A mile, or so, in a prisoner's shoes

Per request of a former professor, I am rummaging through old stories and articles from college to send for her students to read as examples and I came across one of my personal favorites. Since I wasn't a blogger in these days I thought I would post it. If you have nothing better to do than read this I highly encourage it. If you know me, you know I feel strongly about the justice system, prison life, death row and much more regarding criminal justice. This story I wrote for a class as a feature article after my second field trip to Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary.) After reading this, I think you will realize there is more to Angola than hand-carved furniture, paintings and one helluva rodeo. This story explains fairly in-depth why I feel the way i do about criminal justice and why, shortly before moving to NYC, I applied to grad school to earn a master's in CJ. Here goes...

A mile, or so, in a prisoner’s shoes

At the end of LA Highway 66 near St. Francisville, La, sits an 18,000-acre gated community.

This community bares beautiful gardens with bright purple petunias and roses, a deep blood-red. A nine-hole golf course is adjacent to the cemetery that is neatly lined with headstones engraved for former residents. Fields of wheat sway gently in the acres surrounding the enormous livestock population. Little white chapels populate the community for residents to worship in.

What mars this otherwise picture perfect scene are the razor sharp wires that glisten in the warm spring sunshine.

Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, is the largest maximum security prison in the nation.

I am in a white school bus now with 15 fellow journalism students, and our professor, Dr. Beth, preparing to tour this beautiful community.

The bus drives down a blacktop road lined with Cypress trees carrying us to the first stop on our tour, the dormitories.

Mary Anthony, classification manager at Angola and our personal tour guide began telling us facts as the bus rode along.

“Of the 5,218 inmates incarcerated, more than 3,800 are serving life sentences, and will never experience freedom again,” she said.

Life sentences in Louisiana are natural life sentences without parole.

“Most of them die here, and most of their families can’t afford funerals so they are buried here, too.”

Angola has prisoners ranging from age 18 to 80 plus years old.

This is my second trip to Angola, and I was really looking forward to a replay of my last visit. Unfortunately, I did not realize this trip included a full tour of the prison until we got there because I had just tagged along with Dr. Beth and her class. The day turned out to be something I was not quite emotionally prepared for.

My first visit to Angola consisted of a three-hour seminar with The Angolite staff in a secluded classroom. The Angolite is Louisiana State Penitentiary’s award-winning magazine written, edited and published by a staff of inmates.  I was really close minded to the realities of prison then. I suppose I could blame my conservative, southern Baptist raising to the attitude I had then. A trip to Angola is a sure fire way to open up a persons mind.

The layout of the dormitory, oddly enough, reminded me of summer camp, but with grown men in uniforms. The dormitory shelters 90 men. Rows of bunk beds lined the room with trunks on each end for the prisoner’s personal belongings, if he has any. The bunks were immaculately made and shoes were paired up beneath each bunk in a straight line. There are a lot of loafs of bread, and I think to myself that they must snack on a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  

Already I am annoyed by this tour. We are not allowed to talk to the prisoner’s but it is okay for us to walk through their home and gawk at them like zoo animals.

We left the dormitories and headed to the hospice area. A hospice nurse, whose name I have forgotten, spoke with us about how hospice came about, why and when. Then, she showed us a trailer for the upcoming documentary that is going to be shown on TV. At that moment, the tears involuntarily poured down my already red, heat-stricken cheeks.

Prisoners are people, too. I just wish everyone on the outside understood that the way Angola does, thanks to Warden Cain.  

I voluntarily stayed behind with Dr. Beth while the other students strolled through the hospital quarters. I knew what to expect in there, and that was something I was not brave enough to witness.

Next comes the best part of the tour that I had long anticipated. At the end of a hallway, there are offices full of books, old computers and journalists. These journalists are prisoners. Trustees, prisoners who have good conduct and have been incarcerated for at least seven years, make up the staff of The Angolite. The magazine is written solely by its eight-member inmate staff.

I stood toward the back, leaned against a countertop and began taking notes while Kerry Myers, editor of The Angolite serving a life sentence, began talking to us.

He wore blue jeans, a maroon Angolite T-shirt, clean, white New Balance sneakers and a gold chain necklace. He looked like any man you’d see on the outside.

Myers talked about the magazine not being a general news magazine, but a criminal justice magazine. He said the staff covers the prison and tries to reveal what the mainstream media does not.

“Mainstream media does not dig deep enough, they just take the governments word as truth and regurgitate it,” he said.

Their magazine makes a person think beyond the limits of mainstream media, which Myers said is managed corporately, not journalistically.

