Back in 1990, when Inmate No. 40493, Luke Janusz, took over as editor of the little prison newspaper at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Norfolk, the administration had every reason to be wary of what lay ahead. For one thing, Janusz was a fairly well-educated con, having spent part of his years behind bars earning both a B.A., magna cum laude, and an M.A. from Boston University. For another, as director of an inmate program that counseled troubled youths, he had already outmaneuvered the prison hierarchy by incorporating the endeavor outside the walls and soliciting funds from private sources so the authorities couldn't dictate how he spent the money. And when the deputy superintendent at first turned him down for the editorship of the prison paper, for failing to display a sufficient amount of "positive institutional behavior," Janusz appealed the rejection to the more liberally inclined chief superintendent -- since cashiered by conservative Governor William Weld -- and got the decision reversed. Thus it came as no surprise to Janusz when he showed up on day one of the new job to find a cryptic advisory awaiting him from the deputy: "Don't fuck up."

Since then Janusz has not only justified the department's fears that it had a true maverick on its hands, but he's also succeeded in producing one of the most hard-hitting prisoner-run journals in the country -- and easily the best-looking. Titled Odyssey, for the long journey home by Odysseus, the 145-glossy-page magazine, now in its third year of publication, has run investigative stories exposing scams in the Department of Corrections' budget requests, cover-ups involving prisoner deaths, and a conflict-of-interest case wherein a prison official took a high-paying job with the private contractor he was supposed to oversee.

Janusz's favorite targets are prison officials whose penchant for brutality has cost Massachusetts taxpayers millions of dollars in court settlements of lawsuits brought on prisoners' behalf by the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. After on $ 1.8 million verdict that went against nine staff members at the maximum-security prison in Walpole for what was determined to be their "malicious," "sadistic," and "inhuman" treatment of prisoners, the magazine found out that, far from being demoted or even reprimanded, nearly all the officers won significant promotions. Two were elevated to superintendencies in Massachusetts, and a third, whom Odyssey nicknamed "The Caligula of Corrections," became assistant director of corrections in neighboring Rhode Island. "There's one correctional officer in the system who's been cited in twenty-two brutality suits," says Janusz. "I haven't gotten around to writing about him yet, but the story's going to be headlined 'The $ 5 Million Guard.'"

It goes without saying that prison officials have not been too thrilled with Odyssey's crusade, and over the years they've expended considerable time and effort to shut Janusz up. Twice he was thrown into the hole -- i.e., isolated -- for three-month stints on charges that, on appeal, were adjudged to be groundless. Another time he was sent off "by mistake" to Walpole from his medium-security home at Norfolk. His staff has been threatened with reprisals if they continued to write for the magazine. At one point the prison press room was padlocked; thousands of copies of the magazine were confiscated, along with its files, and Odyssey was declared contraband material, not allowed inside the walls on the ground that it threatened to jeopardize prison security.

"They'd say it was a jeopardy, but we were never a threat to security; it was all in their heads," says Janusz, who was released from prison a year ago and now publishes the magazine on the outside. "They're so used to having total control, they get hostile when they're challenged by anyone, and by prisoners of all people. Like any authoritarian system, the people who have the power feel very threatened by a free press."

Supported largely by small foundation grants and occasional help from newspaper publishers, Odyssey circulates to a national audience of 5,000, many of them judges, legislators, and academics, generally people with an interest in making the country's prison system more humane. So far, Janusz has managed to bring out five issues. Unlnike The Anolite -- the award-winning journal published by inmates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola -- Odyssey augments its inmate-written investigative pieces with articles commissioned from criminologists, civil liberties advocates, and former corrections officials who, having quit their jobs, feel they can safely criticize the system. One of them, Abu Hanif Abdal-Khallaq, former superintendent of the highly successful Boston Pre-Release Center, which boasted the third lowest recidivist rate in the country, turned to the magazine last spring to explain that he had opted for early retirement after seeing his program gutted and the Massachusetts system drift toward a harder line. "When the main topic of superintendents' meetings became the ricochet factors of bullets, I knew it was time for me to leave," he wrote.

