AMERICAN IDEA, Page 12The MirrorA Free Press Flourishes Behind BarsLifer Robert Taliaferro runs an award-winning biweekly ata Minnesota jailBy 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.
