PALL IN THE SADDLE

Louisiana Prison Rodeo Makes Inmates Into Gladiators

GOD OF THE RODEO: The Search for Hope, Faith, and a Six-Second Ride in
Louisiana's Angola Prison By Daniel Bergner Crown, 304 pp., $24 BY
LEWIS BEALE

I ONCE wrote a story about the only synagogue in an American prison.
Its members were primarily convicted murderers: One had killed his
girlfriend after a weekend of heavy drug use, another was a motorcycle
gang member and multiple murderer, a third had robbed a store and then
killed the owner. I remember thinking these men must have been on some
kind of mission to disprove the stereotype that the only crimes Jews
commit are the financial, white-collar kind.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that there are at least 1.7
million great stories in the U.S. penal system (the number of people
currently incarcerated), and very few of them are as compelling as the
tale Daniel Bergner has chosen to tell.

Bergner spent a year at Angola, the massive maximum-security prison
farm in rural Louisiana. Intrigued by the facility's annual rodeo -- a
bizarre, and hugely popular, event that has all the trappings of a
gladiatorial contest -- Bergner was also determined to find out more
about Warden Burl Cain, a man who professed to run a compassionate
administration guided by deeply held religious principles.

Bergner's book focuses on six convicts who participate in the rodeo,
and the author's relationship with Cain. The inmates, almost all of
them in for life without parole, run the gamut from those who are
rehabilitated and remorseful for their crimes to one who dreams of
escape so he can murder the people who testified against him.

Bergner looks for signs of humanity in all of these convicts, but he
is not an apologist for the deeds they committed. Still, a key theme
throughout the book is that of redemption, and the most moving parts
of ``God of the Rodeo'' detail the struggles of a parolee to stay on
the straight and narrow.

But only a few can be redeemed -- least of all the warden. Cain proves
to be an egotistical hypocrite who makes shady deals with private
businessmen for convict labor, tries to extort money from the author
to guarantee prison access, and generally runs Angola as if it were a
slave plantation -- which, in fact, it once was.

This brave, beautifully written book has a sobering message: The way
we treat criminals reveals a lot about ourselves. Watching the rodeo,
as prisoners in striped cowboy outfits put their bodies on the line
before a civilian crowd filled with blood lust, Bergner writes that
``the uniforms helped to gratify (a basic longing): that murderers and
rapists and armed robbers . . . be not at all like us, that they be
largely inhuman. . . . We weren't the animals; along with the rodeo
stock, the animals were out there, in the stripes, in the ring.''

Lewis Beale writes for the New York Daily News.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry