My Life on Death Row.

• Author: Rideau, Wilbert
• Position: Essay

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Nothing in your previous life prepares you for living on death row. You're like a head of cabbage in a garden: planted, forced to lead a static existence, every day exactly like the last and the next. Unlike the cabbage, though, your life is without purpose. You are a cipher merely holding a place, awaiting your turn in the execution chamber. Until that day comes, perpetual misery is your condition in life, and your reward for surviving today is that you get to surfer tomorrow as well.

On April 11, 1962, I was cuffed, chained, and transported to Louisiana's death row. There were twelve other men living in the fifteen available cells. Roaches scattered as I entered Cell 9. It was about the size of the bathroom in a typical middle class American home: six feet wide by eight feet deep.

Restlessness went with living in such a small space. There was room enough only for push-ups, sit-ups, and squats, insufficient to exercise all the body's muscles. We were allowed out of our cells and into the hallway--one at a time--for only fifteen minutes twice a week for a shower. We spent years like this, always indoors, with no sunshine.

Worse than the physical toll exacted on out bodies was the toll on out minds. Death row was bedlam--an unending chorus of flushing toilets, curses shouted across the tier by feuding inmates, petty arguments over virtually anything, and competing radios trying to out-blare one another. Most of the pandemonium on death row was a result of men being driven mad by monotony, severe emotional deprivation, and the lack of normalcy.

We were like human animals in one of the old-style zoos, before society realized it was inhumane to confine a large beast in a cramped cage. And like the tiger that obsessively bobs from one side to the other of his barred cage, we would pace back and forth over the small patch of floor beside our bunks. Four steps, turn; four steps, turn; four steps, turn, for hours on end, stopping at the bars of the cell to stare out at nothing. On occasion, a man might bang his head against the steel bars so he would draw enough blood to be sent to the hospital for the criminally insane, where conditions were better and the insanity label protected him from execution.

We were a motley lot with little in common save that each had committed a crime. We were lumped together against our will, and life devoid of the pleasantries that prop us up in the outside world was disorienting. Most people...