December 12, 2003

Students, faculty, and staff tour Angola Prison

Event part of First-Year Experience

Between the Tunica Hills of Eastern Louisiana and 20 miles from the nearest town, Angola Prison sits on 18,000 acres of land and according to Mary McCay, Ph.D., chair of the Department of English, looks like "an antebellum plantation."

On October 20, as part of the First-Year Experience, sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, 150 students, faculty, and staff toured Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It is the largest prison in the United States where 90 percent of the men are violent offenders and 63 percent of all inmates eventually die there. The tourwhich included the disciplinary block, known as the "J block," death row, the prison dormitories, the prison cafeteria, and the agricultural and livestock quartersconsisted primarily of students, but such faculty as professors Emily Drew, Marcus Mahmood, and Jacqueline Woodfork were also in attendance.

McCay, who was once a teacher at a prison in Massachusetts and familiar with prison environments, admitted that she was shocked to see the treatment of the prisoners in the J block. She described the guards, who are some of the most poorly paid and uneducated in the country, and their efforts to objectify the prisoners. She noted that one warden was nearly fanatical about preventing masturbation and that the scrutiny of the so-called freemen or guards has had a dehumanizing effect on the 5,100 mostly black prisoners.

"I didn't realize we would walk past them," she said referring to the J block. "It was as though we were walking through a zoo." She described the experience as both humiliating and haunting for the tour group and the prisoners, and this feeling only deepened as the tour passed through the fields and livestock quarters. She said the prison was a machine for production and retribution rather than recovery, and the Angola prisoners who work eight hours a day, five days a week for four cents an hour are thought to be the lucky ones.

McCay is currently teaching a class about punishment and the death penalty as part of the First-Year Experience for freshmen to "learn about how and why we punish people." An integral part of the class is the First-Year Experience events, which have included the Helen Prejean panel discussion, the play The Exonerated, a death penalty trial, and the Angola prison trip. McCay thinks the First-Year Experience is "a great idea and that Loyola ought to do more of it."

Many of the students expressed how appalled they were by the prison's current conditions and its bloody history. Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola was originally a plantation maintained by slaves from Angola and between 1928 and 1940, more than 60 years after the end of the Civil War, it was the site of more than 10,000 official floggings. The students felt that touring the prison was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that made the death penalty issue more pertinent.

Sunday Angleton, A'04, Intern in the Offices of Public Affairs and Publications