.LesterHoltNBC embedded with inmates at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. This is what he learned.
“We had the highest incarceration rate in the nation for the last couple of decades, but our crime rate wasn’t any better for it,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, told me. “The recidivism rate wasn’t better.” In 2017, in response to that conclusion, Louisiana’s legislature passed a series of reforms that led to the early release of many nonviolent offenders, reducing its prison population.
I felt no apprehension, however, speaking with Sammie Robinson. Robinson is 83 and has been in prison since 1953, well before I was born. I asked him if he wanted to go home, and he replied, “Ya, I want to go home.
To a person, they told me that they had changed and that they are not the wild kids they were when they came to Angola. All of them want a second chance. But who and what do you believe? As I wrote in my journal back in my cell the first night, “You never know when you’re being B.S.-ed.”During my visit I learned a lot about the value of hope, like the excitement generated when incarcerated men faced the parole board.
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