees for mere technical violations. Needless to say, Louisiana quickly became the nation’s number one incarceration state during Stalder’s tenure.

  In 1991, The Angolite had discovered and exposed the state legislature’s quiet, hitherto-unreported passage of a rule that gave all state prisoners one year to challenge their convictions in state habeas corpus proceedings or be forever barred from doing so. The overwhelming number of inmates were unable to do so because they had no lawyers or resources. That law, along with Stalder’s ascension to power, essentially extended the imprisonment of most state prisoners and pretty much buried the lifers and long-termers of Angola. Cain publicly pronounced that more than 85 percent of those imprisoned at Angola would die there.

  Defending prisoners’ rights had by this time come to be seen as disrespect for crime victims. The only fighters left standing in the prison reform movement were death penalty opponents, whose main aim was to substitute no-parole life sentences for capital punishment. Prison conditions, prisoners’ rights or welfare, and clemency were not part of their agenda. Amid this growing desert of indifference, The Angolite was essentially the only voice Angola prisoners had, and it was the target of a gradual muzzling.

  At this juncture, we prisoners knew we had to look out for ourselves as never before. Because I had a half-formed idea of funding a quasi-welfare program for inmates, I was elected president of the bankrupt Pardon Finance Board, the oldest of the prison’s thirty-plus inmate organizations. It was renamed the Human Relations Club and changed its philosophy and direction. We acquired a franchise for the club to sell Angola Prison Rodeo souvenir T-shirts to inmates and tourists to raise revenue. I recruited the civic-minded Checo Yancy to become my vice president, assuring him that he could pursue all the good community goals that he wanted to. Since I was involved in films and radio, I needed him to steer the club in its new direction and to keep the books, sparing me the day-to-day management.

  Our club teamed up with Norris Henderson’s Angola Special Civics Project to maintain the prison’s cemetery. We wanted to take over the handling of prison funerals. During the filming of “In for Life,” dying inmates had complained that the chaplains didn’t even visit them in the prison hospital, and expressed resentment at those chaplains presiding over their burial. I, along with several other leaders, asked Cain to allow us to create and handle a funeral ritual in which inmates would bury their own, with inmate preachers presiding rather than the chaplains. Cain agreed and assigned two inmate carpenters to make wooden caskets to replace the cheap pressed-cardboard coffins the prison had been buying. He assigned another crew of inmates to build an old-time funeral carriage that, when completed, was towed by big, beautiful Percheron horses. The Special Civics Project and Human Relations Club provided the manpower and footed the bill for all other funeral improvements.

  We looked for ways to expand and fund our inmate-helping-inmate effort. A number of inmate organizations ran food concessions in the visiting room, selling coffee, donuts, homemade pizza, and barbecue to raise money. Some of the religious inmate organizations had been visiting men in the hospital and bringing them toiletries and books. We in turn got the clubs with food concessions to agree to give terminal patients any food they requested free of charge. The Human Relations Club offered to pay the cost of bus transportation for any terminal patient’s relative to visit. Later, Cain would order Dwayne McFatter to create for inmates what turned out to be a nationally recognized award-winning hospice program.

  To encourage self-education, the Human Relations Club began to reward the top inmate tutors and students in both the prison’s limited academic and vocational programs by allowing them to be guests at our club’s monthly socials, where they could mingle with outside guests, listen to music, eat well, and possibly win a door prize bag of food, toiletries, and other items not sold in the prison commissary.

  Since most of the elderly inmates just sat around the dorms with nothing to do, the Human Relations Club created a monthly senior citizens’ night, at which hundreds of the prison’s elderly could congregate, be served a good meal different from their normal prison fare, play bingo for prizes, watch a movie, and socialize with their peers at our exp
ense. It quickly became the most attended activity in the prison. We’d give them free tobacco, coffee, gloves, caps. With Cain’s approval, we created an annual long-termers’ day to bring together all those imprisoned more than twenty-five years for a day of good food, entertainment, and an opportunity to visit with free men and women. Our first year, singer Aaron Neville headlined the list of entertainers, and outside churches and groups volunteered their services.

  The Human Relations Club quickly became the most talked-about organization in Angola, because we gave away our profits to the inmate population as quickly as we made them, a first in the prison. Prison employees who liked what we were doing volunteered their assistance, working without pay on their days off to help us stage events. As we had anticipated, other inmate organizations, not to be outdone or embarrassed, followed our lead with charitable endeavors. Checo often joked that I wanted to put a lot of programs in place in case I didn’t get out of prison. There might have been some truth in that, but I took enormous satisfaction in being able to improve the lives of those around me and see the difference in their faces. Cain supported all these endeavors.

  We were very pleased when, on January 10, 1996, seventy-eight-year-old Moreese “Pop” Bickham was released after thirty-eight years at Angola. We filmed it for ABC-TV’s Nightline. The key to his freedom had been starring in “Tossing Away the Keys,” the radio documentary that Ron Wikberg and I coproduced with Dave Isay in 1990. Dave had promised Pop he would get him out, and he and New York lawyer Michael Alcamo had finally pulled it off. Edwin Edwards had commuted Pop’s life sentence as he was leaving office the year before. Cain hosted a small reception at the ranch house—a facility used for entertaining guests at Angola—where we all waited for midnight, when Cain personally took Pop, Angola’s third-longest-confined prisoner, through the prison gate. Pop, who had been ordained a Methodist minister while in prison, knelt and kissed the ground he had longed for years to walk on.