Angola's Angst

Story by Beth Shelburne

January 21, 2020

Photos by Beth Shelburne

Our group — which includes writers, reformers and activists — exits the van into the chilly wind-whipped morning. We’ve just completed a three-hour drive from New Orleans, flat marshlands whizzing by, the highway periodically rising slightly as we pass over rivers the color of mud. We roll through Baton Rouge, creamy historic buildings surrounded by tired palm trees and suddenly, the sun breaks through the milky clouds, at the same time a misty rain falls. The wipers smear splattered insects across the windshield, not enough water to wash them away. 

A busted-up-looking joint called Crazy Cajun Roadside Daiquiri marks the turn down State Highway 66 that leads to Angola Prison. The two-lane road narrows, a smattering of hardscrabble houses on each side. I see borderless yards cluttered with cars, trampolines, RVs and the occasional grazing cow. And then we are here, parked in front of the prison sign with the pansies.

Beyond the sign are the unmistakable hallmarks of our modern penal system: bland, piss-colored buildings, fencing topped with razor wire, uniformed officers, a watchtower. But also, land. Vast, grassy land spreads between the prison buildings and out as far as the eye can see, with institutional architecture visible all the way to the horizon, giving the sense that Angola is never-ending, a jail that stretches into infinity.

Camp H, a prisoner housing facility that is no longer in service.

Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the nation — mass incarceration’s ground zero. Louisiana, long called the “world’s prison capital,” finally enacted long-needed criminal justice reforms in 2017, leading to a 7 percent decline in its prison population. In 2018, Oklahoma became the state with the highest incarceration rate in the United States, but according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the numbers in both states still far exceed the national average. 

Our leader steers us into a tidy, one-story building with a black-lettered sign that says, “Penitentiary Museum.” We enter and meet our tour guide, a white, brunette classification officer with a Cajun accent, named Renee Honeycutt.

She wears jeans and a black pea coat and stands underneath mounted heads of deer and wild boar as she explains the tour. I am so preoccupied with the odd display of wildlife that I miss almost everything she says, except that cameras are not allowed and we’ll get a chance to visit death row. We hand over our phones, which she places in a plastic grocery bag and locks in a safe. 

Back in the van, we roll through the gated entrance and down a long, tree-lined road that splits a massive, lush field of grass. White picket fences that could come from a storybook run along each side. We press our faces to the windows like children, as Honeycutt rattles off a script about Angola from memory. 

“It used to be a plantation, it’s the only prison in America with its own zip code, the entire prison takes up 18,000 acres, it’s larger than Manhattan,” she says.  

The prison is a working farm producing huge crops of cotton, sugar cane, and millions of pounds of vegetables like mustard greens, beets, turnip greens, cabbage, and corn. On the day we visit, 5,501 men are locked up inside Angola, policed by 1800 correctional staff.

Lake Killarney, a geographic feature of Angola.

The van stops as Honeycutt points out a “field line,” around two dozen men, all dressed in blue, working the fields as officers on horseback watch nearby. She tells us when people arrive at Angola to serve time, they must do “hard labor” for 90 days in the fields. Once the 90 days are complete, prisoners can put in a request for a different, less taxing job. Classification officers like Honeycutt decide who may move and who must stay in the fields longer as a punishment for noncompliance or “bad behavior.” 

We watch the line of men working in the distance. I ask if the guards on horseback are armed. She says yes. Every man in blue appears to be black. The guards on horseback are white. The visual is a stark throwback, like we’ve somehow zoomed back in time to antebellum Louisiana. It is sickening, yet we can’t turn away. 

Someone asks if they pay the prisoners. Honeycutt says they start at two cents an hour.

“It’s essentially still like a plantation,” Honeycutt says, and the van is silent. We all shift uncomfortably in our seats.

I ask Honeycutt if she knows the racial makeup in the prison. She shakes her head no. 

The latest U.S. Census data shows Louisiana’s overall population is 63 percent white, 33 percent black. The prison system, however, embodies a stark racial disparity. According to the state Department of Corrections website, Louisiana’s incarcerated population is 67 percent black, 33 percent white. Our van driver, an older African American man who lives in New Orleans, later tells me he thinks Angola is more like 98 percent black.

“That’s how it appears to me,” he says, shaking his head.

Months after I tour Angola, I remain rattled by the experience. Visiting any prison is shocking, but I have been going inside as a journalist for years. I’ve been to prisons for men and women in Alabama many times while reporting on my state’s overcrowded and understaffed prison system, the most violent in the nation. I have witnessed the caging of fellow human beings and the stunning optics of seeing mostly black and brown bodies inside. All that is true at Angola, but there is something else, questions that hang in the prison’s ether and follow me home. 

