In the Place of Justice

"I don’t think there’s much fiction in that. Wilbert’s pretty straight up with what he does and I think in some ways he underplayed some of his own experiences. It may be that the quotes are not verbatim but I think they’re probably fairly accurate from what I know about Wilbert. It’s like anything… I hope to goodness the book I’ve just written is accurate – I’ve researched a lot but there are some things that are just from memory, and I don’t think that makes it fiction. But to go back to Wilbert. His book is all about the world that I lived with for many, many years down in Louisiana and the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola . It’s called Angola because it was a slave plantation and it used to have slaves who had been seized in Angola and brought over to Louisiana. When they changed it from being a slave plantation to being a prison there was an awful lot of things that didn’t change, including the fact that there was an overwhelming number of black people who were being treated like slaves. You had a prison where people were riding around with shotguns and some of the people who were riding shotguns were themselves prisoners and if anyone escaped while they were on duty they supposedly picked up the sentence of the person who escaped, which gave them a hefty incentive to make sure no one escaped. It was incredibly brutal at the time that Wilbert went there, and at the time that I first went there, even though that was a bit later. Wilbert had been in prison since 1961 and he was there for more than 40 years. They talked about him being the most rehabilitated man in America because he started the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s magazine The Angolite. He was the editor the whole time I knew him. The point I was trying to make was a rather different one about the most rehabilitated person in America. I think Wilbert would agree that he wasn’t rehabilitated; he was really habilitated. He hadn’t had an education coming up; he had been brought up in a terribly racist community in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He really educated himself at Angola, after he got off death row. His case was a very celebrated one the first time around, when the Supreme Court reversed it because there was so much pre-trial prejudice and everyone in Lake Charles wanted to fry him before the trial began. He had a long battle to get off death row and then he got a life sentence at a time when life in Louisiana meant 10 years six months, and he should have been out of prison years and years ago but he was kept there for decades. He finally won a new trial on highly technical grounds and at the trial a friend of mine represented him, George Kendall. The jury compromised on a conviction for manslaughter, which meant they had to set him free right away. That’s how he got out – otherwise he would have stayed in prison his whole life. Since he’s got out, he’s lived a pretty exemplary life – going around telling people about prison and what it’s like. I think his book is a remarkable insight into the world that most people just have no inkling of. There’s no question that he did it. He would never deny it. I think that’s probably Wilbert being a bit rough on himself. I’m not sure it was that rational. I think his crime was more what happens to many people when everything gets out of control – you do something that you later regret. I think Wilbert has come to see it through the lens of his own racial views at the time because everything in Louisiana was about race. He would have been referred to as a nigger back then and no one would have thought twice about it. I think they would have been really hard pressed to charge this as a hate crime but nonetheless racism is what it was all about."