The magazine has also run interviews with subjects as disparate as pacifist priest and poet Dan Berrigan and conservative Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr ("I would have two electric chairs -- Old Sparky, no waiting"). The most recent issue -- Spring 1993 -- contains a "Harper's Index" look-alike. Sample items:

Chances a black male will be incarcerated in South Africa: 1 in 147.

Chances a black male will be incarcerated in the United States: 1 in 30.

Percentage of America's 1.2 million prisoners who are addicted to drugs: 66

Occasionally, Odyssey carries ads soliciting articles from current and former correctional officers ("Help us to write an honest, sympathetic, and comprehensive article about what it means to be a prison guard.")

In his editorials and in several pieces he's ordered up, Janusz plunks hard for what he calls "restorative" rather than "retributive" justice -- changing prisoners' attitudes so they can be restored to society committed to play by the rules. "Over 98 percent of the inmates presently incarcerated will return to live in the community," he wrote in his introduction to the first issue. "If they are released as the same people they were when they were incarcerated, or made worse by their experience in prision, how has society been served?"

Exactly how to accomplish this turn-around on a large scale is, of course, the central question that penologists have been wrangling over for more than a century. Along with more education programs and innovative approaches to prisoner therapy, Janusz puts a lot of faith in guilt -- in imbuing inmates with a sense of remorse for their crimes so they can internalize the differences between right and wrong. Humiliated and brutalized by the prison system, it's the inmates, he argues, who end up feeling like the true victims, more sorry for themselves than for the people they've committed crimes against. "The prison system is like a parent who punishes a child day in and day out, so that the child is made to feel so resentful and angry that he never feels sorry for what he did," he says.

Bringing inmates to the point where they can own up to the pain their crimes have caused can also work to the benefit of their victims. One of Janusz's suggestions is to expand the few pilot programs around the country that bring the victims inside the prison to confront criminals directly and to negotiate "contracts" with them for some kind of payback, whether in the form of monetary restitution or community service the inmate performs after getting out. Both victim and perpetrator, the theory goes, will gain from the experience.

Last year the magazine ran a moving Q & A piece about a Rhode Island mother named Suzanne Molhan, whose son was shot to death during a robbery that involved a $ 25 necklace. She subsequently formed a group called Family and Friends of Murdered Victims and finally, nine years after the crime, summoned the courage to confront her son's murderer in prison. "I went there to find out why he did it, to get answers about what happened that only the murderer could give," says Mrs. Molhan, whose story drew letters from all over the country. "I was even willing to ask him, 'Did my son provoke you?'"

As it turned out, she discovered that the killing was even more wanton than she had thought; the man said he shot her son for no reason at all while out on a drug spree, and took the necklace as an afterthought. During the two-and-a-half-hour meeting, she vented her long-pentup anger; the killer, in return, promised to enter drug treatment and get a general equivalency diploma so as to increase his chances of finding a job when he gets out in a few years. Releasing her anger, and eliciting even that small gesture from him, had a profound effect, she says: "I had spent nine years wanting him to know how he had given me a life sentence of pain. When I walked out of there I was mentally exhausted but I felt totally relieved."

Editor Janusz, now thirty-six, had a dozen years in prison during which to ponder his own transgressions. Raised in New Bedford, the son of a postman -- his parents split up when he was ten -- he won a basketball scholarship to Brandeis University, but after making the dean's list his freshman year he gave in to his drug habit, dropped out of school, and began committing crimes, mostly holding up drug stores with a sawed-off shotgun. "Like Willie Sutton said about banks, I held up drugstores because that's where the drugs were," says Janusz. Caught and sentenced to five years in 1979, he came out of prison only to resume his robbery career. He was soon caught again -- after a druggist got the drop on him and fired off three rounds with a .38, hitting him in the chest and shoulder. Janusz staggered from the store and managed to extract one of the bullets with a jackknife. Three days later, he was nabbed by the police at the end of a high-speed chase. "It wasn't until the second sentence that I started taking things seriously," he says.

