About TV
A Conversation From Inside Prison Walls

Wilbert Rideau	Douglas Dennis

The CAUCUS QUARTERLY thought it might be interesting to provoke a dialogue between Wilbert Rideau, one of America's most famous prisoners, and Douglas Dennis, his colleague on THE ANGOLITE, the nation's only uncensored prison magazine. Their conversation was tape recorded at the prison in September of 1993 and edited for presentation here.

Wilbert Rideau is the award-winning editor of THE ANGOLITE, and the co-author of LIFE SENTENCES, published by TIMES BOOKS. He has spent 33 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Douglas Dennis has spent 26 years in prison. He is a staff writer for THE ANGOLITE. Rideau and Dennis are both serving life-terms for murder.

The CAUCUS QUARTERLY is grateful for the cooperation of Warden John P. Whitley and Supervisor Dwayne McFatter.

DD: The media is a major part of what's wrong with the criminal justice system, particularly the electronic media. The reason for that, we think, is that it has such a pervasive influence on public opinion.

WR: It is the single most powerful shaper of public opinion. If the public is afraid it's because the media has made them afraid.

DD: And the single most persuasive force in influencing the public's fear of crime is the local news. Nothing comes close, and I believe the reason for that is because the local news covers crimes that have an immediacy to its viewing audience. The local audience becomes very aware of crime coverage pertaining to them or their neighbor; they're looking at their own town and what's going on in it.

WR: Local TV news brings it right into your living room. The reality is that crime and violence is no closer to you than it was when the newspaper reported it, but TV has the power to reduce distance leaving you feeling endangered. And local TV news is closer to its market, they're closer to their advertisers. And they are less likely . . . they're not as inclined as the national media to invest a lot of money in stories that educate or inspire or address problems in a meaningful way. They go for cheap news, and news that is not threatening to the power structure.

DD: Their culpability lies with the disproportionate emphasis that they place on crime news.

Homicide accounts for only one percent of all violent crime, yet Justice Department statistics indicate that eighty percent of local crime news is devoted to homicides. So and so got killed, and they show you the body being carried out. They show you police milling around the crime scene. Reportage of homicide news leads the public to think people are getting shot down in the streets all around them every day. And over years, over a period of time the public perception is that their hometowns are greatly more violent than they actually are.

WR: TV. is looking for blood and guts. It's cheap and easy to do. All they have to do is get footage of blood, the tangled wreckage and ask somebody what they saw or ask a cop what happened, and there's your news.

DD: One of the problems with reporting crime is that reporters get all their information from the police. And, of course the police put their own spin on it. I mean the facts of crimes . . . the indisputable facts of crimes are horrible enough without a police spin on it.

WR: But even when the police are realistic about it, we still have the problem of . . . .

DD: . . . disproportion.

WR: . . . a television station that is trying to get a point across in approximately sixty seconds. The whole news is governed by sound bites, and they don't explain anything. I mean the biggest thing wrong with television news is that it's always reported out of context. It is never put in a proper perspective and explained to the public. The only time this is ever done is when they're doing a documentary. Recently, in Baton Rouge, because we no longer have a war, they reported their war on crime and gave us a body count. Every night there was a body count at the top of the news.

DD: Like Viet Nam . . . .

WR: "Someone just got killed . . . we just hit number fifty-nine, then number sixty. The bodies "just keep piling up and it's not safe to live anyplace." If you went by the local news you'd swear you were in a war zone.

WR: A local police officer tried to explain that despite all this reportage of violence, it was essential for the public to understand that despite what they were hearing on the news, the chances of them being a victim of random violence was virtually nil.

DD: He also said that most violence is domestic violence. Husbands killing wives or vice versa, or friends having an argument over little or nothing, one of them winding up dead. Remember the record breaking homicide in Baton Rouge, number sixty-one, a woman who thought her husband had been going around with another woman behind her back? She goes home, shoots him in the chest and kills him, in broad daylight, in the afternoon. Police come, the TV station comes, we see the wife being handcuffed and led away. Then the TV reporter goes to the neighbors, it's a lower middle class area, neat and well kept-up, nice people, it's not a slum. They talk to three little old lady neighbors and "oh, I feel so unsafe . . . I don't feel safe anymore." And . . . what in the world? As long as they're not fooling around with that woman's husband, they ain't got nothing to worry about.

WR: The TV reporters promote the fear.

DD: They pump it. "Aren't you afraid? Don't you feel uneasy?"

WR: What they don't realize is that they're sowing the seeds of fear, public fear, and that is fertile soil for a conservative police state, and police states always . . . the first thing they do is silence the media. So in a sense the media is sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

DD: What they surely should know, because they see it every day, is that if people are willing, they'll beat your door down, to trade in their freedom for security.

WR: News is where the public gets their information from. News they attach credibility to. So they believe what they see there. They don't necessarily believe what they see in a Clint Eastwood movie, about Dirty Harry chasing criminals.

DD: They know when they're watching Dirty Harry or the Terminator they're being entertained. Blood is flying everywhere . . . they don't mistake that for reality. There may be a desensitizing effect to violence . . . .

WR: I think it does do that.

DD: But as far as . . . you know, it's like the slasher movies. They've grown to where they're a joke, they are practically tongue-in-cheek. And blood and guts are flying everywhere. The thing about it is, people are brainwashed not by the entertainment aspects of the media, but by the news and by the documentaries when they touch on the criminal justice system. Let's take a local case that got international coverage. A local guy shot down a Japanese student who, along with an American friend of his, approached his house looking for a Halloween party. The local guy opened the door and blew the Japanese guy's chest out. The way I see it . . . and it got intense coverage here, in Baton Rouge . . . the way I see it, this local guy is your typical brain-washed-by-the-media person. He's a lower middle class person, has a nice home, wife . . . and he's scared to death by the media reportage of the violence. He doesn't live in a crack neighborhood. He doesn't hear gunshots every night. But he goes out and buys an Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator Special .44 magnum with a laser scope, to protect his house. By God, he is an American and he is going to protect his castle, and the first little excuse he had he blew somebody's shit away. And I lay the blame for that, the ultimate blame for that, at the door of the TV that this guy probably spent half his life watching.

WR: We're media, too. We may be in prison, but we're part of the news media. And I guess if anybody wanted access to some real titillating stories and what not, we could come up with them. We have 5000 guys up here and they've got plenty of gory stories. There's plenty of violence, there's plenty of whatever you want. There's this inclination among journalists and television programmers to go for the violence. They want the blood. They want the guts.

DD: They want the riveting image.

WR: They all miss the fact that the most powerful thing is the story. It's not so much what you see, it's what you're listening to. They miss that. They replace quality reportage with the visual, they go for the visual. As if that's a superior replacement, and it isn't. It's a downer, and it's bad for society. Everyone is the loser. Don't get me wrong, we're news media, we consider ourselves journalists, and we're all for freedom of the press. It's just that, I'll be quite frank with you, I see us all going down a slope. In fact, we're traveling too fast down that slope and we're sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Some of what we see . . . I may be a prison journalist but damn, some of what I see and what I read, I'm embarrassed by. I mean it's ridiculous.

DD: What you're talking about is lack of responsibility.

WR: Yes.

DD: I think the media, including us, print media and electronic media, have a responsibility to the public. They're always so quick to holler about freedom of the press, and I'd be in the front ranks waving the placard too, but where you have a freedom you have a responsibility, and in my opinion I see a major shirking of responsibility on a very important issue. There's crime and there's criminal justice. They have consistently ranked at or near the top of public concern. But the media has been irresponsible in their coverage. Important statistics or reports have either been ignored or misreported. A recent example: the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, just a couple of days ago, at Stanford University, released a comprehensive report, one of the key conclusions of which is that the criminal justice system, i.e., the police, the courts, and the prisons, have absolutely no effect on the crime rate. Nothing the police do, nothing the courts do, nothing the prisons do, has any measurable impact on the crime rate, on what happens day to day in the streets. We've been saying that for a long time now, but who are we? But now a prestigious group like the National Council on Crime and Delinquency from Stanford University think tank is being ignored, too. That's irresponsible.

WR: We have a problem with crime. But rather than solve the problem, what the media did was turn around and scare the public. It created a monster, because public fear is a monster, one that stands between solving the problem and any conscientious official that wants to do something about it. Look at Clinton. No matter how well intentioned, Clinton won't solve the crime problem because he's too busy trying to pacify the monster. The monster was created by the media having failed in its obligation to explain things to the public.

DD: And by where they go to get their sources of information, like the police or the conservatives. Most of the overall conceptual attitudes regarding harsher penalties and building more prisons and all, come from the police and the conservatives.

