Two Grim, Insightful Looks at Life Behind Bars

Bill Dunne and Wilbert Rideau are scheduled to spend the rest of their lives in prison but under radically different conditions.

Dunne is an inmate at the U. S. Penitentiary at Marion, Ill., “America’s toughest prison,” according to the September WigWag.

Rideau, a celebrated prison journalist, is housed in the Louisiana State Penitentiary and profiled in the October Details.

Together, the articles, and the prisoners’ lives, provide interesting insight into the existence of the 700,000 men and women incarcerated in the nation’s prisons, and into the penal system itself.

Rideau has been imprisoned for almost 30 years for the cold-blooded murder of a Louisiana woman. In that time he has become editor and publisher of The Angolite, a prison publication nominated for two National Magazine Awards last spring. His reputation as a muckraker has afforded him the chance to leave the prison on lecture tours and appear four times on ABC’s “Nightline.”

Rideau would seem the model of rehabilitation. Even behind bars, his good behavior and political clout provide him with considerable leeway. He dresses as he likes and calls the warden at home. There is considerable pressure in Louisiana for the governor to grant Rideau clemency.

Yet the Details piece hints that Rideau has not changed completely after all. As a 19-year-old murderer, Rideau had the power of life and death, Peter Wilkinson writes. As a prison journalist, he discovered “the power to bring change as well as the power to intimidate and manipulate through what one said--with the right documentation--in the press.”

The most privileged prisoners at the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion probably cannot imagine the sort of freedom Rideau is allowed. Marion is the “last stop” in the nation’s system of 711 prisons.

Housed at Marion are criminals so vicious that even the guards at San Quentin and Attica don’t want to deal with them. Also housed here, Susan Lehman reports, are those whose crimes dictate that they receive special protection, such as convicted spies John Walker and Jonathan Pollard. But Lehman also suggests that some prisoners at Marion are there for political reasons--are, in fact, political prisoners.

With the exception of 50 or so prisoners who are allowed to dine together and work in the prison factory, most Marion inmates are locked in their cells at least 22 1/2 hours a day.

“Alone in their cells, inmates can take a step in one direction and two steps in the other,” Lehman writes. “Meals arrive through a slot in the door. Prisoners dine on the floor; they have no chairs or tables. Most . . . live in cells without windows.”

These conditions do not make the prisoners happy. Inmate Dunne wrote to WigWag: “There are indications that the hall screaming and cell talking (talking and singing in the isolation of a cell, particularly when it is dark and quiet and psycho demons have free reign to roam the mindscape) are evidence of psychological trauma.”

As Lehman points out, Marion seems to reflect the future of prisons in America. This disturbs her. She and others want reforms at Marion. Her conclusion is that society, as well as these inmates, would be better served by a program of productive activity.

She makes her case well, although she does not iron out the finer points, such as what to do with the folks such as Matthew Granger, who came to Marion because he killed a guard in another prison, smashing his skull, shoving his keys down his throat, then cutting off his head with a piece of glass.

REQUIRED READING

* Just starting to sleep soundly again now that the threat of global thermonuclear war no longer seems quite so acute? Well, wake up! There’s a whole universe of potential apocalypses in the form of asteroids. If one of those puppies beans the Earth it could be curtains for Homo sapiens. The September California magazine presents an entertaining, informative look at the people who track asteroids and at plans to fend off an asteroid in the relatively unlikely event that one gets us in its sights sometime soon.

* Girl Scouts can now attend a “High Tech Computer Whiz Camp.” Kids go hunting or fishing or mountain climbing in a video game, unconcerned about mosquitoes or sunburn or the other annoyances of the great outdoors. Have these visual temptations divorced children from nature? In an evocative, sometimes nostalgic and finally optimistic essay in the September-October Sierra, Richard Louv examines how children of this generation and others feel about the wilds.

MAGAZINE VS. MAGAZINE

* Anyone who thinks of Cosmopolitan as a sort of Penthouse for women had best turn to Kathryn McMahon’s article, “The Cosmopolitan Ideology and the Management of Desire,” in the August issue of UCLA’s Journal of Sex Research. “The immense popularity of Cosmopolitan,” McMahon found, “may be attributed to the powerful contradictions the magazine represents and contains through strategies of self-management. . . . The text offers the fantasy of revenge for class and gender subordination through images of women’s sexuality used to dominate and control men on their own turf.”

SHREDDER FODDER

* From the moment it arrived in the United States, AIDS was a disease destined to inflame the worst impulses of conspiracy theorists. Now one of the theories concocted about AIDS appears on the cover of a national magazine. The question mark in the headline--”AIDS: Is It Genocide?”--does nothing to mitigate the story’s sensational, irresponsible tone.

The article, in the September Essence, takes a through-the-looking-glass approach to reportage. Credentialed, reasonable scientists are allowed to dispute the notion that AIDS was somehow introduced by someone to do something.

But the piece makes no distinctions about the credibility of its sources. It allows conspiracy theorists to espouse half-baked ideas, backed up with only such flimsy, alleged evidence as a 1969 issue of the Congressional Record and newspaper stories.

And while the scientific community, the piece asserts, remains “unclear” about where the disease came from, some “experts”--physicians trained in pharmacology, gastroenterology and dermatology, a black studies professor--”claim to have a concrete theory about exactly where the virus began . . . .” As one of the alleged experts claims: “There is a possibility that the virus was produced to limit the number of African people and people of color in the world . . . .”

There is also a possibility that Elvis is circling the Earth in a spaceship.

AIDS remains a tough enemy. To defeat it, it will require clear thinking and a unified effort. Mushy tabloidism only hurts the cause.