Jailhouse rock

In the Place of Justice

His book outlines the journey from his imprisonment in 1961 in Louisiana for murder to his eventual release in 2005. Not just imprisonment, either, but decades in Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, a jail with a terrifying reputation that reaches far beyond the Deep South.

Rideau’s book isn’t the expected expression of justice delayed as a result of institutional racism, however. For one thing, he committed the crime he was accused of, killing a woman and injuring another in a botched robbery.