| BY
MARK COATNEY
The
Farm is beautiful.
It's
raining hard when we dock at a small ferryboat landing.
There's mud, and humidity, and heat, and love bugs and mosquitoes
have virtually colonized the boat. But when we slog through
this, and take a bus across the levee, we find ourselves
in verdant, tidily tilled fields surrounded by small, wooded
hillsides. We are in one of the more unusual maximum security
prisons in the country — the more than 18,000 acres
of farmland that make up Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
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| DIANA
WALKER FOR TIME |
| Inside
the death chamber at the Louisiana
State Penitentiary. |
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We've all heard about this place, the Farm, the place Collier's
magazine once called "the worst prison in America."
It's been known as the bloodiest prison in the South; 31 prisoners
once cut their Achilles tendons to protest the brutal conditions
there. While it's been cleaned up considerably since the bad
old days of the '50s and '60s, it's still not a place to call
home. So the beauty is important, because the work is hard
and hope for the future is rarer than an honest Louisiana
governor.
In
Louisiana, as the guards say, life is life; such a sentence
here carries with it no possibility of parole. More than
85 percent of the inmates end up staying here for, as they
say, "life and one dark day" — that is, until
the day they die plus the one day that it takes for the
body to be embalmed and readied for pickup by relatives.
Some inmates end up being here far longer; if no one claims
them, or if (as is often the case) they ask to be buried
on the grounds.
Some
65 percent of the prisoners come into Angola with life sentences.
So the problem, if you're warden Burl Cain, is that problem
of hope. How do you hold on to a man with no hope of ever
leaving this place, keep him from murder or suicide when
he knows that no matter what he does, whether he's a model
prisoner or the most hated man in the joint, he's never
walking out that gate?
One
way is work; for the Farm is just that, a working farm that
brings in $20 million annually through its crops and products
such as license plates. Prisoners work and earn from four
to 20 cents an hour, which isn't much considering they labor
in the fields like draft horses (the Farm uses 19th-century
agricultural technology). On the other hand, there's not
a whole lot to buy inside anyway. More fundamental is religious
instruction; college in Angola is a four-year Bible college,
Sunday is a day of rest, and Cain is extremely proud of
the bell that rings every Sunday morning and evening to
call the cons to worship.
The
warden is a deeply religious man who believes in salvation
and an eternal reward. And when you're both the state's
chief jailer and executioner, that's a good thing. Cain
says he makes it his business to stand beside the execution
table and talk quietly to the condemned man as the needle
is put in, and hold the murderer's hand through the seven
minutes it takes for the poison to kill. "The first
man I executed, I didn't say a word to, just stood there
and did it, and I know I sent him straight to Hell,"
he says. "And it was a real take-a-look-at-yourself
moment."
For
the ones allowed to die natural deaths, Cain is trying to
change state law to allow for at least the possibility of
parole, to get some of his geriatric prisoners out of the
system. But he says that's not a popular position in the
state right now. In the meantime, he's created a hospice
program that's become a model for other prisons with aging
populations.
Cain
has more than his share of detractors, who say his ties
to former governor Edwin Edwards — currently on trial
for extortion — make him suspect, that he's a grandstander,
that he uses prisoners for his own personal gain. And it's
clear that Cain is paternal in both good and bad ways. But
it's also clear that he truly cares about his charges, and
wants to make life better for them. Which makes our visit
moving, and oddly inspirational.
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