PRISON WRITERS
Writings From the Incarcerated World
I know a thing or two about prison—writing, jailhouse lawyering, fighting corruption, and surviving the ever present potential of death.
I spent forty years, four months, and eleven days in the Louisiana prison system doing all these things—some in exceptional ways; others not so much.
Ten of those years were spent on death row and in a prison disciplinary cellblock. The remaining years were spent in general prison population or in a protective custody status ranging from maximum, medium, and minimum.
I was sentenced to die in 1966 at age twenty-one for killing a man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana during a botched convenience store robbery.
Until June 1972, I waited for prison officials at Louisiana’s notorious “Angola” prison to escort me from my death row cell to the prison’s death house—then located adjacent to the prison’s infamous “Red Hats” solitary confinement unit surrounded on all sides by sugar cane fields—and strap me in the electric chair, and pull the switch.
That death-awaiting process was brutal and endured under horrific conditions.
In 1971, I became the first U.S. prisoner to win a federal civil rights lawsuit that dramatically altered death row living conditions.
And it was a Georgia death row inmate’s court challenge that saved me in 1972 from the certain fate of state-imposed execution.
In June of that year the United States Supreme Court handed down Furman v. Georgia—an unprecedented ruling that struck down the death penalty nationwide, ruling that it was being unequally and unfairly applied. Furman effectively vacated the death sentences of every condemned inmate in the United States.
Louisiana death row inmates were ordered to be re-sentenced to life by the Louisiana Supreme Court in Sinclair v. Louisiana in October of 1972. Some death row inmates in other states were re-sentenced to lower terms of imprisonment while some in other states were even set free as state courts grappled with how to interpret Furman.
The post-Furman process of dealing with former condemned inmates was actually more unequal and unfair than the pre-Furman process.
There is never any rhyme or reason in the concept of justice. It’s just exacted by the powerful and endured by the powerless.
After years of solitary confinement facing the specter of execution, some Louisiana death row inmates were deemed psychologically unfit by a collection of prison “social workers” and “classification officers” hired in the wake of Sinclair v. Henderson for life in general prison population.
They were transferred to a “psyche” cellblock or to a nearby “mental institution” outside the prison. A half dozen or more had to be physically extracted from their cells by the prison’s “goon squad.” They had become addicted to the safety of a cell and institutionalized by its routine. They wanted no part of the prison experience.
I was one of the few death row inmates transferred directly to general population on what was known as Angola’s “Big Yard” where I encountered conditions more brutal than those on death row. The prison had garnered the rightly earned reputation as the “bloodiest prison in America.”
Yet less than nine months later myself and Irvin “Life” Breaux integrated the Big Yard without a single fist fight with a plan the U.S. Justice Department and former Corrections Director Elayn Hunt allowed us to implement—a plan we devised and put in place.
To this day I think of that prison integration as my highest achievement.
But it came with a heavy price.
Two weeks after the integration process, Life, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, was stabbed to death by two henchmen given the green light by the “segregation now, segregation forever” prison redneck regime while I was framed by the same forces on a 3-tabs of LSD charge that cost me two years in a brutal disciplinary lockdown.
In 1981, I garnered the American Bar Association’s prestigious Silver Gavel Award for an article—“A Prison Tragedy”—I wrote for the prison’s newsmagazine, The Angolite, about Life’s murder.
During my four decades behind bars, I served time in four Louisiana prisons facilities - Angola; the State Police Barracks in Baton Rouge; the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer; and the C. Paul Phelps Correctional Center in DeQuincy.
During those years, I met men in each of the prisons who had exceptional writing talents, jailhouse lawyering skills (a practice legalized by Sinclair v. Henderson), and leadership courage to recognize and fight against official corruption and lawlessness.
That’s why I became a writer, a jailhouse lawyer, and a published author—to become more than just an inmate doing time and to spite the political forces that wanted to see me dead.
I began to write on death row.
My first published work was a piece published in a religious pamphlet called “Power of Living” that paid me $35. It was a first person account of a religious experience I had on death row.
Seeing my name in print gave me a rush. That published article inspired me to pour out words on paper with an old Underwood typewriter I purchased with a carton of cigarettes.
That Underwood and the words it pecked before pounding out saved my soul.
I began writing a column, “A Word From Death Row,” for The Angolite.
