It is rodeo day at Louisiana's state penitentiary, home to 5,200 murderers,
rapists and armed robbers, and thousands of spectators are having a grand
old time. They have seen prisoners hurled from bucking broncos, and others
competing to hold a wild cow long enough to extract a cup of milk. They
revelled in “Convicts' Poker” - a perennial favourite that involves four
prisoners playing cards at a table as they are charged by a bull: the last
one sitting wins.
Three men have already been taken to hospital, but the convicts don't mind.
They are volunteers, and the rodeo offers them a rare chance to win money,
have fun and, for once in their wretched lives, stand tall.
Now it is time for the finale - “Guts and Glory”. About 50 inmates will vie to
pluck a $600 (£305) poker chip from between the horns of a rampaging 2,000lb
bull. The huge beast erupts from its pen. It charges at the nearest men, who
scatter. It catches a man on one horn and tosses him into the air. Another
inmate is trampled. Nobody dares to get near the raging animal.
Then one prisoner - tall, black and strongly built - finds himself alone in
the centre of the ring, facing the bull. He stands his ground. The animal
hesitates and lowers its head menacingly. The man darts forward and vaults
over the flailing horns, snatching the chip as he does so.
Alan “Foots” Pharr, 43, has served 21 years for shooting a shopkeeper in a
robbery. As the crowd stands and applauds, he approaches the VIP box. There
he throws the chip to Burl Cain, the prison warden.
It was a gesture of gratitude, Pharr explains afterwards. Winning “Guts and
Glory” was the greatest achievement of his troubled existence. “Warden Cain
gave me the chance to make something of my life, and I wanted to show him
that I'd done that.” That is a remarkable thing for a convict to say about
his jailer, but it is a sentiment heard often in this extraordinary prison,
commonly known as Angola.
“He's the best warden we've ever had,” says Jerry Williams, 51, one of
hundreds of convicts selling food and handicrafts outside the stadium while
an inmate band serenades the visiting public. Williams has served 31 years
for murder.
“God always uses a vessel, and God has used Warden Cain,” says Carlwyn Turner,
47, a convicted rapist who is a disc jockey for the only federally licensed
radio station in a US prison - the “Incarceration Station”. “Warden Cain has
given a lot of guys purpose. That's what keeps them going,” says Lane
Nelson, 53, another convicted killer and “Death Row” correspondent of The
Angolite, the prison's award-winning newspaper.
It is hard to argue with such accolades. Cain, 65, a fervent Christian with a
deep Southern drawl and the build of a refrigerator, believes he was sent to
Angola to do God's work, and what he has achieved there in 13 years is
little short of a miracle.
He has transformed the most violent maximum security prison in America into
its safest. He has turned Angola into a place where families with young
children happily consort with convicted killers at the spring and autumn
rodeos. He has brought hope where there was only despair.
Angola occupies a remote loop of the Mississippi and, but for the six heavily
guarded camps where the prisoners live, it could be a manicured private
estate. Its roads are lined with flowerbeds and white fences. They dissect
18,000 acres of rich farmland on which the inmates tend cattle and grow
ample crops for the prison's needs. With labour costing just four cents an
hour, it is one of the last places in America where cotton is still picked
by hand.
There are no watchtowers or fences around the 26-mile perimeter because the
swirling Mississippi is virtually unswimmable, and the fourth side is
flanked by impenetrable forested hills. The prison keeps a pack of
bloodhounds just in case.
On a fine spring day Angola looks almost beautiful, but until recently its
history was one of relentless suffering. Before the Civil War it was a slave
plantation. Afterwards convicts worked it, and were so brutally abused that
between 1870 and 1900 3,000 died. Many were buried in the levees they were
building along the Mississippi.
In the 1930s guards inflicted thousands of floggings on prisoners. In 1951, 31
convicts cut their Achilles tendons in protest at their appalling treatment.
As recently as the mid-1970s gangs ran wild, new inmates were routinely
sodomised and prisoners slept with knives beneath their pillows. At least 40
were killed between 1972 and 1975, prompting Time magazine to label Angola
“the bloodiest prison in America”.
Even today it represents, in one sense, the worst of the US penal system. It
is a prison from which only a handful of inmates will leave in anything but
a coffin, no matter how exemplary their behaviour.
Lifers account for 71 per cent of them, and in Louisiana “life” means life -
even first offenders are ineligible for parole. The rest are serving
sentences averaging 91 years. “A lot of people are in for crimes of
passion,” says David Garrett, a former dentist serving life for murder. “It
was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but in Louisiana you're locked up for ever.”
As if that is not enough to break prisoners' spirits, most are abandoned by
their families. Their wives find someone else, their children stop visiting,
their mothers die. Four fifths of Angola's overwhelmingly black and
ill-educated inmates receive no visitors. A third are buried there because
no one claims their bodies.
“It's downright evil,” says Douglas “Swede” Dennis, 72, who arrived in Angola
half a century ago. The former Marine was hitching through Shreveport one
night in 1957 when the police detained him for no apparent reason, and he
accidentally killed a man during a brawl in the holding cell.
In Angola the next year he lost an eye when attacked by fellow inmates. In
1964 he killed a notoriously violent prisoner in self-defence and received a
second sentence. He escaped in 1979 but was recaptured ten years later and
is now recovering from open heart surgery. The only way he will ever leave
now is in a body bag, he says.
“Do I still think I belong here? No. I think I should have been out decades
ago.”
Cain agrees. “Prison should be for predators, not dying old men,” he says.
“Some people need to die in prison. Some people we can't change. But just
because you can't change some doesn't mean you can't change any.” At least
half Angola's inmates are redeemable, some are genuinely good men and a few
are probably innocent of any crime, he says.
