Death row station spins hope on air

KLSP, a radio station with one turntable, six employees and a $48 weekly payroll, has limited reach over this patch of swampy farmland and razor wire northwest of Baton Rouge. It is meant to be that way.

The station director and most of the DJs are convicted murderers. Most of its 5,100 listeners are serving life sentences at the Louisiana State Penitentiary here. The 100-foot metal pole that transmits the station’s FCC-approved signal — a relatively weak but consistent 100 watts — rises from a grassy knoll behind death row.

Death row, home to 83 men, is where KLSP-FM (91.7), which prison officials say is the nation’s only licensed prison radio station, finds its most dedicated audience and inspiration for its core mission: spreading the word of Jesus (and an occasional message from the warden) to men doomed to die behind bars.

“Our greatest challenge is to give hope where there is hopelessness,” said Burl Cain, the warden at Angola, where the average sentence is 89.9 years with almost no chance of parole.

“This radio station helps do that — it beams out positive information, positive gospel music,” he said. “Even gospel rap.”

The station is in a two-room cinderblock shed next to Angola’s main prison compound. KLSP, “the incarceration station, the station that kicks behind the bricks,” as Sirvoris Sutton, a DJ and program manager, puts it, broadcasts from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily.

A Harris AirWave mixing board, two CD players, an aging Gem Sound turntable and a digital playlist pump out a steady variety of gospel — praise and worship, uptempo, quartet and choir — during work hours. After 6 p.m., the prison’s six DJs, who earn 20 cents an hour, spin an eclectic mix of bluegrass, hip-hop and golden oldies. Friday nights, after a talk show for 170 Muslim inmates, KLSP reveals its regional bias, playing hours of swamp pop, a Cajun brand of rock ’n’ roll.

Still, prison officials screen all music for sexual, violent or negative lyrics; gangsta rap and heavy metal are not played. The station has no telephone, so song requests arrive by prison mail. DJs, all of them inmate trustees allowed to move without guards, can be fired for breaking the smallest rule, including using KLSP stationery, as one former DJ did, to write letters to a girlfriend.

KLSP also dives into old-fashioned radio journalism. A five-minute satellite news feed from the Moody Bible Institute’s broadcasting arm in Chicago arrives at 55 minutes past each hour. Celebrity visitors, mainly well-known Christians, including the former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman and the televangelist Kenneth Copeland, sit for live interviews. A 12-inch color television in the studio carries news from outside.

“It’s one of the better jobs you can have here,” said Sutton, 35. (His on-air name, DJ Shaq, was given to him by inmates who saw him dunk a basketball.) The station’s purpose is “to begin to understand the men here,” he said. A prison radio station has to connect differently with its listeners: “It’s a different language.”