The Bad Dude Ranch

Eleven years ago, Larry Wayne Dixon Jr. was sentenced to 20 years’ hard time for killing a man in a Mobile bar fight. But on a recent Wednesday at dawn, he was blazing across a pasture at the Charles A. Farquhar State Cattle Ranch on a big brown quarter horse, his parries, feints and hollers moving a herd of recalcitrant cattle the way Moses once moved water.

Out here on the low, lonesome hills of western Alabama, there is much to remind Dixon, 32, that he is a convict -- the unsavory food, the lack of privacy, the guards.

But there is also this: moments of hard work and hustle on the back of a good horse, the fresh sun spangling a denim sky, the thrill of the chase resonating in the muffled thud of hoofs on earth.

The incarcerated man samples a defining American freedom, the kind extolled in old movies and cigarette ads. Even his overseers call him by the name Cowboy.

To the state of Alabama, Dixon is one of hundreds of convicts contributing to its perennially underfunded corrections budget by laboring in factories, fish farms and construction sites.

But Dixon is more than that to the authorities at the 102-inmate cattle ranch. Warden George Free and his livestock manager, a wiry, mustachioed cowboy named Hugh Burt, see Dixon as a project. They attest to an obvious metaphor: He is the rogue colt that they have just about broken and tamed.

“He came up hard,” said Burt, a full-time employee of the ranch. Dixon came in as a selfish man, he said: “The inmates call it big boyin’ your way around. But he’s not like that at all anymore.”

Free, a lifelong horseman and former Montgomery police officer, noted that the job is available only to those inmates who will eventually be released. It is valuable training in a state with a $470-million cattle industry that is hungry for experienced cowhands.

Dixon’s early education was on the streets, not the ranch. He grew up in Mobile, the old port city founded by the French. He was raised by a single mother and dropped out of school in the 11th grade.

On a Friday night in August 1994, he and a half brother were at a bar called Debbi’s Hideout, playing pool with some other men and betting beer on the outcome. There was an argument, and a punch was thrown. A 23-year-old man was beaten to death with a pool cue.

Dixon drove away unaware that he had killed someone. But as he slept, the news spread through the neighborhood. By morning, his mother had heard. She woke him up and told him, and he turned himself in to police.

A jury found Dixon guilty of manslaughter. He was 20 years old -- too young to drink legally at Debbi’s Hideout but old enough to go to state prison.

He entered the system May 12, 1995, tall and rangy. Inside, he lifted weights. His body grew burly and broad, and it bolstered the cockiness he cultivated to survive. He tattooed one thick arm with a leering joker -- the jailhouse symbol of wantonness, of laughing in the face of fate.

“I was still a little wild,” he said. “I just didn’t get caught.”

By 1998, a clean record landed him in a minimum-security dorm at the Fountain corrections facility, one of a number of Alabama prisons that run a commercial cattle operation. Choosing to work on its cowboy crew was not a romantic decision. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be a dorm cleaner,’ ” Dixon recalled. “All they do is clean the dorm.”

Inmate cowboy jobs are not uncommon in Western and Southern prison systems, though their existence is not always well-known. (California is one state without them, having shut down its beef cattle operation in the early 1980s.)

Miriam Shehane, who heads the group Victims of Crime and Leniency in Montgomery, had never heard of such a thing in more than two decades of monitoring the Alabama corrections system. But she knew immediately what she thought about the idea.

“I don’t think that anybody who has committed murder or manslaughter should get special perks,” she said. “To me, that’s a perk.”

Balancing rehabilitation and punishment is an enduring theme of the corrections trade. Finding the proper balance has become increasingly difficult in recent years, as states struggle to fund programs in a nation that has seen its incarceration rate soar. In 1980, the U.S. had 139 inmates per 100,000 residents. In 2004, it had 486 inmates per 100,000 residents, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Free acknowledged that the romantic image of the cowboy doesn’t help him politically in his effort to run what is essentially a job-training program.

“But for anybody going back out into society, you need to have them better prepared to function in society,” he said. “Let them leave in a way where they’re going to be productive citizens.”

In 2000, Dixon requested a transfer to Farquhar. Set on 4,600 acres in Alabama’s dark-soiled “Black Belt,” the ranch is home to the prison system’s second-largest cattle operation. Transferring there is considered a privilege. The dorm living is spartan, and the work is demanding. But the reward is access to fresh air and green grass. And it has no fences.

Dixon arrived at the ranch in November 2000 -- a big bull of a man, self-consciously handsome, with laughing, gray-green eyes. Early on, Dixon recalled, the warden took him out in a field and asked if the tattoos meant he was a gang-banger. Dixon convinced him they did not, and Free let him stay.

“But I had an attitude,” Dixon said. “From being in a big camp, you don’t want to get close to nobody. You don’t want to trust nobody.”

The warden eventually saw something surprising in Dixon -- a gentleness with animals. He could often make his cattle move with a snap rather than a push or punch. For a beginner, he sat naturally in the saddle.

Dixon was assigned to the cowboy crew full time. He rode the pastures twice a day, learning to spot cattle that were snakebit or sick. He mastered the calving season in August, when cowboys must maneuver through fields of protective -- and sometimes violent -- mother cows, checking on newborns and castrating the males.

Lee Burdette transferred to Farquhar with Dixon in 2000 and also was assigned to the cowboy crew. Before his imprisonment for murder, Burdette, 31, had grown up around horses. At one point -- he couldn’t remember when, exactly -- he realized that Dixon had evolved into a graceful rider.

“It happens like a child growing up,” Burdette said. “You really don’t notice it while it happens.”

