Jodie Sinclair
AM: Jodie, so glad to interview you about this important book and subject, and I’m happy that our mutual friend, Joyce Corrington, introduced us. Your new book is Love Behind Bars, bearing the subtitle “The True Story of An American Prisoner’s Wife.” This is a memoir about the criminal justice system and the fight to save your husband, Bill, from dying while incarcerated. You were a television reporter in Baton Rouge when you met Bill, who was paroled in 2006 and today works as a paralegal.
I’ll start by asking if, in your opinion, the corruption in Louisiana that you’ve so ably rendered in this book is rampant and widespread, or local and concentrated?
JS: Initially, I had a narrow focus. When you marry an inmate, you become an enemy of the system. The system I fought in Louisiana to free my husband masked corruption and incited public fear with disinformation. I wore a wire for the FBI as my husband and I exposed a pardons-for-sale scheme at Angola after he turned down a prison’s official’s request for $15,000 to buy his way out of prison. It made him a “snitch” and put his life in danger. All those who paid the bribe were released. Law enforcement said my husband hadn’t supplied enough evidence to be free. He served 20 more years after doing the right thing. Over the years, I realized inhumanity and cruelty infects too many prisons and the political system that supports it is an accepted way of life in the U.S.
AM: When you decided to begin reporting on issues related to the death penalty, how interested were other journalists and reporters in that subject?
JS: When I arrived at Angola on March 17, 1981 to start my 5-part TV series on the death penalty, only one other TV news crew was at the prison although news about Louisiana’s first execution in 9 years was being covered in Louisiana newspapers. As soon as I learned that Angola was preparing to execute its first inmate since 1972, when the US Supreme Court overturned the death penalty and ordered states to rewrite their death penalty laws, I jumped at the chance to do the story.
AM: Do you think there’s sufficient reporting about the death penalty in 2020?
JS: The death penalty is state sanctioned murder so it deserves extensive coverage. Currently, there are fewer executions, so there is less coverage. According to The New York Times, there were fewer than “30 executions” in 2019, compared to “1999 when there were nearly 100 executions.” But stories about death row inmates, exonerated due to improvements in DNA testing and forensic science, do make headlines and get documentary coverage. The Innocence Project and Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking,” which inspired the blockbuster movie of the same name, have also made a big difference in the decline of public support for the death penalty. However, the threat continues with U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s current petition to resume federal executions.
AM: What were your original intentions when you first settled to report on Louisiana State Penitentiary? Finding love was no doubt beyond the scope of your plan.
JS: When I got the assignment from the News Director at WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge in 1981, where I was a reporter, I was focused on all aspects of the death penalty. I interviewed two death row inmates, a murder victim’s mother, a death row inmate’s mother, a Catholic priest, a prosecutor, 2 inmates who formerly had death sentences and researched how the electric chair kills. Standing beside the chair, I interviewed Angola’s warden about giving the signal to start the execution. The Death House was the last place I expected to find love and the extraordinary man I married.
AM: What are the most promising ways to reform the criminal justice system?
JS: Criminal justice is public business yet the public knows little about it. Prison is the most expensive management tool with the lowest rate of return. It diverts federal and local funds from public schools educating the nation’s poorest children so they don’t turn to crime, the only “job opportunity” available in too many of our country’s urban neighborhoods. That would significantly reduce the crime rate. In prison, rehabilitation should be the goal. Prisons should provide educational opportunities for inmates who want high school diplomas or college degrees. According to a National Institute of Justice study in 2017, the recidivism rate dropped to zero for prisoners who got masters degrees. In 2017, recidivism rates for inmates with vocational training dropped approximately 30 percent.
AM: Do you think your book might drive important policy changes?
JS: Sister Helen Prejean wrote my book’s Preface because she says my husband is a great example of why the death penalty should be abolished. At age 21, Billy Sinclair was sent to Death Row, convicted of killing a man in an accidental shooting. On death row, the 10th grade dropout became an avid reader and student of the law. When the U.S. Supreme Court vacated his death sentence in 1972, he was sentenced to life without parole. As the Columbia University Journalism Review put it in 1987, Billy and his co-editor of The Angolite had become the “Woodward and Bernstein of prison journalism.” The Angolite was the only uncensored prison publication in the U.S. Their searing articles on rape, violence, and corruption behind bars won a “host of major prizes” from a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and an American Bar Association Silver Gavel to a George Polk Award. Billy went on to expose the pardons for sale scam, putting his own life at risk, and revealing other shocking facts about the Louisiana prison system and its officials.
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AM: How did your marriage to a lifetime inmate affect your personal relationships with others?
JS: Almost no one knew about it except for my family and some close friends. Once I returned to Texas, after I had to give up my position as a reporter for Channel 9 in Baton Rouge because I had developed a relationship with a prisoner that created a conflict of interest, I never revealed anything about my marriage to employers. And they never asked. The people who knew were always very supportive. In the end, while I was working for a prominent state agency in Houston and my first book came out, I offered to resign rather than tarnish its reputation. The board refused to accept my resignation and wished me luck in my fight to free Billy.
AM: Without revealing too much of Billy’s story—I want our readers to buy your book, after all—can you say what it reveals about the perverse incentives within the criminal justice system—from “snitching,” cooperating with investigations, plea bargaining, and on down the line.
JS: In an article in 2001, The Houston Chronicle described me as a “child of privilege” from an upper class Republican family in Texas with lavish homes, foreign travel, and a private school education. Yet I had the opportunity over the 25 years I fought to free my husband to experience firsthand the brutality most inmate families and their loved ones endure.
AM: If you could tell our readers anything—anything at all, about anything at all—what would it be?