The writing process gave me a special venue in which to focus my thoughts. I could control the chaotic world around me, both inside and outside of prison, by analyzing it with words and fighting it was jailhouse lawyer skills.
By 1973 in general population, I was writing freelance material for both The Angolite and Lifer Magazine, an organization publication produced by lifers. .
In 1977, I was assigned to The Angolite staff.
I worked on The Angolite for eight years, first as a staff writer and then as its co-editor.
During my tenure with the magazine, I was the recipient of some of the nation’s top journalism awards—not only the ABA Silver Gavel, but the Robert F. Kennedy Special Interest Journalism Award in 1979; the George Polk Award in 1980, and the Sidney Hillman Award in 1982.
In the wake of these award-winning Angolite articles, I wrote articles published in free world newspapers, magazines, literary journals, law journals, law enforcement publications, other prison journals, and even a medical journal.
I am the only inmate writer in this country to ever have their material published in Police Magazine and Chief of Police Magazine.
Publishing my work in those two magazines taught me that I could write about crime and prison for diverse audiences.
By 1984, just 12 years after being released from death row, I was sharing a live ABC “Nightline” television interview hosted by Ted Koppel with the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Warren Burger. That live interview generated so many viewers calling in that Koppel extended the program an extra 30 minutes.
In 2001, a memoir of my prison years was released nationally. The memoir, “A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story” (Arcade Publishing, N.Y., 2000),was co-authored with my wife, Jodie, and received a favorable review in The New York Times.
Subsequent to the memoir, I wrote an essay, “The Road to Redemption,” that appeared in Paul Loeb’s book “The Impossible Will Take A Little While.” (Basic Books, N.Y. 2004).
Loeb’s book is a collection of essays from people - famous and virtually unknown – who never gave up trying to change circumstances that afflict humanity.
The book includes essays from Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Cornell West, Pablo Neruda, Alice Walker Jim Hightower, Marian Wright Edelman, Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu.
My essay appeared in the chapter with Dr. King’s “Letters From Birmingham Jail.” Seeing it there humbled me like no other experience in my life.
For 40 years—from a typewriter on my bunk in a death cell to the tablets on which I wrote in a near illegible scrawl after prison authorities confiscated my typewriter in 2002—I traveled a literary road that still astonishes me to this day.
But I was not an anomaly.
20th century American prisons produced some really great writers-Caryl Chessman, George Jackson, Malcolm X, Iceberg Slim, and Jack Henry Abbott, to name a few.
But it was, and remains, Angola that has produced some of the best prison writers—some of whom are still publishing their polished wares in the free world marketplace, like William “Bill” Kissinger, Calvin Johnson, and a host of writers associated with the Louisiana parole project.
Like them, I am not finished with the written word.
There is more to say about the incarcerated world that few know or understand, except those who are forced to live there and those who forced to keep them there.
That world gave me the opportunity (yes, opportunity for which I am eternally grateful) to become a journalist and a writer.
It is the journalist’s job to report about people, events and issues that shape the world around them. It is the writer’s job to recreate life events, mostly with dramatic impact.
I was much like an embedded reporter who survived the world of prison to tell stories about those who passed through the hell of incarceration.
I have tried to give life to the voices of the inmates who lived there, and continue to survive there: the way they think and why they committed the crimes that consigned them to the world of prison.
Some of my work is colored with my personal and political views. I offer no apology for that. However, I do endeavor to present the facts associated with the subjects of my essays, my biases notwithstanding.
I liked some of the inmates in my work; others I despised.
Most of them trusted me in one way or another. I inhabited their world. They could see into my eyes, and so they confided in me.
Others I came to know through observation and experiences.
Readers are sometimes shocked by what some of these prison voices say, as I was on occasion, even though I lived side by side with them for years.
But their voices, spoken directly to me or overheard by me, deserve to be heard.
The pathology in their thinking is instructive because it reveals a complex, perverse society that is - I believe - a grotesque mirror reflection into the soul of free world.
Let me close by saying that I saw a recent CNN interview with Debra Des Vigness, a former television crime reporter turned CNN “Hero,” who is conducting prison writing workshops that are having dramatic impact on the inmates taking part in the classes. I was buoyed knowing that their creative work, beginning from scratch, is now paying dividends on a life they will know in the future in the unincarcerated world.