Angola is both the past and the future of mass incarceration. Can a place with such a stark legacy of subjugation, humiliation, and torture ever redeem itself? Is there even such a thing as a “good prison?” Angola frames itself as a vanguard in prison rehabilitation, offering more educational and self-help opportunities than most prisons, but Louisiana also has the nation’s highest rate of prisoners serving life sentences. Eighty-five percent of men at Angola will never go home, a poignant fact, considering the land on Angola was named for the nation in southwestern Africa, from which tens of thousands of people were brought to this continent and enslaved beginning in the 17th century.

The tour leaves me weary from absorbing both the obvious human exploitation and the prison’s appalling sense of institutional pride. And yet, instead of denying its vicious past, Angola seems to own it. The prison museum includes a detailed history of executions, prison uprisings, and our tour includes a visit to “Red Hat,” an especially dreary unit built in 1933 for “incorrigible” prisoners. The 30 cells inside are the size of broom closets and each contains a single iron bunk. Men sent to Red Hat were served only leftovers from the main prison and had to urinate and defecate in buckets. For a time, executions took place in Red Hat, within earshot of everyone inside. 

The unit closed in 1972 as part of efforts to reform Angola, Honeycutt explains, as we gingerly walk through the dank, empty place. It must be haunted, I think, trying to imagine the misery contained within the walls. It strikes me that the access we’re given to once restricted parts of the prison is unheard of in the penal world. In Alabama, citizens who request simple information about the prisons are routinely denied answers, and access to facilities, even for journalists, is rarely given. 

After we pile back in the van, Honeycutt tells us Angola is now less violent than typical maximum—security prisons, with volunteer—led programs replacing the idle human warehousing of years past. Prison administrators, especially the famous longtime warden Burl Cain, sold efforts to increase educational and vocational training, religious services, and personal development by using the prison’s history of brutality to advocate for a new and reformed Angola.

In 1870, former Confederate Major Samuel L. James assumed control of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, then in Baton Rouge and known as “The Walls,” according to the Angola museum website. He ushered in a brutal era of convict leasing and later forced incarcerated people — almost entirely African American men and boys —  to work in harsh conditions on several plantations he owned, including Angola. In 1898 Louisiana banned the leasing of imprisoned people because of public outcry over rising deaths. The state officially assumed control of Angola in 1901, keeping the same model of maximum containment, forced labor and paltry provisions. 

This history of hard labor, whippings, and deprivation led to 31 prisoners cutting their Achilles tendons as a protest in 1952. During the 1960s, Angola became known as “the bloodiest prison in the South,” according to the museum’s site, and then there’s the nightmarish horror of its infamous electric chair, “Gruesome Gertie.” 

An African American 17—year—old named Willie Francis survived Gertie in 1946 when it malfunctioned during his botched execution. Francis screamed, “Take it off, let me breathe!” from behind his leather hood as the volts coursed through him, but didn’t kill him. The following year, an employee of the state strapped Francis into Gruesome Gertie once again, and this time, they electrocuted him. Louisiana retired Gertie in 1991 when it decided lethal injection was the best way to kill its citizens. Gertie is now encased in glass — a star attraction inside the prison museum.

The former Angola execution chamber at the Red Hat Cell Block. The electric chair is a replica of the original "Gruesome Gertie."

Allowing citizens inside an active prison is virtually unheard of anywhere else, but I wonder, how much of what Angola’s wardens allow us to see on the tour represents the bleak, daily reality for the people confined by Angola? We won’t hear about the heartache, the ruin of families and communities, the wasting away of lives condemned to die in prison. We don’t see the everyday aggressions from guards — strip searches, shouted commands, counts that reduce human beings to a number. 

Our van passes an empty outdoor arena, home to the world—famous Angola Rodeo, a tradition that dates back to 1965. The arena seats 10,000, and, like much of Angola, was built by incarcerated people. Every April and October, the prison opens its gates to the public for rodeos, which bring in thousands of people from all over the world. Prisoners compete for cash prizes in bull riding “as an opportunity for positive behavior changes,” according to the prison’s website.

Honeycutt explains the rodeo is also a marketplace, where incarcerated men can sell art and “hobbycrafts” to the public, like leather goods, jewelry, and furniture — keeping 85 percent of the profits.

Someone asks if the prison keeps the rest. Honeycutt explains they pay taxes and the rest of the money goes to support prison programs. Later, I hear a few group members discuss the rodeo as an example of enslavement within the prison industrial complex. I think of the men I know serving time in Alabama, banished from public view with little opportunity to interact with the outside world.  Is the rodeo an innovative way to bring the prison population and surrounding community together? Or is it an unsafe spectacle that capitalizes on prisoners’ poverty?

