The New Yorker Interview:

In 1961, Wilbert Rideau, a nineteen-year-old with an eighth-grade education, robbed a bank in Lake Charles, the small Louisiana town where he lived. During a botched getaway, he killed a teller named Julia Ferguson. Rideau spent twelve years on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, a former plantation that occupies as much land as Manhattan. Then in 1972, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s death-penalty law; Rideau soon joined the prison’s general population. After trying and failing to get a job at The Angolite, an all-white prison magazine, Rideau created The Lifer, which may have been the first African American prison periodical.

The Lifer was shut down after only two issues. Rideau, however, started to freelance for regional newspapers, and even wrote a story for Penthouse about Angola’s Vietnam veterans. In 1976, when a reformist official named C. Paul Phelps became Angola’s warden, he named Rideau the new editor of The Angolite. “Phelps felt there was a role for freedom of expression and journalism in prison,” Rideau told me. “Censorship, and keeping everything a secret, was counterproductive to changing things.” The magazine had its own unrestricted phone lines, cameras, and tape recorders; Rideau often reported outside the prison with unarmed escorts, and, on two occasions, attended a convention of newspaper editors in Washington, D.C. He said at the convention that, even in an institution rife with violence and conflict, The Angolite “had proven valuable at easing tensions”—not only because it countered rumors with reporting but also because it helped “keeper and kept understand each other.”

Under Rideau’s leadership, The Angolite was nominated for seven National Magazine Awards. One of his stories, “Prison: The Sexual Jungle,” about men who raped and subjugated other men in Angola, won the George Polk Award. “The act of rape in the ultramasculine world of prison constitutes the ultimate humiliation visited upon the male,” Rideau wrote. In the seventies, American prisons still tended to aim for rehabilitation rather than punishment, and the story led directly to policy reforms.

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