He talked about the staff’s limited resources. They have no Internet access and rely on books, outside sources, other prisoners and their own knowledge to write their stories.

“We have a lot of freedom, but we’re still in prison,” Myers said.

Myers, a 15-year veteran of The Angolite staff, said the staff takes pride in their job, and not just anyone can be part of the crew.

“The pool is broad but not deep,” he said. “We have to know everyone here can be trusted and has the same goal, and that’s the magazine.”

The eight men work together day and night to produce their award-winning magazine.

One of the students asked Myers how long he had been there and he replied, “21 years today.”

The date seemed irrelevant to me, until now. It was Tuesday, April 5, 2011.

I am only 21 years old, as of a month ago. I was 13 days old when he came through Angola’s gates. I do not know Kerry Myers personally, and I had no idea who he was until last October when I first visited Angola. Regardless, it doesn’t seem fair that he has spent, what is to me, an entire lifetime in prison.

I cried a little inside because I had already realized this last October when I visited Angola, but it took me this long to remember the sad thought.

John Corley, another lifer and Angolite staff member, was still there. I met Corley on my first visit to Angola and couldn’t forget him since he is a fellow die-hard Elvis Presley fan such as me. Leave it to me to find that out in a five-minute conversation.  

I shook his hand and told him I was glad to see him again and asked how he had been.

Thinking back that seems like a moronic question to ask a man who is serving a life sentence in prison and essentially has the same daily routine.

The day was depressingly steady as we moved from site to site of the prison, and it never got happier.

Our next stop was the old execution and lock down area known as “Red Hat Cell Block.” Mrs. Anthony informed us that this was where prisoners were sent for punishment when the prison first evolved. They were stripped of their clothes and feed through food slots in the door and sometimes 12 men were piled into one eight by eight holding cell.

Directly next to these cells is the former execution room.

In front of the execution chair is standing room for the public who came to watch executions. Public executions ended in 1973 and Ms. Anthony said that 65 men and one woman were legally executed in that room from 1957 to 1973. She put a lot of emphasis on legally.

The next building we toured was apparently newly erected and resembled the entrance of an elementary school, and for whatever reason I remember the distinct smell of freshly-baked blueberry muffins. I had no idea where we were until someone informed me… We’d arrived at death row.

Inside we walked through a set of doors and proceeded down a hallway that had phone booths and visiting rooms to the left. Ms. Anthony informed us that four times a year, death row prisoners are allowed a visitor, if they are really good.

At the end of the hallway, another door leads into death row. In the center is a round room enclosed by glass with computers and what I assume to be security, surveillances and what-not. The room serves as the center of the building where hallways extend like rays of sunshine, but really the hallways are more like blades on a razor-sharp saw.

I tell Dr. Beth I do not want to walk down the death row hallway, but she insists I cannot truly know how disgusting it is until I go.

So I follow her, and the rest of the students. In a single file line we walk to the end, turn around and return in the same fashion. Again, unable to speak to the prisoner’s, but able to gawk at them like zoo animals.

Again, the tears involuntarily stream down my face, faster and longer. I am disgusted not only with the system, but with myself. I didn’t need to walk the plank to know how disgustingly heartbreaking that was going to be.

There are 83 death row inmates who spend 23 hours a day in their cell and are allowed one hour outside for exercise, twice a week. The exercise area is set up in a small, fenced in area that looks like batting cages. Each cage has a basketball hoop. Their shower stalls are in their cellblock, so they really see nothing but death row. The only sign of life they see in a day, aside from a guard, gawking tourists or fellow inmates passing by is a thin line of trees and grass barely visible through the thick iron bars. It is tragic, and I am slightly nauseous at this point.

There is one more stop on our tour and I can’t even fathom what is left to show in such a hell. Well, of course it only gets worse. Not far from death row is the execution room. Again we are at the end of a hallway. To our right is where the victim’s family, lawyers, etc., sit and watch the inmate die, by lethal injection, through a glass window.

Directly in front of us we proceed through to the room which holds the lethal injection table. An execution table looks exactly like one would imagine or see in a movie. Gray and bleak, with three thick, burgundy-brown colored straps, two at the feet and one around the waste to restrain the inmate. If you need any more of a visual you can watch Dead Man Walking which was filmed at Angola in the late ‘90s.

Angola has used this table since 1991. Eight people have been executed since then.

Inside the execution room, there is a reaper (as I choose to call him.) He is inside a smaller room within the execution room and no one ever sees him except the prisoner facing execution and the warden standing beside the prisoner, but only once the curtains close over the large glass exhibition window. The reaper then comes out, injects the euthanasia, and returns to the closet-sized room and almost instantly, the prisoner is dead.