Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  “Why am I getting so much attention from the bigwigs?” I asked her. “I mean, I know I’m not their favorite person.”

  “They’re scared of you.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cuz you’re intelligent, and they know they can’t treat you just any kind of way.”

  “Black folks, too?”

  “Oh, no”—she smiled—“all them want your autograph.”

  The head jailer in Calcasieu, Bruce LaFargue, sent for me. About my size, he was ruddy-complexioned and friendly in a professional way. He had taken the job after retiring from Department of Corrections headquarters in Baton Rouge. One of the first things he told me was that he knew and liked Ron Wikberg. I wondered why he told me this, but I knew I couldn’t trust him.

  Placed in a solitary-confinement cell in a section of the jail called Intake, I was to be moved on Monday. I only have to survive solitary for two days. Next to me, separated by a cinder-block wall, was a young, dark-haired white woman whose face looked strained. She had killed her husband and three kids shortly before I arrived. Black trusties sat outside her door to guard against suicide, peeking through a small window at her every few minutes and logging their observations on a time sheet. I nodded off.

  On Saturday, I woke up to grits, biscuits, and scrambled eggs that were totally tasteless. I was permitted out to shower, then returned to my cell, where I read the legal notes I’d made as I waited for George, who arrived with Linda about 1:00 p.m. George was furious because neither he nor Julian could find out what was going on. Linda pointed out to George that Calcasieu consistently refused to recognize him as my attorney, so they never notified him of anything. She showed him that he was left off the court order notification list. George scrutinized the order and saw the name of the judge who signed it: G. Michael Canaday.

  “This is the judge we were informed had already been handpicked before your case had even left federal court,” said George. “Judges are supposed to be selected at random, but somehow the prosecutor got him. They’re playing dirty. They’re rushing this case through and won’t tell us a thing. We can’t even get them to tell us what day they’re going to arraign you.”

  The door to the confidential attorney interview room opened and in walked Sheriff Beth Lundy, a petite brunette with some miles on her who, in another setting, might have been attractive. She introduced herself to George and Linda and assured them that she’d do whatever she could to accommodate our legal needs.

  After she left, George pushed a stack of paper toward me. “These people might try to plant a snitch on you, so be careful of what you say to anyone. Here are some agreement forms for every inmate around you to sign, saying they’re not going to discuss your case with you. That should flush out a snitch.”

  “Do you want us to go pick up your things at Angola?” George asked. I told him no, that if I lost at trial, I’d need them when I went back. George lurched forward in the molded plastic chair. “You’re never going back to that place again,” he said passionately.

  “You don’t know what you’re dealing with out here, George,” I said. “This isn’t just corrupt Louisiana; this is the place that throws its biggest festival every year in honor of the pirate Jean Lafitte, who smuggled contraband slaves into the territory after selling human beings was outlawed. Pay attention to your surroundings, man. You’ve gone backward in time to the 1950s.”

  “Well, trust me,” George said, exuding confidence, “I’ve settled much more difficult cases than this one.”

  Linda and I exchanged a look that said, He doesn’t have a clue.

  They left, Linda for Baton Rouge and George for New York. I was returned to my cell, where I paced the floor. I only have to get through two days of this. Five steps, turn; five steps, turn, endlessly. The last time I was in solitary it was right here, in Calcasieu.

  On Sunday I got a “recreation” reprieve from my cell from a white deputy who wore his prejudice on his face. While I walked briskly, he sat and smoked, watching me. After thirty minutes of the staggering July heat, he was ready to go in. I showered and returned to my cell, pacing and thinking. Someone told me I’d move in the morning.

  The next morning, a young black female officer escorting four trusties pushing a food cart squealed, “Mr. Rideau! Oh, I’ve got to get your autograph before they transfer you.” She slid a slip of paper at me. “I’ve been hearing and reading about you all my life. I admire anybody [who’d] fight that long without giving up.”

  That evening, I learned from a black deputy that I would appear before a judge in the morning who would appoint a lawyer to represent me if I didn’t already have one. I called George at home, who said to tell the judge I was indigent but had counsel.

  As night fell, I was still in solitary, pacing endlessly back and forth. I wondered why I hadn’t been moved. Are they playing a mind game with me? Linda’s words from yesterday’s visit penetrated the panic rising in me: Don’t ever forget who you are. Be true to the best in yourself and they can never break you. Fifteen minutes later my stress was under control.

  At 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday I was taken to “seventy-two-hour court,” a large, plain-looking room across from the attorney interview rooms. It’s meant to resemble a courtroom, but nothing about it suggested the majesty of the law. Some forty pretrial detainees in orange jumpsuits and orange plastic flip-flops sat in molded plastic chairs facing the lieutenant I had met earlier, who was standing at the front explaining that they were not to talk, smoke, or sleep. About a dozen of the detainees were white. I noticed five females in the crowd; they all looked drained of spirit and tired of living. Lawyers sat off to the left, a couple of court secretaries to the right. A video camera and TV were perched behind the bench, where the judge would ordinarily be. This is the trendy video court system adopted across America. The only beneficiary is the judge, who doesn’t have to leave the comfort of his office to come to this special courtroom, which was designed to spare citizens the expense and danger of transporting detainees to the courthouse downtown. The face of Chief Judge Al Gray appeared on the TV screen. As he read off the names of the detainees, they stood and answered the judge’s questions about their ability to hire an attorney. One after another, they declared themselves indigent, to no one’s surprise. If these people had money to pay a lawyer, they’d also have money to post bail, which is available to anyone not charged with a capital offense. So, as a rule, only poor people await their trials in jail. Judge Gray was a broken record, assigning each detainee to be represented by the public defender.

  “I’m indigent, but with counsel,” I announced when called.

  “What does that mean?” Gray asked.

  “It means I’m poor and cannot hire lawyers, but I do have attorneys at present, who’ve been neither hired nor court-appointed and have been fighting my case on principle.”

  Gray instructed deputies to bring me downtown to court at 1:30 that afternoon. A mild-mannered, light-complexioned black man in casual dress followed me into the hallway and introduced himself as Ron Ware, head of the local public defender’s office.

  “You Dennis Ware’s son?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, a smile breaking over a set of perfect white teeth.

  I inquired about his dad, now seventy-eight. He had been a teacher of mine before I dropped out and for years was a staunch supporter, publicly taking on some of my most vocal adversaries to argue that I should be treated the same as other offenders from Calcasieu. I hoped the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree; because I was indigent, the court would automatically assign my case to the public defender, no matter what I said. I asked Ron if he could get my court appearance rescheduled so that George would have time to get back to Lake Charles (he got it switched to the next morning). He said he couldn’t find any conflict of interest among his small staff that would give him the legal right to refuse my case. He expected my defense to cost a lot of money because the age of the case would require massive research into the long-defunct laws
that would govern the trial as well as into the places, people, and evidence connected with the case. The cost would come out of his budget. Ninety-two percent of his budget went to defending capital cases. The rest, he lamented, was totally inadequate for the steady stream of other indigents I saw in “seventy-two-hour court.”

  At noon, a young female officer escorted me to my new quarters, and my relief at leaving solitary vied with apprehension about what lay before me. Mine was a unique placement: Although the jail officials were unwilling to make me a trusty, I was assigned to live in a trusty dormitory with ten detainees. In this way they avoided housing me with the general population, where they thought I could conceivably cause real problems for them; at least that’s what several black deputies said to me.

  My dorm was a split-level room with one wall of windows for the jailers in a glass tower to observe activity inside and three beige walls with blue trim. Intercom speakers in the ceiling provided a means of communication between the inmates and the tower jailer. Metal stairs against one wall led to the upper level, which extended halfway across the room and formed a ceiling over the bottom sleeping area. Upstairs were five double bunks, a shower, and two toilets. The floor crew, who cleaned the jail floors at night, lived there. Below there were six double bunks, one shower, and one toilet. All three toilets sat too close to the bunks on the end of the row, requiring anyone using the commode to improvise “respect” for the bunk man by stretching a bedsheet over a string in front of the toilet.

  Half of the room served as a dayroom furnished with five octagonal steel tables with four round steel seats affixed to each. The seats were too small for men to sit on comfortably, raising the level of frustration in the dorm, which was obviously created by an “expert” jail designer who hadn’t a clue as to what really works in day-to-day jail existence. As with the toilets, inmates improvised, using their pillows to sit on.

  I was given a bottom bunk on the bottom floor, on the opposite end from the toilet and shower area, about four feet from the wall. The only person near me was an old ex-con on the bunk to my immediate right. Two night laundry workers and an orderly also slept on the bottom floor. Two ceiling fans and an industrial fan mounted on the wall above the stairs struggled to cool off the place, but it was a losing proposition. It was stifling, and all the men there wore shorts or drawers.

  Unlike the harsh and barren lockup of forty years earlier, this jail had cable TV, a chest for ice and cold water, reading material, and a fledgling literacy and GED program, as well as a much more tolerant administration. Pay phones were located everywhere for inmates to make collect calls to whomever they wished at usurious rates that included kickbacks to the jail. The commissary offered small radios, cheaply made clothing, seasoning for the food, and a variety of unhealthy snacks, all at rip-off prices. Jail is a captive market where profits are guaranteed by official policy, and it has been my observation that personal friendship and political cronyism figure in who gets awarded the contracts to provide the goods and services to jails and prisons.

  New detainees are stripped of everything upon entering and can have only what they purchase from the commissary. I came with possessions already approved by the penitentiary, so I was told I could keep a couple of T-shirts, shorts, and a pair of socks; anything else, I would have to buy.

  One thing that hadn’t changed in forty years was the age of the jail population. I was the oldest in my dorm. Here, as elsewhere in the state, jail detainees were largely eighteen to twenty-eight years old, black, and poor. They were stunted emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally, their development arrested around age fourteen or fifteen. They were basically adolescents in adult bodies—unsanitary, undisciplined, and noisy. They pretty much raised themselves, shaped by street culture, rap music videos, advertisements, needs, fears, and what little education they acquired in school before losing interest and quitting or getting expelled for behavioral problems. They regard getting arrested, shot at, or jailed as natural experiences to be taken with a shrug of the shoulders. They do not accept responsibility for what happens to them in life. They blame everyone and everything else for their frustrations, anger, and problems. Nowadays, most are crackheads and thieves. My guess is that most of these youngsters never held a job. They are not part of the American economy and exist at the fringes of its society.