Such hopelessness would seem to be a recipe for violence among prisoners with
nothing left to lose. But Cain sees opportunity in their despair. He regards
them not as evil men to be locked up and forgotten, but as souls to be
saved. He preaches “moral rehabilitation”. He seeks to persuade his captive
flock that they can still reach Heaven if they mend their ways. He recalls
his mother's edict when he took the job: “If you don't see that those
prisoners have a chance to know Him, He will hold you accountable for their
souls.”
Cain, a self-styled “benign dictator”, has doubled the number of prison
chaplains, built chapels in all six camps, and opened a Baptist Bible
college that trains inmates to become ministers.
He calls Angola “the land of new beginnings” and has had a biblical verse
inscribed in stone at the prison entrance: “I have learnt to forgive and
forget about the things that are behind me. I am pressing forth and reaching
for the things that are before me.” It is a message that falls on soil as
fertile as Angola's silt-covered fields.
Cain claims that at least half his inmates have found God. More than 140 have
graduated from the Bible college and serve as ministers in Angola or as
“missionaries” to other Louisiana prisons. About 250 others have been
baptised in the past three years.
Where violent gangs once ruled, the inmates have formed dozens of churches and
religious groups with names such as “Men of Hope” and “Wonders of Joy”.
Volunteers look after dying men in the prison hospice. Others repair
wheelchairs for disabled Third World children, or make toys for deprived
kids. “They are learning how good it feels to do the right thing,” says
Cain.
In three years there have been no killings in Angola, and only two suicides.
Last year there were 286 assaults - a record low, down from 1,061 when Cain
arrived in 1995.
The atmosphere is remarkably relaxed. The guards - mostly unarmed - banter
with inmates. I talked to prisoners in their blocks without guards present,
and without feeling threatened. Every other inmate described himself as
“born again”.
Pharr, the “Guts and Glory” winner, expressed deep remorse for his crime and
strives to steer younger inmates towards God. “I've learnt that Heaven and
Hell are real and I want to do things here, even if I never get out, to make
sure my life on earth is not in vain,” he says.
Turner, the DJ, is in the Incarceration Station's cinderblock studio. He plays
gospel music interspersed with preaching and Bible readings for 12 hours
every Monday and Wednesday (gangsta rap, heavy metal and songs with violent
lyrics are banned). “We need the Lord to direct our path,” he croons, as he
puts on Order My Steps by the Mighty Clouds of Joy.
Turner, an erstwhile rapist who is now an ordained minister, broke down in
tears when asked if he had children. His 27-year-old son was also in Angola
for murder, he confessed. “I feel bad. I feel responsible,” he wept, adding
that he cried out his son's name while on air.
Ron Hicks, 38, convicted of murder 19 years ago, is now pastor of a
flourishing inmate church with 200 members. “I'd love to make peace with my
victim's family,” he says. Meanwhile, he likes to think that God has chosen
him to work in a prison. “God can use me inside or out,” he says. “I would
prefer it was outside but if I have to do His will right here, I have to do
His will.” Jerry Williams, another convicted killer, is selling food at the
rodeo to raise funds to buy clothes and medicines for other inmates. “I
changed my life when I came here,” he says. “We're not terrible people. I
just made a mistake at a young age and I'm paying for it.”
Cain doesn't forget Angola's 83 Death Row inmates. He was racked by guilt for
failing to console the first of the six men executed during his tenure.
Since then he has ministered to each prisoner in his final hours, and held
his hands as the lethal chemicals course through his veins. “God is waiting
for you. You're going to ride away on a chariot. Your time has come,” he
told one killer, Antonio James, as he died. After each execution he
announces that the prisoner's soul has been “sent to God for final
judgment”.
Not all inmates are gentle and compliant, of course, and Cain does not rely
solely on religion. He also employs a more earthly system of sticks and
carrots.
Some 1,400 inmates have earned trustee status through years of good behaviour.
That entitles them to substantial privileges - good jobs (prison angler, for
example), higher pay, less supervision, access to hobby shops and
participation in the rodeo. A few are even allowed out of Angola to preach
or to sing in inmate choirs.
But Cain swiftly removes those privileges from transgressors, or from whole
groups if prisoners know that one of their number is breaking the rules and
don't inform on him. Real troublemakers face banishment to the infamous Camp
J, where they live in isolation, wear jumpsuits and are deprived of personal
possessions.
Cain's methods have generated interest in a penal system not known for its
compassion - several prisons across the South are starting Bible colleges,
hospices and rodeos. But it is public opinion in Louisiana that needs
softening if the state is ever to relax its “life means life” law. That is
why the rodeos, which bring 10,000 people a time to Angola, are important.
Cain says: “It's the inmate's chance to show ‘I'm not a killer any more. I did
a horrible thing one time and I'm really sorry and I won't ever do it
again'. And then the people go back and say ‘I couldn't believe it. I
could've left my children with some of them'.” Garrett, the convicted
dentist, agrees. “When you're put in prison you're ashamed and embarrassed,”
he says as he sells wooden boxes and bowls at the handicrafts fair. “But
here people see that you're not an animal or a totally bad person. It makes
you feel good about yourself.”
Cain's next mission is to encourage reconciliation between inmates and their
victims' families, because no politician would dare to consider parole for
convicted killers unless those families were on board.
At present the families must make the first move, and few are inclined to do
so. But the warden believes that his prisoners are ready, that most are
truly repentant, and quotes from Chronicles: “If my people ... shall humble
themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways,
then I will hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal
their land.”
He continues: “This land has seen more human suffering than anywhere in
America, but look at it now. It's healed, and that's a God-thing. These
inmates have turned their faces, and He has healed this land. It's probably
safer now than New Orleans.”
