The Mirror A Free Press Flourishes

By DAVID ARNOLD

Severe penalties sometimes threaten the editor of the Mirror, a tabloid published every other week behind the rock walls and accordion-wire fences of the maximum-security Minnesota Correctional Facility at Stillwater. The punishment is likely to come not from the warden or the guards but from any of the approximately 1,200 convicted car thieves, drug dealers, armed robbers, kidnapers, rapists, child abusers and murderers who may take issue with his editorial policy.

In 1984, 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?' "

A 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.

The Mirror is the oldest continuously published newspaper in a U.S. prison, . founded in 1887 by the likes of the notorious bank-robbing Younger brothers, who each served more than 20 years here after a badly planned bank job in Northfield, Minn. Coleman, the eldest, became prison librarian and printer's devil at the newspaper. In his second year Cole was named Mirror editor, and the paper's motto became -- and remains -- "It's never too late to mend."

Among the dark, walled fortresses of U.S. penology, Stillwater is considered a well-secured country club with a relatively mellow population. It is a kind of felon's Lake Wobegon where gangs do not rule and sex offenders outnumber those who have killed; a prison where only the guards wear uniforms and only four of 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 patrol cars.

The Mirror's pages read like a chapter from Tom Peters' In Search of Excellence. In this place of punishment, achievement is possible and highly promoted. The newsmakers in a fall edition of the Mirror were Karta Singh and the other bonsai-club members, who practically blew away the civilian competition at the Minnesota State Fair. "I'm ecstatic about it," Singh told the Mirror. "Winning a blue ribbon motivates me even more, and I think it's a testament to the quality of instruction we're getting."

The 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. I've been there."

Power in prison falls to those who gather it, and Taliaferro prefers to hire men who, like himself, were convicted of capital offenses and therefore face long prison terms. "Short-timers have an ax to grind. They never learn anything in here. They blame everyone else, and they just can't wait to get out and screw up again. Then they come back. I committed murder. Homicide. I put myself in here. I take that responsibility, and I will deal with that."

Taliaferro illustrates the theory that serious crime makes a good prisoner. A former drug addict who killed his wife, he has become a productive citizen of the Stillwater prison. He has almost completed his bachelor's requirements, and hopes to become a college professor someday.

Hovering over his keyboard, Taliaferro cradles the telephone receiver just above the monogrammed RT on his black jersey. Like the capable editor of a small-town newspaper, Taliaferro has the reader by the pulse. He is a leader of his captive constituency: vice president of the Jaycees' Star of the North prison chapter, a leader of a black-culture group and a big editorial voice inside these walls. "I'm a black redneck," he says with a casual smile. If he were free, he'd have voted for George Bush for President even though he thought his candidate didn't understand prison furloughs.

Taliaferro wanted to capitalize on his prison term and invested his time in the Mirror, where he's made big changes. He dropped "Prison" from the masthead, gave the front page a USA Today look, and brought into the cellblocks a broader view of things, quoting frequently from such outside papers as the nearby St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch.

The biggest change was an end to all the bad news. The Mirror's readers will not read about gang rape, booze brewed in a toilet or how a man in C cellblock took a dive from the gym rafters and landed on a broom. Not even an obit for a lifer who died of natural causes. "It's bad enough just being in here," Taliaferro says.

The Mirror casts a lighter, more positive reflection. Booster journalism promotes progressive activities. It includes poetry and several pages of basketball, handball and softball scores. Consumer stories criticize new prison regulations, meat fraud in the cafeteria, movies on the closed-circuit | channel and such outside issues as exploitation of lab animals and the Federal Government's handling of the AIDS crisis.

The newspaper's changes have attracted attention. Three first-place American Penal Press awards received in the past four years and a row of plaques stretch around a newsroom occasionally cluttered with visiting journalists who've come to examine the prison newsroom.

His publisher has noticed the company the Mirror has been keeping. All the awards and publicity have helped give the Mirror a life of its own, says warden Robert Erickson. The newspaper has a fourth-estate status he would not like to challenge. And, after all, how could Erickson mess with history? "Cole Younger would turn over in his grave, with his six-shooters blazing," the warden says.