TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031389/03138900.055

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.4 KB | 150 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN IDEA, Page 12

The Mirror

A Free Press Flourishes Behind Bars


Lifer Robert Taliaferro runs an award-winning biweekly at a
Minnesota jail

By David Arnold


    Severe penalties sometimes threaten the editor of the
Mirror, a tabloid published every other week behind the rock
walls and accordion-wire fences of the maximum-security
Minnesota Correctional Facility at Stillwater. The punishment is
likely to come not from the warden or the guards but from any of
the approximately 1,200 convicted car thieves, drug dealers,
armed robbers, kidnapers, rapists, child abusers and murderers
who may take issue with his editorial policy.

    In 1984, when Robert E. Taliaferro Jr. was transferred from
Wisconsin, where he was serving time for murder, he became a
Mirror reporter. He quickly learned the dynamics of his new
editorial responsibility. "My editor wrote a story about how
inmates were smuggling reefer in here in balloons," Taliaferro
recalls. "I told him, `You don't sit up here and put that stuff
in the newspaper. You wanna get yourself killed?'"

    A short time after that article circulated through the
cellblocks, an irate inmate struck the editor across the head
with a chair. The complaint triggered the editor's early
retirement, leaving Taliaferro in charge of two secondhand IBM
computers and a small staff working in an office the size of a
large bathroom. But the prestige of the job is considerable.

    The Mirror is the oldest continuously published newspaper in
a U.S. prison, founded in 1887 by the likes of the notorious
bank-robbing Younger brothers, who each served more than 20
years here after a badly planned bank job in Northfield, Minn.
Coleman, the eldest, became prison librarian and printer's
devil at the newspaper. In his second year Cole was named
Mirror editor, and the paper's motto became -- and remains --
"It's never too late to mend."

    Among the dark, walled fortresses of U.S. penology,
Stillwater is considered a well-secured country club with a
relatively mellow population. It is a kind of felon's Lake
Wobegon where gangs do not rule and sex offenders outnumber
those who have killed; a prison where only the guards wear
uniforms and only four of them carry firearms. Other U.S.
prisons are overcrowded, but each Stillwater resident has a
cell of his own, a TV if he chooses to buy one, and ready access
to a dozen phones mounted on the wall beneath the towering,
barred windows of the cellblock walls. D cellblock, where
Taliaferro and a few dozen other convicts cram at night for
final exams in bachelor's and master's degree programs, is
appointed with carpets, computers and hanging plants. The rest
of Stillwater can earn up to $5 an hour making manure spreaders
and birdhouses, or fixing school buses and highway patrol cars.

    The Mirror's pages read like a chapter from Tom Peters' In
Search of Excellence. In this place of punishment, achievement
is possible and highly promoted. The newsmakers in a fall
edition of the Mirror were Karta Singh and the other
bonsai-club members, who practically blew away the civilian
competition at the Minnesota State Fair. "I'm ecstatic about
it," Singh told the Mirror. "Winning a blue ribbon motivates me
even more, and I think it's a testament to the quality of
instruction we're getting."

    The newspaper sells no ads, and annual subscriptions are
cheap: free to residents, $10 outside the walls. The state pays
for it, and the warden is publisher. But Taliaferro's best
readers are the men inside, the line officers and inmates.
"You've got to walk the line; you'd not believe how thin it
is," Taliaferro says.

    Keeping an editorial balance among publicity seekers, black
culturalists, bonsai growers and softball teams complaining of
favoritism is physically demanding. Taliaferro measures up to
the job. "I'm 6 ft. 7 in. tall and weigh 200 lbs.," Taliaferro
says. "I came out of other systems where you had to be tough."
Readers and staff writers who disagree with the editor are
sometimes invited to the prison gym to put on boxing gloves.
"I'm not afraid to fight for my opinion, be it ever so humble,"
the editor says. "And I'm not afraid to be locked in the hole.
I've been there."

    Power in prison falls to those who gather it, and Taliaferro
prefers to hire men who, like himself, were convicted of capital
offenses and therefore face long prison terms. "Short-timers
have an ax to grind. They never learn anything in here. They
blame everyone else, and they just can't wait to get out and
screw up again. Then they come back. I committed murder.
Homicide. I put myself in here. I take that responsibility, and I
will deal with that."

    Taliaferro illustrates the theory that serious crime makes a
good prisoner. A former drug addict who killed his wife, he has
become a productive citizen of the Stillwater prison. He has
almost completed his bachelor's requirements, and hopes to
become a college professor someday.

    Hovering over his keyboard, Taliaferro cradles the telephone
receiver just above the monogrammed RT on his black jersey. Like
the capable editor of a small-town newspaper, Taliaferro has the
reader by the pulse. He is a leader of his captive constituency:
vice president of the Jaycees' Star of the North prison chapter,
a leader of a black-culture group and a big editorial voice
inside these walls. "I'm a black redneck," he says with a casual
smile. If he were free, he'd have voted for George Bush for
President even though he thought his candidate didn't understand
prison furloughs.

    Taliaferro wanted to capitalize on his prison term and
invested his time in the Mirror, where he's made big changes. He
dropped "Prison" from the masthead, gave the front page a USA
Today look, and brought into the cellblocks a broader view of
things, quoting frequently from such outside papers as the
nearby St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch.

    The biggest change was an end to all the bad news. The
Mirror's readers will not read about gang rape, booze brewed in a
toilet or how a man in C cellblock took a dive from the gym
rafters and landed on a broom. Not even an obit for a lifer who
died of natural causes. "It's bad enough just being in here,"
Taliaferro says.

    The Mirror casts a lighter, more positive reflection.
Booster journalism promotes progressive activities. It includes
poetry and several pages of basketball, handball and softball
scores. Consumer stories criticize new prison regulations, meat
fraud in the cafeteria, movies on the closed-circuit channel
and such outside issues as exploitation of lab animals and the
Federal Government's handling of the AIDS crisis.

    The newspaper's changes have attracted attention. Three
first-place American Penal Press awards received in the past
four years and a row of plaques stretch around a newsroom
occasionally cluttered with visiting journalists who've come to
examine the prison newsroom.

    His publisher has noticed the company the Mirror has been
keeping. All the awards and publicity have helped give the
Mirror a life of its own, says warden Robert Erickson. The
newspaper has a fourth-estate status he would not like to
challenge. And, after all, how could Erickson mess with
history? "Cole Younger would turn over in his grave, with his
six-shooters blazing," the warden says.