Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

          The Angolite, the official inmate publication of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, has been the recipient of some of the nation’s most prestigious journalism awards. Famed prison journalist Wilbert Rideau became its editor in 1975. I was a member of the staff from 1977 to 1986—as a staff writer, associate editor, and finally a co-editor. During that nine-year period, Rideau and I were the individual recipients of 1979 George Polk Award and the 1979 and 1980 ABA Silver Gavel Awards. The magazine, through our joint efforts, received the 1979 Robert F. Kennedy Award and the 1981 Sidney Hillman Award.

            Through this critically acclaimed era, The Angolite was touted as the only “free penal press” in America enjoying unlimited powers to investigate and report about the realities of the world behind bars. I recently read a 2009 Associated Press account about the San Quentin News, the inmate publication of that maximum security California prison. The report cited the growing interest and success in the publication, particularly in the inmate community at the prison. The report made me think back to the early days when the Rideau/Sinclair writing team transformed The Angolite from a publication much like the San Quentin News is today into an internationally respected voice in prison journalism.

            But was The Angolite truly a “free penal press?” (A concept that garnered a $75,000 grant from the Soros Foundation to Rideau’s wife, Dr. Linda Labranche, to produce—a four-year-old project yet to be completed.)

            No. But the concept made a great story, particularly for liberal media giants like The New York Times which became enthralled with the prospect that a black inmate in a southern prison could singlehandedly (if you listen to Rideau’s accounts) establish the nation’s first truly free penal press. Rideau quickly realized that his key to success and acclaim lay with perpetuating that image of an uneducated, deprived black man waging an endless struggle against a racist prison system with the “power of the pen.” Liberal reporters swooned.

            The Angolite beyond a doubt enjoyed more freedom than other prison publications – but there is no such beast as a “free penal press.” We were able to write about issues—sexual violence, suicide, murder, the death penalty—in ways not normally associated with prison publications, and, yes, in that sense The Angolite was unique. But every issue we wrote about in the magazine, in one way or another, served the interests of the prison administration. They wanted the “story out.” That’s why they let us write about them.

            But when we touched on any issue that involved possible official corruption or wrongdoing we were told in no uncertain terms that the issue was “off limits.” In effect, The Angolite’s freedom ended where the prison administration’s nose began. In his memoir, Rideau would have readers believe the prison publication was such a force within the system that it could dictate the state’s methods of execution and reduce a sitting governor and federal judge to sniveling cowards. Bullshit.

            The Angolite was, and remains, a top of the line prison publication. The fact that the publication has survived the Rideau era and continues to produce worthy journalism in a prison setting speaks volumes. But it is not now, nor has it ever been, a “free penal press.” Prison is a violent and corrupt world—even the best of them are afflicted with the daily wrongdoing. There is nothing honest, true or decent about the caged world of prison—not even its penal publications, The Angolite included. A true free penal press would survive in prison about as long as Keith Olbermann’s Countdown would survive on Fox News.

            There’s a saying in Texas, “you leave the dance with who brung ya’.” The Louisiana prison system took Rideau and I to the dance and we did the Texas Two-Step to their music. We all had enough sense to realize that we had a vested interest in promoting the myth of a free penal press. Former Louisiana Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps once asked me why I had not brought the information I had about a corrupt pardons-selling scheme to him instead reporting it to the FBI and I responded: “You would have buried me under one of those cellblocks if I had given it to you.”  There’s no way the corrections secretary would have let me report that corruption in The Angolite, especially with the magazine being knee-deep in it and the corruption going all the way to the Governor’s Office.

            Those who read, and believe, Rideau’s memoir, In the Place of Justice (Random House 2010), will find this post hard to believe. But I ask them: what shocking revelations did the famed prison journalist’s memoir reveal? None. It is poorly written and factually flawed. In a sophomoric way, the memoir intimates that Angola Warden Burl Cain may have once put in place a plot to kill the former editor and that Sister Helen Prejean is a naïve person easily manipulated by prison reform groups. That’s about the best the darling of the The New York Times could produce. It’s so sad. I must stop now. I am about to shed a “tear in my beer.”