LOUISIANA STATION GIVES CONS A SENSE OF IDENTITY

Radio station KLSP, whose call letters stand for Louisiana State Prison, is known for spinning tunes like Elvis Presley’s pounding rendition of “Jailhouse Rock” and Sam Cooke’s soulful “Chain Gang.”

A prisoner-operated broadcast station, KLSP caters to a captive audience in Angola that enjoys music and news as much as any drive-time commuter or housewife.

Prison officials hope the 3-month-old FM radio station will entertain, inspire and educate the southeastern Louisiana prison’s 4,747 inmates.

“We see this as an instrument for the administration to give all the inmates a sense of belonging, to help them become a community of people who are trying to improve themselves,” said the Rev. James Stovall of the Angola Educational Foundation, which raised the money to build the small 100-watt radio station.

Two inmate disc jockeys, Abdullah Rauf Amin and Richard Avery, select the music, arrange interviews with guests and prepare news and sports updates.

A typical news broadcast includes a mix of world and national items rewritten from a daily newspaper. Longer stories are carefully chosen for KLSP’s audience, focusing on the search for a prison escapee or the need to ease overcrowding in Louisiana prisons.

Sports reports are also tailor-made for inmate listeners, ranging from an announcement for the Mr. Angola weight-lifting contest to the results of inmate football games.

Amin, a native of New Orleans, has been in prison 19 years for robbing a liquor store and a dress shop. Avery, also a convicted robber, has been imprisoned in Florida and Louisiana since 1977.

The novice disk jockeys plan eventually to record the gospel, rock, jazz and country-western music performed by various inmate bands.

“Some people think everybody in here is a slimy killer, but we’ve got some really talented cats,” Avery said.

Assistant Warden Roger Thomas said Amon and Avery were chosen for broadcasting responsibilities because of their good records at Angola.

The town is located near the Mississippi River in the heart of an area dotted by historic plantation homes about 100 miles north of New Orleans.

The station, which carries a signal only strong enough to be heard on the prison grounds, costs taxpayers a modest $1.62 each day for electricity, Thomas said. Maintenance costs are paid out of the Inmate Welfare Fund which receives money from the prison’s annual rodeo and inmate clubs.

The $11,000 needed to buy second-hand equipment to get the station off the ground was donated by the Angola Educational Foundation.

Two other inmates who are self-taught electricians manage to repair and wire the equipment in a room of the prison’s old administration building.

“Some of the stuff we got was junk--I mean junk,” Thomas said. “It looked like somebody took a radio, threw it up against a wall and caught all the pieces in a box.”

Prison officials have installed three special cut-off switches in three separate locations as a precaution to prevent inmates from using the radio station to incite either a riot or a mass escape.

“You turn any one of those switches and it turns off the station. Even if the inmates got all three areas, I wouldn’t be worried about the radio station,” Thomas said. “We’d have other problems.”

Warden Frank Blackburn, who manages the radio station, said an added benefit of the station is the job training it provides disk jockeys.

“I’d like them all to be able to walk out of here and get a job in a radio station,” Blackburn said.