How not to behave in prison

A lesson from a first-timer

The first time I visited Angola was as one of the chaperones to a busload of high school students, under the guidance of Judge Ginger Berrigan.

At the time, Ginger was the Chief Judge of the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Louisiana (she has since retired from the bench.)

From the north to the South

Ginger was born in New York state, and wended her way to the Deep South and to the bench via a winding path. Along the way, she picked up degrees in psychology and journalism, served a stint as a volunteer with then-Senator Joe Biden, and eventually found herself drawn to work in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

Ginger got to know civil rights leader Charles Evers, whose brother, Medgar Evers, was assassinated in 1963 while working to end segregation and gain voting rights for Blacks. Just as Medgar Evers’ death spurred his brother Charles to alter course and work for civil rights in Mississippi—abandoning his early career as a racketeer—Ginger’s experiences with Charles Evers and the Black citizens of Fayette, Mississippi, led her to seek out a career defending people’s civil rights. She became a formidable attorney, including as an advocate for those facing the death penalty.

Ginger has always had a knack for getting on with people in all walks of life. She treats everyone with dignity and, through the years, she has developed strong friendships with many of those who have been incarcerated, including luminaries such as Wilbert Rideau, the famed, long-time editor of Angola’s inmate-run newspaper, The Angolite.*

School bus at the gates of Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola.

My first time inside Angola

It was in 2001 that I joined one of Ginger’s expeditions to Angola with a group of young people from a New Orleans school, a trip designed to act as a warning to youngsters who might be at risk of ending up on the inside themselves one day. It was my first trip there, some years before I started visiting regularly with Sister Helen Prejean.

The tour involved a session with the Recidivists’ Group in the main prison, who gave unvarnished accounts of the lives they had led which dead-ended in Angola, and of the grim life inside the prison itself.

The impact

Watching the kids as they listened, I could see that these men’s stories were having an impact. The joking subsided, the acting cool dissolved.

While I remember that talk well, the part of the tour that had the greatest impact on me was the visit to death row that followed.

This was in the days when death row was tucked in right behind the razor wire near the front of the prison. (It’s now located in the farthest corner of Angola’s 18,000 acres.)

We were ushered through an iron gate onto a tier with a row of cells down one side, a long corridor running in front.

As our group of teens and adults passed through the gate and walked along the corridor, I witnessed something that disturbed me deeply: not a single one of the group, other than Ginger, spoke to any of the men in the cells. There were hushed conversations between members of the tour party, but no conversation back and forth through those bars.

The wrongness of it hit me hard. I could not make that walk in silence, past a row of men, caged and destined for ‘legal homicide.’ It was too utterly zoo-like.

And so I stopped at the first cell, where a young man, barely older than the schoolkids I was accompanying, was sitting on his bunk with a book in his hands. I introduced myself and asked him what he was reading. It was Dr. Martin Luther King’s Where Do We Go From Here.

He was eager and delighted to talk. He told me of what he did during his days—mostly reading, writing letters, and thinking about his case—and of his hope that he might find relief in the courts. (Ginger, who knew his case, said relief was highly unlikely to be granted.)

By the time the tour party had made their way along the entire line of cells and back, I was still there at that first cell, talking with this boy who would never leave prison.

Who’s inside

It’s hard to blame people for acting like the members of that tour group did, especially a bunch of young people who’ve just heard a litany of crimes from men who the justice system deemed didn’t merit death.

We fossilize those who are incarcerated, coating them in amber at the instant of their crime.

We deny them the possibility of growth, of change.

We fail to allow for the limited ability of juvenile brains to weigh actions and consequences.

We ignore the fact that the innocent are imprisoned along with the guilty.

We gloss over the crippling effects of poverty, abuse in all its many forms, mental illness.

We refuse to see the mirroring of a society obsessed with violence.

We pass over the racist history that was foundational to the evolution of the justice system.

We forget they are people.

If ever you visit

As I have come to learn in the years since that first visit, most of the people on death row get no visitors at all. That’s true, in fact, for a lot of the men throughout the prison.

Angola is a long drive from anywhere. It’s a day trip to get there followed by standing in line to be processed through security, then busing to the various camps dotted around the prison. As the years grind on to decades, even loved ones fall away.

If ever you visit Angola, or any other place where those we cage are kept, know that you can improve someone’s day merely by treating them with dignity.

If ever you visit, remember who is there. People.

Train song

Thanks to all those who nominated songs to Sister Helen’s Justice Train playlist. I thought I’d throw in something from the playlist every week or so as a balance to a newsletter which, I admit, is not always light and frothy.

It’s easy to pick the kickoff track for this mini-feature. Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the founding members of the all-woman, a capella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, died less than a month ago, on July 16th.

As well as being a singer, Bernice was also a composer, professor of American history, scholar, curator at the Smithsonian, and social activist.

Ella’s Song celebrates the life of Ella Baker, who played a key role in Civil Rights organizations including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

* Most editions of The Angolite are now freely available online as part of the Reveal Digital American Prison Newspapers Collection, an amazing resource.