By TOM KELLY
Editor and Publisher

Except for the 20-foot high chain-link tunnel decorated with razor wire which surrounds the perimeter, this place could be a very bright, spacious modern college campus. And of course, passing through the shake-down (hand over your camera, film, pocket knife, cell phone, pocket change, and driver's license), the metal detector, and the double sliding steel gates which allow you inside the cage, closing behind you before the next one opens, you realize there is a definite emotional difference between "outside" and "inside."

This was only my second time in jail, the first being a few years ago at the federal facility at LaTuna, just outside El Paso, Texas. The emotional differences were similar, and then, as now, I was a guest, just visiting. This time, it was to see the arts and crafts show staged by inmates at the Winn Correctional Center, located in a very scenic pine-covered Kisatchie National Forest tract south of U.S. Highway 84, a few miles west of the Gum Springs Recreation Area not far from Winnfield.

After a long, windy walk across an open space of maybe three to four acres I came to the tall recreation center building, inside which is what appears to be a larger-than-regulation basketball court with bleachers on either side and other fixtures which I never got around to examining. Around three sides of the building interior was a string of long tables covered with a variety of objects - leather purses, decorative pieces, wooden articles of a variety of sizes, shapes, and uses. The place was filled with people walking up and down, noisily talking among themselves and with the artisans seated behind the tables. This could have been a county fair, or trade bazaar. Two-thirds of the way down the first row of exhibits, I spotted what I knew was my destination: a table-top logging set, with a loaded double-bunk trailer attached to a well-known brand-name tractor truck, stopped beside a working loader, and various other machines nearby, made of wood, expertly machined to scale, down to the working hydraulics, out-rigger booms, headlights and horns.

Behind the table, a tall, slender, youthful looking man with a military-type buzz cut, sat talking with an older couple. "You must be Terry Rhodes," I said by way of introducing myself. He gave me a firm handshake and a smile, and conversation that was as loose and easy as if it had been over a plate of catfish at your favorite Piney Woods eatery.

Terry, who appears to be mid-to-upper thirtyish, has served five years of a 28-year term, over an unfortunate incident in which he killed a woman threatening him with a knife.

"I made a mistake. I'll pay my dues," he said, without any touch of rancor toward the system which brought him here. The judge could have ruled differently, but, says Terry, "He's tough, but he's fair."

I made contact with Terry after meeting his father, Terry Rhodes, Sr., who happened to be showing a set of his son's model logging machines to a Winnfield businessman who expected to buy them. Terry, Sr., is a heavy equipment mechanic, and on the side, drives a school bus at the Dodson High School. Terry, Jr., was a woods worker before his incarceration. "I was a sawhand, back when they still had sawhands, in the Nineties," he said. Later he worked with a tree-cutting company clearing utility right of way.

He said he had never done any woodworking similar to the model-making he pursues now. He had dropped out of high school before graduating, and while on his last job, he took courses to complete his G.E.D. in order to qualify for a better job position. He took and passed the test, but failed to get his certificate before his legal problems began. Once inside, the prison officials were able to have the certificate issued to him - a fact in which he expresses pride. Underneath the exhibit table holding his model equipment, Rhodes brings out a copy of Southern Loggin' Times, to show pictures of some of the machines which he uses to scale his models. He also looks forward to his monthly copy of The Piney Woods Journal (for which we have granted him permanent subscriber status, in consideration of the presentation of the model which we have proudly on display at our offices now).

The model making project is a self-liquidating one. Terry buys wood from Marlin Dean, who has a band saw mill at Atlanta, Louisiana. He uses the prison shop facilities, and sells the models at prices average around $125 to $150 per unit. His profit is put into government bonds, to provide a nest-egg for the day when he is free again, or, as he says, "If something happens to me in here, my children will have something to send them to college." He speaks proudly of his two daughters, ages nine and six, who live with their grandmother.

How much time does it take to turn out one of the models? About 20 to 25 hours, Terry said. "The State sentences us to time at hard labor," he said. So, he works from 7 a.m. to around 3 p.m., doing maintenance work, kitchen duty, working on electrical system or machines, skills he comes naturally by, from working with his father earlier. Then, after his regular prison work, he goes immediately to the woodworking shop, and stays "until they run me out, sometimes eight, nine, o'clock or midnight."

Terry volunteered that if we could make the contact for him, he would like to donate one of his models to the Louisiana Logging Council, to be auctioned for the Children's Miracle Network, which he reads about in the logging publications. He thinks that Louisiana should do more for the Network.

"I put myself in here," he said. "Those kids I see at the hospital when I go for a checkup (he has lupus) didn't put themselves in. It's sad to see them."

What about when he gets out? Terry said he would like to study more about the use of biomass for conversion to fuel energy. "Then, I'd like to design a processing head especially for the smaller trees that usually go to waste, so they can be saved for biomass fuel."

Any chance for an earlier release? That's a prospect Terry does not speculate about, although he says, Governor Blanco is doing some things with juvenile prisoners that if they are applied to regular adults, could shorten the time some. His sentence runs until around 2020.

Is there anything we haven't asked or talked about, any piece of advice, you'd offer, I asked.

"Trust God," Terry said. He admitted he did not always follow that advice on the outside, but he has found that it works for him now.

Back