Before Janusz took it over, the sixteen-page newspaper at Norfolk, like most prison papers, had a distinctly home-made look, filled mainly with stories on inmate prayer breakfasts and basketball games, none of them likely to raise any hackles. To get the money he needed for a more significant effort, Janusz lobbied inmates on the prison council, a body representing "houses," or living units, at Norfolk, which voted him nearly $ 4,000 out of the profits earned by the prison commissary. He promised the black prisoners to cover issues involving racism, the Vietnam veterans to cover their club meetings, and members of the Boston mob to, in effect, not cover them at all. ("Most people in organized crime like to keep themselves out of the headlines, because it might affect their appeals," he says.) Next he collected a core staff consisting of inmates who could not be easily threatened in the event they wrote anything offensive to the administration. One was a convicted killer named Patrick O'Shea, who is working on a life sentence plus 100 years for shooting one police officer during a bank robbery in Massachusetts and another in Wisconsin, pulling a prison escape in Connecticut, and kidnapping two sheriff's deputies in Georgia, chaining them to a tree and driving off in their cruiser. A founding member of the Massachusetts Lifers' Organization, O'Shea was pretty much impervious to intimidation from staff and inmates alike. "I'd been all over the federal and state system, been in solitary confinement for years and years," he says. "There was nothing short of death that they hadn't already done to me."

To give the magazine a professional look, Janusz, who taught himself all about graphics, prints the issues on high-quality stock and runs only the sharpest, most compelling photographs and artwork. He also turns into a demon when it comes to copy editing. For the initial issue he spend several hundred scarce dollars to make-over the magazine when he found the first article contained a spelling error, a misplaced comma, a wrong capital letter, and a typo. "I called in the staff and I told them, 'If you don't think your words are important then no one else will,'" Janusz recalls. "'Maybe you've bought into the fact that this is a prison journal and that that means making excuses for it. Well, you are in prison and you're compelled to do certain things, wear certain clothes, but doing this magazine is something we can choose to do right. So I want it to reflect the fact that we don't choose to be degraded anymore.'"

Janusz rain into difficulties with the administration right away. After the appearance of the first issue, which contained an article critical of a new modular housing unit as overly repressive, he was charged with being the "silent leader" of a hunger strike going on at the time. He appealed the accusation to the chief superintendent, who found him not guilty, but not before Janusz had spent three months in the hole. During his isolation he assigned articles for the second issue and, in preparation for a profile of a well-known criminal lawyer, mailed out a series of questions. He also did the application work for some sixty grants to get outside money. "The first time I was lugged to the hole I said to myself, 'Ah, hah, this will happen again and again. There's no way a prison magazine can exist unless the prisoners own the financial and administrative base.' What I needed to do was set up a corporation without the DOC knowing about it."

After Issue No. 2 appeared, this one with a striking cover caricature showing a guard muzzling a Charley McCarthy-like puppet dressed in prison stripes, Janusz was given a surprise urine test to detect drug use, informed that the sample wasn't enough to do the test adequately, charged with refusing to preovide an adequate amount, and thrown back into the hole. It was three more months before his sister Greta, a lawyer, got the prison laboratory to admit it had enough urine to do not only one test but ten others as well, and the charge was dropped. During Janusz's lock-up this time, the new superintendent at Norfolk -- the old one having been fired -- raided Odyssey's offices and confiscated most of the press run, along with all the letters to the editor in response to the second issue. By the time Janusz reemerged from the hole, however, he had raised enough money to buy his own computer, hire an outside person to input the articles, and run off the subsequent issues on an outside press.

Last year John Reinstein, legal director of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, managed to persuade the DOC to rescind its ban and allow the magazine, published out of Janusz's apartment in Dedham, Massachusetts, inside the state's institutions. "For the inmates there's an immediacy to Odyssey that the daily newspapers don't have for you and me," Reinstein says. "It's enormously important to them, because it expresses their legitimate grievances, against the system, the petty indignities they experience every day. If they can't express their grievances, there's just nothing else in their lives."

A more important effect, in the opinion of one Boston journalist, is the influence Odyssey could have on the public at large. "What I like about it is that it defies the stereotype that all people in prison are these illiterate, dangerous, irredeemable people," says Chris Black, a political reporter for The Boston Globe who covers corrections as part of her beat. "It makes a difference that at least one person is trying to show their humanity in the face of a society that couldn't care less."

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