When they first met at a larger prison, Burdette said, he was put off by Dixon’s swagger. “I didn’t much like him, and he didn’t much like me,” Burdette said.

But they learned to trust each other while working side by side. One morning, Dixon warded off a rampaging cow and probably saved his life, Burdette said.

“Now, I’d call him my friend,” he said.

Dixon developed an interest in breaking horses -- the art of training the animals so that they may be ridden. The task requires patience, skill and the guts to risk a hoof to the head.

He had been introduced to horse training back at Fountain prison, but now he began to borrow books on the subject. Burt, the livestock manager, had five untrained 2-year-old horses sent from another prison so Dixon could work on them.

Burt recalls that Dixon was nervous at first. “But the more he did it, the better he got,” Burt said. “And he took some hard licks. I’ve seen him get thrown straight in the air quite a few times.”

Dixon eventually broke eight horses and even trained a black-and-white cur to be a reliable cattle dog. Meanwhile, the warden continued to train the man. Free told Dixon not to let his weightlifter’s vanity go to his head. He lent him books with titles such as “Think Like Your Horse.” He chided him for dressing sloppily.

“You can’t dress no better than that?” the warden would ask. “Ain’t you a man?”

In 2002, Dixon’s plea for freedom was denied by the state parole board. Free recommended his release, but it was strongly opposed by the victim’s family.

By Dixon’s own admission, he started slipping. His mood soured. The other cowboys found him hard to work with and quick to anger. About two years after Dixon’s parole was denied, a calf was killed in an accident with a tractor. Dixon was supposed to be looking out for it, but he had been distracted. The animal would have fetched as much as $800 at the prison’s summer livestock auction.

The state of Alabama pays Dixon 15 cents an hour: It would have taken him more than 5,000 hours to work off the expense. Free removed Dixon from the cowboy crew.

“I missed my horses,” Dixon said. “That was about the saddest thing. Cows is all right, but I missed the horses.”

His parole was denied a second time, in April 2005. The following December, the warden allowed him to return to the cowboy crew. He had been humbled -- his fellow cowboys could sense it. He also came back as a veteran; a number of the old hands had been released on parole since he had last worked on horseback.

The ranch’s big livestock auction, and its attendant roundup, come in the summertime. This season, Dixon rode with confidence. The city boy still fears being thrown from his horse at full gallop, but the risk of breaking his neck is worth taking. His only other option is prison’s more typical drudgery.

“It’s a rush,” he said. “It’s dangerous too. But you’ve got to take the chance.”

In the hazy light of dawn, Dixon and the others -- cowboy grifters, a cowboy drunk driver, a cowboy murderer -- took about 40 minutes to corral 236 head of cattle from a pasture called Gum Springs. It was Dixon’s pasture: He referred to these animals as his own. Over the last few months, he had ridden among them nearly every day, imparting everything he knows about the business to Alan Lashley, a boyish, baseball-capped 24-year-old serving 15 years for robbery.

“He’s showed me a lot about controlling my horse,” Lashley said of Dixon. “I know he doesn’t want to see me hurt.”

Once the cattle were penned, Dixon guided his horse in front of an interior gate. He was wearing a beat-up straw hat that seemed to mock cowboy style -- here, it seemed to say, was a cowboy with an asterisk, not Gene Autry, not John Wayne, not freer than the animals he tends.

Now Dixon “cut” the cattle, separating the cows from the calves. The mothers were herded through a narrow gate and into an adjacent pen, while the calves were forced to stay behind. Dixon and the horse leaped and turned, blocking the calves trying to follow their mothers. He held the reins lightly, guiding his horse with slight shifts in his body weight, watching the calves the way a basketball player watches a quick guard readying for a drive to the hoop. He yelled, goaded, kissed, his spurs cocked at the horse’s flanks.

“Get outta heah!” he yelled as a few calves drove for the gate. “Sht Sht Sht!”

Today, “you ask any one of these guys, and they’re going to tell you they don’t feel like they’re in prison,” said Clyde Gregory, 46, an inmate doing 30 years for securities fraud. “They got one thing on their mind -- that’s to get these calves penned.”

The mothers were turned out to pasture as the calves were tagged, weighed and readied for transport to a holding pen -- and eventual sale. The mothers stayed close to the fence, lowing and wailing after their babies.

Dixon worked the big machine that catches the calves by the neck. He smoked a few hand-rolled cigarettes and made a few silly comments about “The Da Vinci Code” -- Dixon passed his high-school equivalency exam in here and has since become a reader.

He performed his job ably, his attitude by turns serious and insouciant, his expression rippling with echoes of the joker tattoo. Burt watched him. “Dixon’s not a leader -- not right now,” he said. “But he has the potential to be.”

In May, Dixon will be up for parole again. “I think I’ve come a long way in here,” he said. “Right now, if I’d a got in that fight, I’d a ran.”

Free, the warden, says he will probably recommend Dixon’s release, and Burt thinks he can find him a full-time ranch job making $35,000 a year -- good money for rural western Alabama.

Dixon has an 11-year-old son who isn’t impressed by cowboys. He finds their boots and tight jeans uncool in the age of hip-hop.

Dixon isn’t sure what he’ll do if he gets out early. But if the parole board grants his wish, he might understand the trust the warden has placed in him. He has felt something similar breaking horses.

Once a trainer has taught a horse to be obedient and calm -- and accustomed it to the bearing of burdens -- there is a critical moment when the hobbling chains are removed from its legs. The horse now is free to cause all the havoc in the world.

At that point, Dixon said, all you can do is hope.