Cowboy Prisoners
Daniel Bergner's God of the Rodeo: The Search for Hope, Faith, and a Six-Second Ride in Louisianna's Angola Prison
Mark Berkey-Gerard
April 1, 1999
God of the Rodeo: The Search for Hope, Faith, and a Six-Second Ride in Louisiana's Angola Prison by Daniel Bergner (Crown, 1998), 304 pp.
Daniel Bergner's investigation of Louisiana's notorious Angola state penitentiary and its annual convict rodeo is, he admits, a spiritual quest. "I hoped to find visions of redemption," he says, "even as I knew the perversity of the rodeo was thoroughly at odds with what I hoped to see." It's an earnest, and sometimes incredibly naive, approach to one of the country's toughest prisons. Of the 5,000 inmates at Angola, 85 percent are violent offenders—rapists, murderers, brutal thieves—many serving life sentences. And the prison operates mere generations removed from its roots as a slave plantation, with mostly African-American prisoners working in the fields and answering, "Yessir," to white guards.
However, Bergner's quest provides the insight, and the blind faith, necessary to get him deeper into the system than would otherwise be possible, making God of the Rodeo more than just another book about prisons in America. It's a story of how we are deceived, who we are willing to believe, and where we choose to find beauty and possibility.
The Angola rodeo, held annually since 1964, is spectacle of sport, gore, public humiliation, and occasionally, individual triumph. Real rodeo events like bull riding go alongside crowd pleasers like "Guts and Glory," in which a red chip worth $100 dangles between the horns of a bull. Thirty convicts in the ring try to grab the chip with their bare hands, often getting gored and trampled in the process. The rodeo is the closest most spectators will ever come to the inmates, for whom it's one slim chance to be more than a criminal. The inmates compete for the ...
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