Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

          Wilbert Rideau was released from the Louisiana prison system in January 2005. The famed prison journalist and his supporters promised the world a spectacular autobiography. In Rideau’s orbit of supporters and admirers, a mixture of anticipation and expectation ran high. The freed journalist could really allow his writing talents to soar. The literary world would be in “shock and awe.” It was reported he would command a six-figure advance from one of the many publishing houses ready to bid on the rights of publication. It was awe-inspiring!

            Then, nothing. No book.

            Finally, on February 20, 2007 the Open Society Institute of the George Soros Foundation announced that it had awarded over one million dollars in grants to 18 Soros Justice Fellows the group hailed as “visionary leaders in criminal justice.” Rideau was one of those “visionary” Fellows. He was given a $75,000 grant to “write his autobiography about 44 years spent at the Louisiana State Penitentiary and the politics of race and justice.” The working title of the autobiography was The Truth Shall Set You Free.

            The year before Linda Labranche, Rideau’s wife, was also given a $75,000 grant as a Soros Justice Fellow to study “a quarter-century in the life of inmate-run The Angolite, winner of journalism’s most prestigious awards …” Her study was to “document The Angolite’s operation and content, as well as its impact upon prisoners inside and outside the Louisiana State Penitentiary.” The study period focused on the time Rideau was the magazine’s editor. The grant was given to Labranche through the Medill School of Journalism of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

            Yet another noble literary endeavor.

            Then, nothing. Four years later a Google search does not reveal the publication of any “study” by Labranche about The Angolite. It may still be a “study in progress.”

            As for Rideau’s $75,000 Soros grant, he at least produced his “autobiography” under the title In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2010). It was released on April 27, 2010. New Orleans-based Associated Press reporter Mary Foster gave the memoir its first national review  and her praise for the book was almost teenaged giddy-like. A week later The New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner was, rather reluctantly, forced put the memoir in literary perspective. Although the Times reviewer praised Rideau’s individual accomplishments and excused his terrible crime as a “reckless” act, Garner said much of the second half of the book was “rudderless,” and in comparison to the “atmospheric pressure” of Jack Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast, Rideau’s In The Place of Justice was like a “slow-moving weather system.” Ouch!

            After five years of labor and research by Rideau, a $75,000 subsidy from the Soros Foundation, and Random House’s editors and proofreaders scouring the manuscript, a reasonable person would expect a factually accurate book to be presented for public consumption. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The famed prison journalist’s memoir is littered with not only blatant factual errors but host of factual contradictions which seriously undermine the literary value prominent writers like Elmore Leonard and Richard North Patterson have bestowed upon it.

            For example, on page 91, Rideau wrote about an incident he said occurred in the Main Prison Complex at Angola in the fall of 1974 before he became editor of The Angolite: “When I was released from the Dungeon, I learned that my lockup had been followed by a search of the office I shared with my friend Robert Jackson, which revealed photos of a female security guard and romantic letters she had sent to him. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for such a relationship to take root in the fertile soil of love-starved males competing to make the female employees feel like the most desirable of women. And when staffers rubbed shoulders with convicts day in and day out, they often came to see the inmates’ humanity with fresh eyes. Still, in an us-against-them world, such relationships were viewed as traitorous by the other employees and were forbidden; a guard under the emotional sway of an inmate could aid him in an attempted escape or smuggle in contraband. Robert was locked up in a disciplinary cell, the female guard was forced to resign, and I lost my office.”

            The problem with that episode is that there were no “female security guard(s)” in the Main Prison Complex at the state penitentiary where Rideau and Jackson were assigned in 1974.

             Rideau underscored this very point on page 115 where he described a scene in 1976 involving Angolite supervisor, Peggi Gresham who escorted another female employee to the magazine’s office which was located in the Control Center of the Main Prison Complex: “The following week, Gresham escorted Stan Williams, director of food services for the Louisiana Department of Corrections, and Judy Sims, who headed a training program for inmate culinary workers, to the Angolite office for us to interview. Having Williams come from corrections headquarters to answer questions about his operation was as unique an event as Gresham and Sims being physically in our office. Women were never permitted inside the Main Prison. Prison authorities, all white males, traditionally held that a woman entering a prison compound full of sex-starved men, predominantly black, would inevitably be sexually assaulted, reflecting the historical Southern white belief that black males lusted after white women and could not control their sexual impulses…”

            Which incident  is true?

            Wilbert Rideau has embellished and twisted past events so many times over his career as a prison journalist that he truly did not see the glaring factual contradiction between the two aforementioned episodes while laboring away on his $75,000 “visionary” memoir. He should have stuck with the working title The Truth Shall Set You Free and perhaps the finished product of In The Place of Justice would not be littered with so many factual errors and contradictions.

             Rideau’s “mistakes” may be excused as minor “lapses in memory” but there is no excuse for the lax performance by Random House’s professional proofreaders who should have caught the glaring contradiction about women in the Main Prison Complex in the 1970s: one page which leads the reader to believe that female guards and employees were so prevalent in the Main Prison in 1974 that it was common for them to be romantically involved with inmates while another page leads the reader to believe that in 1976 the “all white male” employees did not even permit women “inside the Main Prison” because they might be “sexually assaulted” by “sex-starved” black inmates.

            Worse than being a “slow-moving weather system,” In The Place of Justice is an embarrassment to the journalism profession. It is a classic “get even” book in which Rideau belittles the character and integrity of all the people he believes “wronged” him during his 44 year incarceration while at the same time promoting himself as a champion of the downtrodden inmate world. The “memoir” actually reveals that Rideau’s reputation as an “award-winning” journalist and convict editor are “faction”—a mix of fiction and fact. He produced some good work and did some good deeds but not nearly enough to warrant the “gravy train” ride the national media gave him toward “journalism” success during the last 25 years of his incarceration.

            Personally, I think Random House should recall In the Place of Justice and contractually bind Rideau to produce The Truth Shall Set You Free—the “autobiography” the publishing house and Soros Foundation paid for.