WR: I think they go to the police plain and simple because they're lazy. To do otherwise requires them to work. And I think they always go to the conservatives because the conservatives deliberately made people in the news media develop a guilt complex about being perceived as being liberal, or slanted.

DD: Soft on crime.

WR: It's hard to find a liberal in the media now, at least anybody who's going to profess to be one because they're all running scared. That is the reason why they go to conservatives because they're all afraid of the liberal label. The other bad thing is . . . they've got a whole new kind of journalism that had come into existence over the past fifteen, twenty years, right along with the law and order movement. And it's a cop-out, relieving the journalist and media of any obligation or responsibility. A journalist can't make a subjective judgment whether something is right or wrong. He's supposed to present a balanced picture to the public and let them do their own deciding. In other words, if a picture is unbalanced, more good than evil, or more evil than good, the journalist will have to compromise one of them to make it balanced, to make both sides equal. In other words, good and evil become the same thing. I mean, how do you compromise evil? If you're reporting a situation and it's wrong, it's wrong! Let the journalist present the story -- don't compromise it. The public will distinguish the truth.

DD: That's the power of SIXTY MINUTES. And they take a moral stance. SIXTY MINUTES operates from a grass roots American moral stance of right and wrong. And they will attack from a moral position. And what is the most popular news show on TV? SIXTY MINUTES. And God bless SIXTY MINUTES, they do go after white collar crime, doctors who commit crimes, and public officials who are committing crimes. You don't see that very much on the local news. But look at HARD COPY and INSIDE EDITION and all those clones, the NATIONAL INQUIRERS of television. Somebody needs to step on that stuff, somebody needs to squish it in some kind of way. If I was running the network, none of that kind of garbage would go on.

WR: If I was running a network I would not allow it. I understand it makes money, but you wouldn't see that kind of stuff on my network. We wouldn't do just anything in the name of profit on my network because we'd honor an obligation to exercise our freedom of the press in a responsible way. And you can be responsible and make money. The networks and local television have no business broadcasting news in a way that plays to biases, prejudices, and public fears, appealing to the worst in us. That would be my criteria. I wouldn't try to censor the news or anything; it's just we're talking about style, that's all we're talking about; we're not talking about content.

DD: Responsibility, responsibility.

WR: Sort of like . . . I remember C. Paul Phelps who, you know, lifted the lid of censorship on the Penitentiary over here. I remember he used to tell us this about our magazine, THE ANGOLITE. He said "we're not talking about content. You're free to say anything you want to say. We're talking about style, how you say it. That's all."

DD: And saying it responsibly within sound journalistic guidelines. Last night on the local news they had a feature segment about a homeless man who found his way to living at the Salvation Army. Once he had a roof over his head, he went out and got a job flipping burgers at Greyhound. Now he's an assistant manager at the restaurant there and he's doing good, so they did a feature on him. And he talked about how he owed it to God and how he, you know, he really wanted to make something of his life and he got that little hand-up by the Salvation Army. His boss came on and said that he was a dedicated worker, said he took a chance on him and he's glad he did. And all the time I'm thinking this story could be about an ex-convict. This story could be about the fifty to sixty-five percent of those ex-convicts who get out there and never get in trouble, never go back to prison again.

WR: But they're not going to do that because they've created that monster out there and it's going to rear up and bite them and say, "oh, you're praising an ex-convict . . ."

DD: "You're soft on crime." Sure, criminals have done some very horrible things. Others have done not quite so horrible things but wrong things. All of us have done wrong things, we have made mistakes. But does that dehumanize us, make us another race? We still bleed, we still have one brain, two hands like everybody else. Like it or not we're a part of society. We screwed up big time. And we're paying for it. But does that mean that we're not human, that we should just be exiled to the moon forever and written off as a total loss? There are a few individuals among us who deserve that status and that honor, if you will. There are, you know, the Ted Bundys and the Charles Mansions, but most criminals we're talking about, 1.2 million people behind bars, are they all Charles Mansions? That's the perception that TV promotes, that we're all monsters, we're all Atilla the Hun. And we're not! Most of us have families, we all had mothers. We were children. We did wrong and we're paying for it. That's not the problem, the problem is that we're being dehumanized and wiped off the slate. And that's wrong.

WR: You can't solve the problem of crime by painting us as simplistic one-dimensional creatures, totally devoid of any humanity.

DD: The roots of crime are not in the criminal, they lie in society.

