by Angela Hill / Eyewitness News
wwltv.com
Posted on February 21, 2011 at 6:21 PM
ANGOLA, La. -- Angola State Penitentiary is huge, 18,000 acres.
“It’s 22 miles when you come in the front gate if you drive all the way around the outside perimeter,” said Angola Warden Burl Cain
Cain calls Angola “a gated community," emphasis on community, and it’s not just the 5000 inmates who live here. Of his 1500 employees, 600 of them are residents.
And the warden himself lives here.
“We have a swimming pool down here for the kids and ballparks, and there is a post office in front of us. We are the only prison in America that’s large enough to own its own post office,” he said. “We feed naturally about 11,000 inmates a day, because not only do we raise the vegetables for this prison, we also raise the vegetables for Dixon and Hunt and the womens prison and Avoyelles across the river.”
The vegetables are farmed with mules and horses and harvested by hand -- a little primitive, he says, but it works.
“The mules crank every morning. We don’t have to worry about burning up the clutch. We don’t have to buy diesel fuel,” he said.
The warden is very proud of his domain, a very different place from when he arrived 16 years ago.
“We cleaned up. We really changed the whole management system of it. We got accountability from the staff and we stopped being oppressive,” Cain said.
“In corrections, it means correcting deviant behavior. It doesn’t mean torture and torment; it doesn't mean lock and feed,” he said.
He has taken those words very seriously and created what he calls moral rehabilitation, and it is what he calls his greatest contribution.
“I’m real proud that females can walk anywhere in this prison with no whistles and cat calls. I'm real proud that we don’t curse here. There is no profanity in prison, and that’s big time,” Cain said.
But his rehabilitation goes far beyond correcting bad language and bad manners.
“We want to be a normal society as we as can possibly be. That's not being soft. That’s being right,” Cain said. “I'm trying to rehabilitate them and the moral rehabilitation is the only true rehabilitation. I can teach you skills and trades to read and write, but if I don’t have any morality with it, I just made a smarter criminal.
“I don’t care what religion you are. I don’t even care if you are in religion. I care if you are moral.”
He started the moral rehabilitation by first talking with prisoners and letting them talk to him, he even created a word for the open discussion, "askable."
“And parents should be askable with their children, because I wind up being their parent what happens, and I got to make them do everything you should have done as a parent,” he said. “I gotta teach them the discipline and to respect others and just get control of them, and it’s a shame it has to be as an adult.”
But his system has worked. Violence of all kinds at Angola has dropped over 75 percent since he took over and now prison systems in other states are replicating his approach.
With numerous programs to teach prisoners trades, even art, Burl Cain calls Angola the "the land of new beginnings," whether a prisoner ever gets out or not.
“Where they can begin their life over and they are not really judged for what they did, let’s judge for what they are going to do.”
http://www.wwltv.com/news/Angola-warden-has-changed-atmosphere-of-prison-116622158.html
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