We can debate crime and punishment all we want, but it is worth listening to the man who presides over the country's largest maximum-security prison, who actually holds the hands of the men he is ordered to execute before they die and who tells them to "get ready to see the face of Jesus." Angola prison warden Burl Cain figures his job will probably wreck his marriage eventually. "My wife, she doesn't like that she's married a killer," he says. "There are very few things I hide from, but I hide from that." Cain tries to make the system work as best he can, but he hates the notion of life without parole. "We're keeping dying old men in here," he says, for acts they committed decades ago. It's a drain on the prison system and a waste of life. "The public is what has to change. The will of the people has to change, not the legislature. I think many of them already know this isn't right." But he doesn't question the death penalty: "By law, I have to do it." He keeps the dead men's pictures on the wall. "They're special people to me," he says. And when he's done, he sometimes gets in his car and goes driving, goes to look at the river.

By New Orleans, the river bed is 170 ft. below sea level—which means the water down there has no reason to go anywhere. But the water on top does, which creates a tumbling, cascading effect that is hell on levees, and yet another in the laundry list of reasons New Orleans is slouching toward Venice, and the environmentalists and engineers are trying to figure out how to keep the city from submerging, if the termites don't finish it off first.

The river is the color of café au lait, with a generous helping of 30-weight and detergent thrown in. Down toward the mouth of the Mississippi, the land was formed of sedimentary deposits from farther upriver, rich topsoil blown from the hills of Wyoming into the Missouri, acres of Kansas prairie swallowed by flooding and swept downstream. Mark Twain's characters claimed that a man who drank the water could grow corn in his stomach. You know all this, and yet you are unprepared for the Delta, otherworldly and flat, the best place to grow cotton on this earth, once a hellish jungle, cleared by the backbreaking labor of slaves and sharecroppers. It's a wet western Kansas, a beautiful, flat, fertile window box.

The difference, of course, is that when faced with the shrinking labor needs of modern farming, the good people of western Kansas simply moved away in search of better lives elsewhere. While this happened in the Delta as well, a large number chose to stay in one of the poorest regions in the U.S. The average family of four here has an income of $16,538, slightly more than half the national average. In Mississippi County, Ark., 35% of kids live in poverty, and 40% of adults don't have a high school diploma.

If the new economy has not yet flowed downstream, there are lots of people who will tell you no one is even looking for it here. Whether or not a town stays afloat has a lot to do with whether the local factory is still open—the fate of the town rests in the hands of Continental Concrete, Sparta Printing, the Mississippi Lime Co., Tower Rock Quarry, Ralston Purina, Pillsbury and AnheuserBusch. When one of these leaves, and the farms start to fail, an entire town can shrivel and die. Laid-off workers lose their livelihood. Retired workers lose their health insurance. "Benefits can be more important than pay," says a mayor. The biggest industry left in downstate Illinois is prisons.

By the time you make your way to Rosedale, the closest manufacturing plants with possible jobs are 15 miles away. They might as well be in another country. If you have to pay $20 a week to some guy with a truck to drive you to work, and spend an additional $40 a week for lunches, and buy your uniforms, it can be cheaper just to stay home. The closest hospital is 19 miles away, and Rosedale has only one ambulance. One man, 32, says he has never seen a doctor. He has no idea whether he is healthy or not. "I feel healthy, but I don't know it," he says.

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