Word: caine
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...short history of the grudge match: The Hebrews invented it. Cain was the first winner, but God disqualified him on the grounds of poor sportsmanship. Abel was awarded the gold posthumously...
...Cain's predecessors, Warden C. Murray Henderson, was recently convicted of shooting his wife five times, and he's most likely going to wind up in Angola for it. At 18,000 acres, it's the largest prison in the U.S., with the lowest-paid guards, few of whom have graduated from high school. It's a place that Collier's magazine once called "the worst prison in America," where in 1951, in an effort to protest the brutal conditions, 31 prisoners sliced their Achilles tendons so they couldn't be sent to work...
...prison museum Cain has built, where all the T shirts, coffee mugs and videos have the name ANGOLA printed in big letters, Cain points his thick fingers at pictures of the men he has executed. "They're special people to me," he says...
These men, like most prisoners, don't get many visitors. "The first people to stop visiting are your buddies who you committed the crime with," explains Cain. "The next is your wife. Your father dies. Your mom and your sister are the only ones who keep coming. Your momma is the only one who loves you." So Cain says his main job is to give the 5,108 hopeless men on this former slave-breeding farm hope, even though 86% of them will stay here for "life and one dark day." The dark day is the one after they...
...months ago, though, some prisoners lost it, lost the hope, and one of them took a guard hostage. Burl Cain couldn't talk the hope back into him, and they had a shootout. "He got one of ours, and we got one of theirs," he says. "It all worked out in the end." And wrong as that sounds, in Angola that's how it is, and there's no hiding from it, and I feel so lucky to go back to a place where heaven and hell and sin and redemption are just philosophy...