WR: A lot of these characters they depict in movies, they don't even exist in prisons. They might in some insane asylums, but not in prisons. Remember the news media doesn't give the public much explanation, so whatever they see in movies supplies them with their image of the criminal . . . In just about all your television programs your criminal is generally a murderer, or a rapist, or some kind of violent fiend salivating at the mouth waiting to attack somebody else. Yet, the bulk of all crimes is larceny.

DD: Smash and grab. And shoplifting.

WR: But this is the perception it fosters, and you wonder why is there need for that? It's like reaching for extremes to titillate the public and it's totally unnecessary. Look at all your best movies. We were talking about this the other day. The most memorable movies you've ever seen weren't the ones where the good guy wore the white hat and the bad guy wore the black hat. Like THE UNFORGIVEN. The best movies portray people as complex individuals, a mass of living conflicts, contradictions. That is what people love, because they can relate to it. I mean the struggle between good and bad, the impulse to good and the impulse to evil that lives in all of us. I mean, hey! Those are the movies you're going to watch more than once.

DD: Yeah, look at THE DIRTY DOZEN. You drag these brig rats out of the army prisons, and give them a chance to do good. Of course we all understand this is a fable, but in fables lie the truth. And the truth is that in the worst of us there is good. That's the eternal truth that is fableized in THE DIRTY DOZEN. And even in THE WILD BUNCH, because at the end they knowingly went to die for a principle, the principle of loyalty. One of the most admired principles that the human race has is loyalty. "That's our partner, and we ain't leaving without him." You're willing to die for a principle, not for money, not for a slavering blood lust, but for a human admirable quality.

WR: It plays to the best in people.

DD: Now why don't we see that on TV? Or more of that on TV? I mean we don't see any of that on TV.

WR: I think producers and network executives talk too much to each other. They don't get out in the world and talk to other people enough, expose themselves to different perspectives, new ideas.

DD: Why can't we see more of the struggle between the bad and the good in men on network programming, instead of shows like DYNASTY, where the whole theme is the corruption and garbage of the upper class. Why can't you show the triumph . . . play to the good, the triumph within a person of the better nature over the evil nature, because we're all Jekyll and Hyde.

WR: Instead of appealing to the best in us, DYNASTY appealed to greed, to the greed that lurks in most men.

DD: And DALLAS, DALLAS was the same. J.R. was the focus point.

WR: And he epitomized corruption. You know what DYNASTY and DALLAS did? Aside from appeal to the baser, the worst in us, it also bred a callousness among people. You're not supposed to care about nobody, you're supposed to be . . . I mean the only goal is your own selfish ends.

DD: It made ruthlessness seem attractive.

WR: But you see it breeds a certain callousness . . . .

DD: If you want to be successful you have to be ruthless.

WR: Callousness is fertile soil for violence.

DD: For any crime. If you don't care about your neighbor, you'll steal his cow, you'll rape his wife, and you'll cut his heart out.

WR: The philosophy that those shows promoted was that the end justified the means. Well hell, that's no different from the criminal philosophy.

DD: I can't picture the values portrayed on DALLAS and DYNASTY, as turning anybody away from crime, or influencing them away from crime.

WR: Even in advertisements, the television industry is not mindful of what they're doing. There's one of these national commercials, it's about a burger, and the message is "if you want a burger, sometimes you got to break the rules." That's the essence of the message, sometimes you just got to break the rules. Then they show this person who's enjoying this big burger, eating it and feeling good. Well, to an adult, that message doesn't mean a damn thing.

DD: Well, it's cute, but breaking the rules seldom brings a reward.

WR: For a little kid to whom a burger is a big deal, they're receiving a message that tells them break the rules and you'll be rewarded. That's criminal.

DD: It pushes kids in the wrong direction.

WR: The networks, you know, they used to take seriously their obligation to educate the public, which is why they used to do so many documentaries. They no longer do documentaries. Documentaries are like an endangered species, it's a rare bird.

DD: You see them on public television, that's about it.

WR: We used to gather around and watch and see what they were doing, you know, because they were getting ready to educate you on something. That carried a lot of credibility. And now what we've got are news magazine shows, patterned after SIXTY MINUTES.

DD: But some way or another in the cloning process they've lost almost all of that grassroots moral foundation, that moral background, from which SIXTY MINUTES springs.

WR: The problem is that now the networks feel the need to entertain more than they feel the obligation to educate and be responsible like they used to. I think it's the fierce competition for dollars.