The driver parks the van outside the main prison and we follow Honeycutt through a series of gates that seem to magically buzz open, into a busy lobby where prisoners line up to enter a boisterous cafeteria for visitation, where they can eat a meal with their loved ones. I nod and say hello to the men lined up as we walk past and they politely nod back. 

Through an outdoor caged walkway, we turn right and arrive at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic chapel, a stucco building with stained glass windows and the words “Let Us Pray” written in red on the pavement at the entrance. Inside it is cool, with wooden pews and a tiled floor. The wall at the rear of the sanctuary contains a floor-to-ceiling mural of Jesus on the cross, painted by incarcerated artists. Jesus is flanked by the two thieves crucified with him, one with a green demon on his shoulder, reaching down his throat. 

We sit down in the pews and two men walk onto the elevated stage that contains the pulpit. They introduce themselves, both residents of Angola serving life sentences. Each man has been incarcerated for over 25 years.

“Unless the law changes, we’ll both die here,” one says.

He is Daryl Waters, 50, a handsome man dressed in jeans, white sneakers, and a jean jacket over a blue shirt. The younger man is Keith Morse, 43, wearing a sweatshirt and hat displaying the logo for “Malachi Dads,” a prison ministry for incarcerated fathers. 

Morse, who is African American, tells us one of his favorite prison clubs is the Latin American Cultural Brotherhood. He and Waters are both heavily involved in various interest groups inside the prison — Toastmasters, Alcoholics Anonymous, Horticulture, Literary Arts, Drama, something called Concept Club. “It’s where we talk about ideas,” says Morse. 

He says a program called Cultivating Compassion has made the biggest difference in his life.

“It helps guys learn to empathize with their victims,” he says. 

Morse and Waters are both in prison for murder. Waters tells us he was a college athlete, majoring in computer engineering when he committed his crime. Both men appear peaceful, mature and humble. Whatever rage and regret they might have carried with them through their incarceration is not plain in their presentation, but I understand prison administrators hand-picked them to focus on the positive. 

Both men work in prison ministry, and both have attended the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, a rare, four—year college degree program that has offered enrollment to people at Angola since 1995. I raise my hand and ask how Angola has changed since they’ve been here.

“It used to be a lot more violent, it was just about survival,” Morse says. “Many guys have developed a sense of hope, especially about the laws changing.”

Waters says Angola is no longer dangerous and guys are being productive behind the walls.

“The level of thinking has been elevated,” says Waters. “The conversation inside has changed. It’s not just about playing games and watching TV.”

Someone asks how they feel about Angola’s requirement to work the fields. Waters says he did the field work for 90 days, and while he wouldn’t want to make a career out of it, the experience helped him become more compassionate.

“It helped me understand the experiences of others, guys who can’t get a better job,” he says. “I’m just privileged to have a good job. I love my work,” he continues. “Sometimes I think I should be paying them to allow me to do what I do. The way I see it, I’m making pennies today, but I’ll be making dollars tomorrow.”

Morse’s response about the field work is different. His face scrunches as he tells us he was stuck in the fields for a decade. “I hated it, I saw no benefit,” he says. He admits he was not following the rules at the time, and eventually the hard labor as punishment began to deter him and his job was moved inside. He still finds the wages insulting.

“Two cents an hour is outrageous,” he says. “It takes three months of savings to buy a loaf of bread. But again, we made mistakes.” He shrugs and the room is still.

Angola Landing on the Mississippi River. Prisoners pick cotton under the watch of Angola guards, circa 1900. Angola prison camp, July 1934; the prisoner in the foreground is Huddie Ledbetter, aka the legendary folk singer Leadbelly, who was jailed at Angola when recorded by the folklorist Alan Lomax (photo by Lomax).

Our time is up, and we file back through the brisk morning air and into the van, which rolls onto a main road through the prison’s expansive fields. We pass a “Horse Crossing” sign and I ask about the prison’s livestock. Officer Honeycutt says prisoners tend to the horses and the 2000 head of cattle, raised at the prison and sold for beef. Several times during our tour she mentions that Angola is a self—sustaining facility, so I suggest the beef production must be good for the prison’s food bill. She turns to face me directly. 

“Oh no, they sell the beef to the outside,” Honeycutt says, shaking her head. “The prison orders low—grade beef to feed the inmates.”

“Why?” I ask.

“They’re not going to feed inmates choice cuts of meat,” she replies pointedly, revealing no emotion she might hold about the prison’s strict caste system. 

Another thick, uncomfortable lull settles across the van, until I ask another question. 

