A Polk Award-Winning Reporter Recalls Life Behind Bars

I can think of few people that would be more justified in writing a spittle-inflected harangue about the criminal justice system than Wilbert Rideau. In 1961, Rideau was convicted of murder by an all-white jury, and sentenced to death. That conviction was later overturned. But he was tried again, and again. Each time, the sentence was overturned.

In the 1970s, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison. Rideau grew into his adulthood in jails, solitary confinement and Angola Prison. In 2005, he received yet another trial, and was convicted of manslaughter, a crime he had confessed to from the start. He was sentenced to 21 years of incarceration — but by then, he'd already served 44 years. Today he is a free man, after spending an unnecessary 23 years behind bars.

Rideau has plenty to be angry about, but his recently released memoir In the Place of Justice (Alfred A. Knopf; $26.95) is not an angry book, or a denunciatory screed. It is a reporter's book: 366 pages of sober observation and self-reflection. If Rideau has revenge on his mind, he has decided to pursue it by telling the truth.

When Rideau was convicted, he had an eight grade education and no experience of the world beyond the area he grew up in. Scrawny, poor and unpopular, Rideau made his first friend while awaiting death in the maximum security pens of Calcasieu Parish jail. Later, he was held in solitary confinement, where his jailers nudged him toward insanity in the vain hope they would see him snap. He become a legend — known as “the one they can't break” — and the recipient of his fellow inmates' charity. (Of which he observes, “The irony is not lost on me that it's the professed Christians who are so cruel and unmerciful, while it's the criminal misfits and social dregs who try to help me, usually without my even asking.”)

After this period, Rideau enters the general population of Angola Prison, where he teaches himself how to report and creates a magazine aimed at the prison's black majority. This is the first of many firsts that he mentions almost as afterthoughts (first black editor of an official prison magazine, first editor of an uncensored prison publication, first prisoner to win a Polk Award).

While incarcerated, Rideau's byline appears in local papers and magazines — even in Playboy, which pays him top dollar for his freelancing. Most importantly, though, it appears in The Angolite, the prison publication he edited and transformed from a sporadically published, censored and non-journalistic broadsheet into a balanced news source written in the best tradition of muckraking, small-town papers.

In 1975, Rideau told Angola's new warden that the system's greatest problem is that "the general public and those with the power to change things are seriously misinformed.” Those are the words of a True Believer, a born writer, the sort of god-sent editor every journalist should pray they'll have the honor of sweating blood for. And they neatly encapsulate the mission of In the Place of Justice.

You can think of Rideau's book as a prison memoir or an expose. But neither category does it justice, because each implies that one perspective is privileged at the expense of all others. In the Place of Justice is best read as a piece of immersion reporting: a book in which the author is present but not an eclipsing force, and in which every character and decision is subjected to examination and critique. A book where the point is not to "make a point," but to put forward a set of truths to challenge the assumptions of the sympathetic and unsympathetic alike.

Photo Credit: amandabhslater