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Hope For
Dying Prisoners
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Dying behind rows of razor wire and iron bars is the likely fate of nine out of ten prisoners at Angola penitentiary in Louisiana. But the warden has embarked on a moral rehabilitation program that offers spirituality and emotional comfort for the nearly five thousand inmates who desire to die with dignity. Reed Galin reports. |
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SCRIPT:
(Locater: Angola, Louisiana)
Facing an average sentence of 88 years, most prisoners at the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola will die here.
Ron Hicks / Angola Inmate: “I think that every man, they wonder what’s after this. What’s after this life.”
Inmate Ron Hicks dealt with those questions after receiving a life sentence for murder. He was 19 years old…and found religion in his cell.
“I just lift up Mr. Finley to you, Lord God.”
Hicks now leads a United Methodist congregation in the prison and volunteers in the prison hospice program.
Ron Hicks: “I began to not really say, well, okay, this is it, this is it, just give up. But I begin to encourage them in the word of God.”
Warden Burl Cain says building prison churches and treating prisoners as more than numbers is about moral rehabilitation.
Burl Cain / Warden
Louisiana State Penitentiary: “Inmates are people, too, and many of
these crimes were committed 20 and 30 years ago. And what we did is, we
created an atmosphere where you could be what you could be.”
The dignity the
warden insists on carries over to prison funerals, New Orleans style,
with a horse-drawn hearse built by the inmates.
Inmates singing: “I’ll fly away.”
With 5000 aging prisoners at Angola, such funerals occur about once a week. United Methodist inmate Gary Norris is another hospice volunteer.
Gary Norris / Angola Inmate: “This is not the end. It’s really only the beginning. I think it’s important to have someone with you when you’re in that situation.”
(Eulogy)
And, though most prisoners will never leave Angola, many say the one thing they will not lose is spiritual hope.
TAG:
Angola used to have a reputation of being the bloodiest prison in the country. Now, the warden says the moral rehabilitation of prisoners has made it one of the safest.
More information can be found at: http://www.corrections.state.la.us/lsp/.