“How is the food?”

“It’s edible,” she replies, and then explains how food at Angola works. 

Employees can get a “state tray” for free, but the food sold by various “inmate clubs” is the preferred cuisine at Angola, according to Honeycutt. The clubs order ingredients and cook the dishes, but the prison manages the cash transaction. Clubs sell the food during rodeos, visitation, and to employees during the workweek. I have never heard of such a thing inside a prison. It sounds like a prisoner—run food court. I ask Honeycutt to describe the food, thinking again of the people I know locked up in Alabama, whose best meals are concoctions of processed commissary items. A “prison casserole” comprises a cup of flavored noodles heated in a microwave, mixed with a can of tuna and topped with crushed potato chips.

“Hamburgers, chicken, seafood gumbo, whatever you want,” says Honeycutt. Loaded baked potatoes for $8 made by the Toastmasters are a favorite. 

Food is a big deal in prison. Institutions typically offer only the cheapest, lowest—quality food. In Alabama, I’m told portions in the chow hall are so small, some incarcerated people resort to stealing or hustling for food, just to get enough.

We arrive outside death row and there is a brief discussion about going inside. Three of us agree to tour death row, the rest prefer to sit inside the van. Louisiana currently has 70 people condemned to die at the hands of the state. I have never covered an execution — and never plan to — but I appreciate the opportunity to bear witness to the living conditions of death row and perhaps interact with some of the men who live there.       

The three of us walk into a choppy wind as we pass the sign for death row, with a painted bald eagle emblazoned with the American flag. We are buzzed through a series of exterior gates into the low—slung, brick building, with a compact, quiet lobby inside.

A heavyset, white woman who identifies herself as Lt. Russo appears as our guide through death row. She leads us through a locked gate into a hallway and points out eight visitation booths for “non-contact” visits and a room on the right with a “contact visit” underway between a man and his family.

I glance through a small window and see a young, African American man seated at a table, talking and smiling with three older adults. A 30-something white, male corrections officer is seated steps away from them, staring at the floor. Russo tells us men on death row are allowed five contact visits a year and the visit underway is between a prisoner and his mom, aunt, and uncle.  

We follow behind Russo into a “control room,” a large interior cubicle with video surveillance of the eight tiers of cells that make up death row. She explains there are six tiers for people condemned to die and two for “CCR,” or Closed Cell Restricted, another word for solitary confinement. Louisiana has long excelled at its use of CCR, once holding three prisoners, Robert King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace, known as the “Angola Three” — in solitary confinement for longer than 40 years. 

Russo explains that all death row prisoners are allowed out of their cells and onto the tier for two hours each morning and two hours each afternoon. They also get two hours twice a week on the “yard,” a caged grassy area with a few sets of weights. She asks if we want to walk down a tier. 

A door buzzes open and Russo leads us onto a tier, which is a wide, concrete hallway with individual cells along the right. Opposite the cells are mounted fans, whirring away. There is no air conditioning in the housing areas of Angola prison.

“Females walking on the tier!” Russo bellows and her voice echoes off the floors and walls.

We follow behind her awkwardly, tentatively, as men stir in their cluttered cells. I nod and say hello to the first man I see, but also feel the urge to apologize for our intrusion. An older white man with thick glasses is sitting on his bunk holding a paperback book. He glances up at us and quickly looks back down. I pass another cell and see a man sleeping, his large, tattooed arm visible outside a thin blanket that conceals his face.

We make it to the end of the tier after passing a dozen or so cells, all of them occupied. Mounted televisions face the cells, one TV for every two cells. The men in the last two cells are standing at the bars. I say hello and ask them how things are for them here. 

“Things have gotten so much better,” a trim, middle-aged man says to my surprise. He tells me he used to only be allowed out of his cell one hour per week, totally isolated from the rest of the prison. 

“How long have you been here?” I ask.

“In this cell? Since 1991,” he replies, smiling slightly. My stomach tightens as I do the math. He has lived in this windowless concrete box, about 8 by 10 feet, since I was in high school. The day I take the tour I am 44 years old. 

I notice a television remote control wedged between the bars that separate the two cells. The man explains that because they share a television, he and his next-door neighbor must pass the remote back and forth if they want to change the channel, but they mostly agree on what to watch.

“We get along well,” he says and the man in the other cell chuckles. “It might not be that way if it was someone else.”

Lt. Russo motions for us to wrap it up, so I thank the men for talking with me and follow Russo back down the tier and into the control room. As we walk past the other locked tiers, I mention to Russo that the man on death row told us conditions have improved for the men who live there.

