COWPOKES IN CHAINS

By ADAM COHEN, IN ANGOLA

CLIFFORD BOWMAN, LEFT, IS EVERYTHING A RODEO HERO SHOULD BE. He rides tall in the saddle. He can hang on to a bucking bull with the best of them. He can milk a wild cow, and he's handy with a gun--after all, he's serving a life sentence for killing his father-in-law with a rifle.

No, Bowman is not your run-of-the-mill broncobuster. But he is the winner of this year's All-Around Champion Cowboy title at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Site of the only all-inmate rodeo in the nation, Angola is home to what the event's organizers tout as a "gang of crazy convict cowboys." Among them: all-around runner-up Johnny Brooks, right, who owes his title to skillful bull riding and a botched grocery-store robbery; and Terry Hawkins, a former butcher-shop employee who killed his supervisor with a hammer and went on to win this year's "Guts & Glory," an event in which contestants try to remove a poker chip taped to the forehead of an angry bull.

While prisoners are fairly unpopular these days in most parts of the country, some 20,000 Louisianans were willing to wait in line for hours and pay $7 ($3 for the kids) to attend the sold-out shows at the state's only maximum-security prison. Parents with a sense of humor took photos of their children behind bars in a replica of an Angola prison cell. Business was also brisk at the "Lifers' Sno-Cones" refreshment booth, manned by a murderer and an aggravated rapist. In a nice Jailhouse Rock touch, an all-convict band named Pros and Cons provided the music.

A sprawling 18,000-acre work farm that has as grim a history as any prison in America, Angola might seem like an unlikely place to go looking for a good time. The fieldwork used to be so brutal that in 1951, 31 prisoners cut their Achilles tendons in protest. But today, thanks to a federal lawsuit and changes in prison leadership, the mood is about as upbeat as it can be in a facility that boasts watchtowers, razor-wire fences and a lethal-injection chamber.

Some audience members no doubt attend in hopes of seeing the rodeo animals dish out a little cruel-and-unusual punishment. "They think if a prisoner falls off a horse and gets stepped on, maybe that's what he deserves," says Bowman. The risk of injury at Angola is actually higher than at a non-inmate rodeo because many of the men have no experience with bulls and bucking broncos. "Some of these prisoners are from the big city and have never been on an animal before," notes Dan Klein Jr., one of the rodeo's producers. "The bad ones are really bad." Audiences in the past have been rewarded with broken bones and, once, a fatal heart attack.

But the crowd's good-natured cheering seems to indicate that the majority are rooting for the cons not to get trampled. Warden Burl Cain hopes his men, with their sometimes accomplished bull wrestling and barrel jumping, are leaving a lasting impression. "These inmates don't have horns and a fork and a tail," says Cain. "The rodeo shows that they can be rehabilitated--that they're real people too."