Word: taliaferro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...