JS: I support murder victim’s families as they strive for justice for murdered loved ones. To do less would betray the victim. Selective enforcement cheats them. There are two prime examples in my book. A Shreveport doctor killed his sleeping wife with a sledge hammer and served 11 years in Louisiana. A Bossier Parish man, rebuffed by his girlfriend, went into a bar with a shotgun where she was sitting with his best friend, opened fire, and killed two people, injuring several others. He served 23 years.
My husband served 40 years for firing an unaimed bullet over his shoulder as he ran away from the store he tried to rob in the dark. It killed the clerk chasing him. The victim’s family in my husband’s case had powerful political connections in Louisiana so they could manipulate the system to get a much harsher punishment for my husband. The family of the doctor’s wife and the families of victims in the bar didn’t get the same level of “justice” for their loved ones. Selective enforcement makes the criminal justice system unjust. It isn’t fair and it isn’t unique. If you ask others to obey the law, you – the system – must obey the law.
AM: Thank you for the interview, Jodie. I know our readers will appreciate this book.
About Allen Mendenhall
Love Behind Bars: The True Story of an American Prisoner’s Wife is the true life story of two earnest, honest, spiritual people prevailing against the unimaginable. At heart, two peas in a pod but in life’s experience as different as night and day, this pair endures endless assaults from implacably vengeful “Christians” and countless brazen illegalities by so-called “Defenders of the Law,” but bolstered by an improbable, unfaltering, unending love and the steadfast support of a few very good people.
Prefaced by the celebrated author of “Deadman Walking”, Love Behind Bars reveals even more about the dreaded Angola prison, about the common, but inhumane, punishment that could befall any prisoner from a minor infraction, a mere appearance of infraction or from nothing but a tiny lie by a jealous or power-hungry guard.
The prison subject of this book experienced Angola from its worst times in the sixties, to improved times decades later; but even then, life in Angola and other Louisiana prisons into which the book takes us was an enduring horror, with constant danger of losing ones life, especially if you are unlucky enough to be a highly principled person. Yes, especially if you’re living up to your highest ideals of good, decent human behavior.
It was 1971. I was a young lawyer living in Baton Rouge who was appointed to represent a man on death row at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The prisoner’s name was Billy Wayne Sinclair. He had commenced an action on behalf of himself and other death row inmates to gain exercise rights and access to medical care. Thereafter, I made many trips up to Angola, driving 25 miles or so north to St. Francisville and then another 15 miles west on a winding road through the Tunica Hills to the prison.
I always had to steel myself for those trips. For one thing, it always seemed to rain, and not just rain, but driving, bucketsful of water falling on the car, making the drive perilous. The guards were at best dismissive; at worst rude and coarse. The noise, smells, clamor and cursing on the cellblock assaulted my senses. The stories I heard assaulted my sensibilities. I was always glad to get home to see and be with my young wife.
In her autobiography, “Love Behind Bars: The True Story of an American Prisoner’s Wife,” ” Jodie Sinclair tells of the myriad journeys, much longer and more arduous than mine ever were, that she made for 25 years to see Billy Sinclair, the former death row inmate that I represented 49 years ago.
She left her home in Houston every other weekend, without fail, to be with him, often for just an hour or two – wherever the arbitrary and punitive transfers engaged in by the Louisiana prison system landed Billy – first to Angola, then to the State Police Barracks in Baton Rouge, then to the far northern reaches of the state to a prison just outside Homer, and finally to a prison just north of Lake Charles.
After reading Jodie’s book, you will hardly know what to think. Could there possibly be a prison administration as venal, corrupt, and downright cruel as the one Jodie Sinclair found herself up against? Could an East Baton Rouge family possibly have such deep political roots and connections as to be able to exact a measure of punishment (and revenge) so disproportionately extreme and punitive compared to other similarly situated prisoners? Could the political machinations, hidden agendas, and blind alleys Jodie always seemed to encounter from every corner of Louisiana’s criminal justice system ever be exposed and brought to account?
Rather than providing answers, Jodie Sinclair’s book details the challenging and mind-numbing realities she faced and what she brought to the fight – endurance, courage, stubbornness, a razor sharp intelligence and a faith in her husband that refused to be shaken or denied.
In his autobiography, a “Life in the Balance: The Billy Sinclair Story,” published in 2000, Billy tells the improbable story of his journey through an otherworldly harsh, unforgiving landscape, detailing the manner in which this country chooses to impose its punishments.
Jodie’s autobiography “Love Behind Bars” tells a different story – one of a system, pockmarked with evil and an abiding disregard for the humanity of people who pass through it, that was ultimately defeated by the power and promise of two people in love.
In the end, it is a singularly riveting love story, pure and simple. And I urge you to pick it up and read it. After you’ve finished, nothing will seem to exist beyond the power of your own abilities.
Thank you for an in-depth interview, which helps reinforce some of the particulars of the book for readers outside the USA (I live in the UK). For me, “Love Behind Bars” is the true story of a man who spent more than 40 years locked up in the United States and the reporter who arrived to do a TV series on the death sentence and who went on to marry him. Together, in the face of great personal danger, they took action against entrenched corruption in the prison system and fought for general reform. That bare outline contains a fast-paced stranger-than-fiction thriller that reveals a deep love affair and concern for the truth as well as a detailed, poignant inside story of the physical and emotional challenges of prison life.
Raw and searingly honest, Love Behind Bars takes us into the sanctity of unflinching loyalty and truly unconditional love. It is a memoir for our times, at once a prescient reminder of the destructive nature of unchecked state power, and an intimate rekindling of our faith in the human spirit’s ability to overcome. Meticulously recounted and naked in its intensity, the book proves once again the truth of Dr. King’s wise adage: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”