Pubdate: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 1998 Mercury Center Contact: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: Daniel Bergner PALL IN THE SADDLE Louisiana Prison Rodeo Makes Inmates Into Gladiators GOD OF THE RODEO: The Search for Hope, Faith, and a Six-Second Ride in Louisiana's Angola Prison By Daniel Bergner Crown, 304 pp., $24 BY LEWIS BEALE I ONCE wrote a story about the only synagogue in an American prison. Its members were primarily convicted murderers: One had killed his girlfriend after a weekend of heavy drug use, another was a motorcycle gang member and multiple murderer, a third had robbed a store and then killed the owner. I remember thinking these men must have been on some kind of mission to disprove the stereotype that the only crimes Jews commit are the financial, white-collar kind. Which is a roundabout way of saying that there are at least 1.7 million great stories in the U.S. penal system (the number of people currently incarcerated), and very few of them are as compelling as the tale Daniel Bergner has chosen to tell. Bergner spent a year at Angola, the massive maximum-security prison farm in rural Louisiana. Intrigued by the facility's annual rodeo -- a bizarre, and hugely popular, event that has all the trappings of a gladiatorial contest -- Bergner was also determined to find out more about Warden Burl Cain, a man who professed to run a compassionate administration guided by deeply held religious principles. Bergner's book focuses on six convicts who participate in the rodeo, and the author's relationship with Cain. The inmates, almost all of them in for life without parole, run the gamut from those who are rehabilitated and remorseful for their crimes to one who dreams of escape so he can murder the people who testified against him. Bergner looks for signs of humanity in all of these convicts, but he is not an apologist for the deeds they committed. Still, a key theme throughout the book is that of redemption, and the most moving parts of ``God of the Rodeo'' detail the struggles of a parolee to stay on the straight and narrow. But only a few can be redeemed -- least of all the warden. Cain proves to be an egotistical hypocrite who makes shady deals with private businessmen for convict labor, tries to extort money from the author to guarantee prison access, and generally runs Angola as if it were a slave plantation -- which, in fact, it once was. This brave, beautifully written book has a sobering message: The way we treat criminals reveals a lot about ourselves. Watching the rodeo, as prisoners in striped cowboy outfits put their bodies on the line before a civilian crowd filled with blood lust, Bergner writes that ``the uniforms helped to gratify (a basic longing): that murderers and rapists and armed robbers . . . be not at all like us, that they be largely inhuman. . . . We weren't the animals; along with the rodeo stock, the animals were out there, in the stripes, in the ring.'' Lewis Beale writes for the New York Daily News. - --- Checked-by: Patrick Henry