“Oh, yes, they’ve got it made here,” she says, waving her hand dramatically. “No labor, free healthcare.” She smiles. 

I feel a familiar, out-of-body surge of adrenaline.  

“What about the forced labor in the fields?” I ask.

“They get breaks every hour and they’re not out there longer than eight hours,” she says, an incredulous look on her face. “They’ve got more rights than us. We have to wear body cameras now.”

I am scribbling notes and following behind her as the others in our group listen. 

“But do you think the improvements have made things better here?” I ask.

“It’s good for the offenders,” she says.

“But isn’t it safer for you?” 

She admits death row is the safest place she’s worked in 14 years as a correctional officer. 

We continue our tour with a stop outside another tier and I notice coolers directly outside three cells, with what looks like box fans on top. Russo explains the contraptions are a way to reduce the heat in the cells. Someone asks why the devices are only outside three cells. 

“Those are the inmates that are suing over air conditioning,” she says, rolling her eyes. “If you install air conditioning, you might as well put ’em in a hotel,” she continues as we walk on. “It’s not a penitentiary if it’s not hard.”

Later I look up the lawsuit, filed in 2013 by three elderly men on death row where the heat index routinely soars above 100 in the summer. A judge ordered the prison to provide the so-called “Cajun coolers,” which are just ice chests rigged with fans to blow tepid air. Louisiana has spent over $1 million fighting the lawsuit. It would cost $225,000 to install air conditioning throughout the entire death row.

In Angola’s museum, framed photo grids show everyone the state of Louisiana has executed there.

Our last stop on the row is the execution chamber, which is reached by first entering a conference room that contains a long, wooden table, the seal of Louisiana Corrections carved in the middle, with the words, “Union, Justice, Confidence.” A large television in the corner blares a soap opera. Honeycutt explains this is the room where men eat their last meal before they are put to death.

The death chamber is adjacent to the conference room, the black gurney in the middle, leather straps across it and shackles at the feet. We circle around and Honeycutt points to the viewing area, a separate room with glass windows. A smaller room to the right is out of view from witnesses, “so no one knows who the executioner is,” she says. I notice a separate door to the outside that the executioners can enter and exit, thus keeping themselves and their act anonymous. 

The last time Louisiana killed someone in this room was 2010. The space feels intentionally clinical, and I wonder how the people who participate in state—sanctioned killings feel after they leave this room. Do their hearts ache with sorrow, or is administering death just another dehumanizing transaction that is part of prison employment? 

As we exit the death chamber back into the lobby, a young, female African American correctional officer passes by, carrying a bag of fast food. She disappears behind the door of the conference room and I glance back to see her seated at the big table facing the television, the death chamber visible behind her. She begins to eat her lunch.

Point Lookout, one of the prison cemeteries on the Angola property.

An older man empties a trash can and turns to say hello to me and another woman in our group. His name is Morris Harrison, in his 60’s and has been incarcerated at Angola for 37 years. He tells us he likes working in the gift shop, but he’s hoping to go home later in the year. 

“I believe God kept me alive this long for a reason,” he says, pausing to smile at us before he continues cleaning. 

Before we leave, I ask Mr. Harrison if I can take his picture. He has a kind face and a gentle demeanor and I want people to see him for who he is today, not for whatever he did so many years ago to end up at Angola. He tells me he’s not allowed to have his picture taken. I say thanks and wish him good luck. 

We pile back into the van, a weighted disquiet settles over us and remains with me today. Almost a year has passed since I toured Angola, but I still revisit certain moments again and again in my mind. The 2.2 million people our nation has locked away are fighting for survival, struggling to retain their humanity and experiencing trauma behind bars beyond anything the free world could imagine. No matter how a prison presents itself to the world, it is still a place of perpetual punishment. No amount of prison reform can erase the human rights disaster of our time.

As we pull away from Angola Prison, I spot Mr. Harrison walking back toward the prison gates. His job at the gift shop puts him outside the walls of Angola, so close to freedom that is still out of reach, yet every day he walks back inside. As we drive down the road that leads away from Angola, I turn around in my seat and watch Mr. Harrison amble back through the prison entrance. The sun is setting and he is walking slowly, like a man who has carried a bag of bricks on his shoulders all his life. 11 months later, I call the prison museum to ask if Mr. Harrison has been released. The woman who answers the phone tells me he is still there.

Beth Shelburne is a writer and journalist based in Birmingham. She was named a 2018-2019 Writing for Justice Fellow by Pen America. Shelburne spent 20 years working as a television news anchor and reporter and won two Edward R. Murrow Awards for Excellence in Journalism. She currently serves as an investigative reporter for the Campaign for Smart Justice with the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama.

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