DD: In the seeking after the bottom line, it seems that the networks, and cable, have decided to treat hard news, and documentaries, as entertainment. There was a special about Gary Graham, the death row inmate in Texas. It was packaged as entertainment. It didn't go into the rightness and wrongness of him being on death row; it didn't pursue a clear hard evaluation of his circumstances or what led up to him being there, which is where the story was. They presented it as just -- the bleeding hearts versus the prosecutors. That's their idea of balance. They went and stuck a microphone in a D.A.'s face, and let him rant and rave about killing this guy. Then they stuck a microphone in some bleeding hearts' faces and let them weep and wail about saving his life. Then they stuck a microphone in Gary Graham's face and he says, "Gee, fellas, I'd really rather you wouldn't execute me." And then they ask him, "How do you feel about it?" "Well, I'm scared." You know, gee, isn't that a thrilling insight. Here's a guy on death row, and his execution date is a week or two away, and he's afraid of dying. What a revelation.

WR: Take my personal instance, I'm probably one of the more publicized prisoners in America, and I wasn't publicized because of my crime, but because of what I've done, my achievements, afterwards as a journalist. I have absolutely no problem with the public knowing what I'm about. What I've done, why I'm in prison, what I'm about, how my victims feel, anything. I have no problem with it. In fact, I have faith that if the public could look at my situation realistically, as it is, they'd vote to free me. But what I'm scared to death of, even after all these years of dealing with microphones and reporters, is the media. I dread every time a reporter puts a microphone in front of me. Even though I have no problem with the public knowing everything they want to know. I want the public to know everything, but I dread the reporter who sticks a microphone in my face because . . . I'm scared of him.

DD: It's not the reporter, it's the editing.

WR: But even the reporter because sometimes the reporter is not as competent as he should be. They don't ask the right questions. They ask questions that almost . . . I mean it's A-B-C type questions. They don't even try to get at the truth or any meaningful point.

DD: That's what I was talking about with Gary Graham, they're not going into anything. They're presenting an exhibition.

WR: They scare me. And I'm accustomed to it. Remember when Mike Wallace was being sued by General Westmoreland. The television cameras were all on Wallace and someone asked him "What have you learned?" and he said "I've learned what it's like to be on this end of the camera. Now I know what it's like and how it feels and I know what's wrong." Reporters can do more injustice to people, because they don't do a good job. Between the way they interpret their obligation, if they see any obligation at all and by being lazy and not doing a very good job, they do the public a great disservice.

WR: What about the life of the people in the world of prisons on TV? In real life, it's a secretive thing. Everything is secret. Courts are pretty much secret too, although they've made some penetration in showing their activities on television.

DD: You know, even though it was a comedy, NIGHT COURT was a pretty damned realistic way of looking at what went on in a city court. Transvestite hookers coming in. Now it was all done light-hearted, it was a comedy, it wasn't meant to be taken seriously, but they showed day courts and night courts at the city level, where you get arraigned, and we know something about that. Showed it pretty god damned much like it is. So you don't need heavy heavy drama to show reality, you can do it in a comedy program. You can show prisons. Why aren't there any prison programs? Why can't we have . . . as a protagonist a courageous warden fighting bureaucracy, fighting the law makers, fighting his own criminals that he has caged up.

WR: The problem is they don't know how to do it, they don't have the experience to write it and we're not there to write it for them. You see, the other problem is that most prisoners who get out of here and who write have, like most people in prison, led isolated prison experiences. Their writings tend to be one-dimensional. They don't know about the power politics played out on the warden's level, or the things played out on death row or the things played out in the trustee camp.

DD: Or in the legislature with criminal justice legislation.

WR: They don't know about the factional politics between employees and all that. In other words they don't have a realistic overview. We've gotta have that overview to put out the ANGOLITE magazine, but the other prisoners, the million point two of them, are walled . . . literally walled off from any possible overview.

DD: The highest person in authority that they may actually speak to would be a Captain, maybe a Major. A few influential ones might nail a warden in passing about a specific issue. But they're not going to sit around and shoot the shit with the warden about criminal justice philosophy and be privy to the politics of what's really going on.

WR: You have to be able to cut across all the lines that divide people in the prison world, and there's very few people that can do that. We do it and that's the reason why we can do the journalism we do.

DD: So you can take this as a pitch. If any of you want to do a good one-shot movie about prison or a prison series, you found two boys that can lay it down for you.

WR: We'll make the battiest f . . . show you ever saw.