  They display adult comprehension and abilities in only a few things. For example, one man I met in my dorm was expert at dope pushing and the economics attached to it, but was largely ignorant of and inept at everything else. He planned on “getting some bitch pregnant” when he got out.

  I asked why, and he looked at me, puzzled. “That’s part of being a man. That’s what you supposed to do, so your name lives on after you dead.”

  Love and a relationship don’t enter the picture, and he had no plans to care for the child.

  “That’s on her,” he said, then laughed. “If she don’t want a baby, she shouldn’t open her legs.”

  There is little respect among these men for females, who are viewed as prey to be conquered and used. Women are commonly referred to as “bitches” or “hoes.” “Niggah” and “dawg” are the terms most frequently used for other people, and they call whites “niggah” as quickly as they do fellow blacks. Their major endeavors in the streets were hanging with the brothers, chasing sex or some form of dope, and trying to make a hustle.

  When I was jailed forty years ago, a substantial percentage of the detainees were unable to read or write and many more did so only with great difficulty. Today’s inmates are better schooled but more stupid. Most are dropouts who travel in marginal orbits with few perceived options in life. They spend their time telling and retelling street experiences, talking about the personalities who populate their small worlds, and playing cards, chess, or dominoes. They neither watch nor read the news. Their TV fare is a diet of sports, violent action movies, The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, Saturday-morning kiddie cartoons, and Discovery Channel documentaries that show violent animal behavior. Some listen endlessly to rap music, their heads bobbing like corks in running water, or dance by themselves in a corner. Others engage in boisterous horseplay or argue over petty things. Their power to reason with others is almost nonexistent, and the loud disputes that often end in threats stem from an inability to explain their point of view to those who don’t understand. Crippled by rap slang and a deficient sense of cause and effect, they simply repeat themselves over and over, getting louder and louder, until one of the frustrated speakers turns to nonparticipants in search of agreement or begins to issue threats, raising his voice to dominate and drown out the point of view he’s unable to win over.

  They wear two or three pairs of underwear, each falling lower, with the third one hanging just below the backside. They wear their pants hanging off their asses, too. None was able to give me a reason for doing so other than it “gangsterfies” them. Understandably, they must constantly pull up their britches.

  It was painful for me to look at these street-raised weeds, these outcasts and misfits. I knew only too well that they do not care about a world that does not value them. This makes them walking time bombs.

  My history made me a living legend in the jail. Returning to Calcasieu after a thirty-year absence, I was at once both a heroic larger-than-life figure and a martyr, generating admiration, sympathy, and respect among many, especially blacks.

  I settled into the dorm and stowed my meager belongings in the footlocker bolted to the head of the bunk. Although I’d given up cigarettes a decade earlier, I brought a couple of cartons of Camels from Angola. My immediate need was for a combination lock, which I bought from Fred Matherne, one of the two white men in the dorm, for two packs.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening listening to the inmates’ problems and their cases. I heard it all—those who claimed they were innocent and had a witness to prove it; those whose warped sense of right and wrong convinced them they were justified in whatever they did; men
who said they should have already been released but weren’t because of bureaucratic foul-ups computing the “good time” credits that shorten sentences. They were all frustrated because their cases were stalled somewhere in the system and they had no one to talk to about it. Desperation tinged their voices as they unloaded their anger and grief.

  Claude “Collie-Boy” LeBlanc, a stocky ex-con in on a drug charge, had been unable to get his records from the clerk of court’s office.

  “Did you see your lawyer?” I asked.

  “Hell, I been here six months and I ain’t seen the bitch yet, and I go to court in less than a week,” another detainee, Eric Alexander, interjected.

  “That’s when you gonna see ’em, when you sentenced,” Claude said.

  “I thought the new sheriff, Beth Lundy, had a free, direct line to the public defender’s office installed,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Eric, “but you can never get past the receptionist.”

  Claude continued: “I have never had a lawyer come to this jail and talk to me. Only seen a lawyer when I went to court. Look, you got a handful of public defenders and they represent everybody in the jail. Their caseload so big till everything here is plea bargains. There’s no fighting here. The DA and the judges know that, at some point, you gonna come around, get tired of sitting here, and accept whatever they offer. That’s the reason they set court dates so far off in the future. These people full of shit, man.”

  The other men said that was their experience, too. Adili Barfield, short and light-complexioned, was charged with probation violation when he was arrested for possession of marijuana and narcotics. “I’ve been here eight months and they haven’t even arraigned me,” he said. “Trial? Hell, people rarely go to arraignment to schedule a trial, and when they do, the trial date is so far off until you’re ready to cop out. But I’m not copping to anything. That would put me in the joint. If I was guilty, that’s one thing, but I’m not guilty, and I’m not pleading guilty.”