Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1992 by Deanna Lee

Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars. Wilbert Rideau, Ron Wikberg. Times, $15. Earlier this summer, I lived in the Tutwiler Women's Prison in Alabama, not for murder or drug possession, but for an assignment for "Nightline." I was there for only 11 days. But I will never forget what it's like to be a prisoner--disconnected from the outside world, without control over my surroundings or contact with the people I care about.

America now incarcerates more of its population than any other country in the world: 1 in 25 men and 1 in 173 women. But the inmates that we hear about are usually the few high-profile cases, the next to be executed, the celebrities. What are "average" prisoners going through? What is it like to live behind bars? My experience was, of course, limited. But still I found myself on an emotional roller-coaster ride that threw my preconceptions up in the air.

Reading Life Sentences, a collection of articles published from behind prison walls over a 13-year period, has roughly the same effect. The clear, powerful prose in these 24 articles--mostly written, not by "experts" or free-world journalists or movie directors, but by one former and one current inmate in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana--will give anyone without a rap sheet as vivid an experience of prison life as he's ever likely to have. Rideau, as eighth-grade dropout who taught himself to write on death row and is now serving his 31st year of a life sentence, is editor-in-chief of the prison's award-winning magazine, The Angolite,

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Wikberg, his coauthor, was paroled last June after serving 23 years for murder.

The book provides several sensitive profiles of life behind bars. In "Conversations with the Dead," Rideau introduces us to "lifers" like Earl Goines, who, after 30 years, is "still a prisoner and, once planted in prison soil, forever a prisoner," and Frank "Cocky" Moore, the inmate with the oldest active prison number in the state. These men have been locked up so long that they no longer have family or friends, nor anyone, for that matter, to represent them in the outside world. No mechanism is set up for their cases to be reviewed. Unless an inmate possesses the wherewithal and zeal necessary to pursue his freedom, the system simply forgets him. Profiler Rideau describes Moore's pain--and his own--acutely:

We cut the interview short. I had to get away. Sitting in that little shanty--the old man's world--stirred the painfully chained need for some normalcy in my life: the need to ride a bike, take a swim, watch children playing; the need to hold a woman, to talk to normal people. . . . I knew I was looking at the face of a far more obscene and ominous kind of death than the physical--a living death. The face of tomorrow? My insides shuddered, my teeth clenched, as a quiet desperation began stealing through my veins. No . . . not like this . . . never. . . .

In my case, it didn't take the 33 years served by Moore to feel forgotten; it took all of two days, and it started with what seemed at first to be minor inconveniences. Twice I tried to make my daily call-in to "Nightline," and twice an automated voice came back saying my collect calls were not accepted. Only after losing my phone link to the rest of the world did I realize how much I depended on it. Just retrieving messages on my own answering machine--now out of the question--had always been a way to keep a mental tab on who was thinking about me.

Losing touch with the people in your life, giving up the clothes that define your personality, being warehoused in overcrowded double-bunk rooms, sticking to a jarring schedule (beginning at 3:30 every morning)--it all seems to be part of a constant barrage of conditions sucking away your individuality from the moment you walk in the gate.

Life Sentences could have made prison more palpable had the authors included more of their own emotions and experiences. They have a lot to say, however, and much of it is purposefully objective. Rideau and Wikberg have read prison records and academic studies and conducted interviews with current and past institutional employees, state officials, and outside sources. They take us through an extensive history of Angola, from its philosophical roots based on a belief in mercy and a second chance for each prisoner to multiple periods of torture and inmate despair. It's easy to believe Wikberg and Rideau when they call Angola the most dangerous prison in America.

The history is chilling. In the last 30 years of the 19th century, they tell us, an estimated 3,000 male, female, and child convicts, mostly black, died from overwork and brutality as "state slaves" leased to private enterprise. In 1951, 37 white inmates cut their Achilles tendons protesting their living and working conditions. In 1989, a federal judge declared a "state of emergency" following a rash of suicides, escapes, and murders.

That brutal history helps explain why, in one anecdote, a lifer with an exemplary 20-year record suddenly ran away from guards, almost certain to be shot before escaping. As one inmate puts it, "Louisiana has taken away all the hope and closed all the avenues of possible release. . . . That was nothing more than a kamikaze move."