RIDEAU SCENES THAT DID NOT HAPPEN
In the Place of Justice (Random House 2010), the memoir of famed prison journalist Wilbert Rideau, is flawed with serious factual errors (which have been documented by this website) and features a host of people/event misrepresentations. The book is also not short on lies, portraying a number of prison scenes which, to an inexperienced eye, are impressive, but which did not happen. Two of these scenes describe how Rideau’s death sentence was a vehicle that gave him “street creds” among fellow inmates. The first scene was set in the parish jail in Baton Rouge in 1964. Rideau had been placed on a tier with “general population” inmates. A kid taunts Rideau as soon as he arrives on the tier with “prison bitch” comments. The head honcho on the tier warned the kid (aptly named “Chicken” by Rideau) that he had better back off the new arrival because he was “from death row” and didn’t have “a fucking thing to lose.”
The next scene in which Rideau’s death sentence was employed to create “street creds” occurred when he arrived at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1973 as a “fresh fish” and was assigned to the “Big Yard”—a notoriously violent place at the time. Rideau was greeted by several former death row inmates who had already established themselves in the prison community as bad dudes not to be messed with (according to Rideau). One of those inmates, Daryl Evans, reportedly told Rideau that he would not encounter any problems in the prison community because the violent inmates “ain’t challenging nobody coming off death row, not with the kind of charge you’re carrying.”
General population inmates, either in jail or prison, did not fear “death row” inmates. To the contrary, they generally held condemned inmates with contempt because of the cold blooded and cowardly nature of most their crimes. The “old school” inmates attached a social stigma to those who raped and killed women, especially those who slit a pleading woman’s throat while she begged for mercy. “I’d pull the switch on the motherfucker myself if I could,” was the prevalent sentiment of most general population towards a crime like the one Rideau committed. His crime did not invoke fear among general population inmates, especially among the hardcore criminal element that controlled the prison at the time.
In fact, Rideau described a scene in the Baton Rouge jail where a 17-year-old black inmate charged with the “rape of a fifty-two-year-old white housewife” was gang-raped by fellow inmates as an expression of their contempt and revulsion for sex offenders. Yet Rideau said one of the inmates who greeted him on the Big Yard and paved the way for his social acceptance was a former death row inmate named Ora Lee Rogers. Rogers had been convicted of raping and killing a white woman—just as a number of other inmates in Rideau’s circle of friends had either killed or raped women.
The reality is that an inmate’s crime does not gain him social acceptance “in the belly of the [prison] beast.” More than half of the 45 or so condemned inmates freed from Louisiana’s death row in the wake of the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively declared the death penalty unconstitutional wound up in “protection” cells once released from death row. They could not make it on the Big Yard or anywhere else in the prison community—not because of their crimes but because they did not have the “balls” to make in the prison world. There were at least two former cops on the Big Yard when Rideau arrived there in 1973—and no one messed with them because they had established with their “balls” that they were not to be messed with.
In an attempt to show he had “balls,” Rideau described what happened after his harrowing experience in the Baton Rouge jail with “Chicken” and after the head honcho’s provided him with the death row protection: “Let me have your attention a minute,” Rideau said he told the jail inmates. “I’m not sleeping on the floor. I’m willing to pay five dollars for a bunk. I’m also prepared to take one if I have to. So, who wants the money?”
That scene did not happen.
First, if Rideau was truly prepared to “take” a bunk, why offer to buy one. Second, that was a challenge to the whole tier. Rideau in 1964 was still a “puny” skinny 22-year-old as he described himself in the book—someone who had been bullied, harassed and slapped in the face most of his life. He had to buy a gun and a knife for protection in the free—a much less dangerous environment than the prison world. And you’re not going to begin any prison “ultimatum” with, “let me have your attention a minute.”
The immediate response to that “puny” ultimatum would have been by one or more of the inmates: “motherfucker, why don’t you start with trying to take my bunk … I don’t give a motherfuck if you was born on death row.”
Rideau said that once he got to the Big Yard he ordered “a custom-made knife from an inmate who worked in the tag plant, where they turned out license plates, street signs, and other items of metal. My knife was the length of my forearm, and I fashioned a sheath to strap it on under my sleeve, which allowed me to appear to be unarmed, unlike many inmates who wore long coats to conceal (and thereby announce) their weapons even in the summer heat.”
That scene did not happen, either.
It’s pure Peter Pan fantasy, concocted by someone who spent 44 years in prison and who doesn’t know a damn thing about the underbelly of that world. First, “shanks” in Angola at that time were crude weapons. There was no such thing as a “custom-made knife.” A shank was made to kill—there was no assembly line at the tag plant for “custom-make” shanks that would fit snuggly in a “sheath” under a long-sleeve shirt. Shanks were bulky weapons grinded out from metal with sharpened points and blades.
Rideau was a “high profile” inmate who would have been more likely to be “shook down” (searched) by guards—a tactic guards used to let those kind of inmates know they were not “running anything.” Rideau did not carry a “custom-made knife” strapped under his forearm. Didn’t happen.
And to add insult to this lie, Rideau impugns the “violent skills” of the real hardcore inmates by saying they walked around with their knives concealed under heavy coats while he coolly and calmly walked around with his strapped in a sheath under his shirt sleeve. This novice inmate in effect said he was smarter than the hardcore cons too dumb to even know how to conceal their weapons. One of those cons reading that bullshit would have to fight down the irresistible impulse to slap Rideau in the face for even saying such a thing.
I guess that’s what disturbs me the most about the Rideau scenes that did not happen. They may be believable to some young criminal justice student in a community college, but to anyone who examines the scenes closely, especially anyone who has served time, they read like a “Twilight Zone” story.
So, please “let me have your attention a minute,” the foregoing scenes in Rideau’s memoir did not happen.
