Word: louisiana
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Conditions were not always so relaxed and congenial at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Just three years ago, the main prison and five outcamps at the 18,000-acre maximum-security prison farm -- physically the largest lockup in the country -- were rocking with murders, suicides and escape attempts. The mood was so tense that a federal judge declared a state of emergency, which included a state investigation and tightened federal oversight. Discontent among the 5,186 inmates could be summed up in a word: hopelessness. Prisoners, the vast majority of them lifers in a state where a life term...
Enter John Whitley, a quiet-spoken Louisiana native with a lazy smile, whose cowboy hats and elephant-hide boots make more of an impression than his low- key manner. In just 32 months, he has turned Angola around, relying on little more than his sense of decency and fairness. The number of stabbings, hangings and escape attempts has dropped dramatically. The malaise has lifted. Security officers say Whitley has improved communications between the prisoners and the 1,545-member staff. Inmates credit Whitley with providing new educational and recreational programs. Most important, inmates feel they have an advocate in Whitley...
...illustrate, prisoners usually start with July 22, 1991. At 12:10 a.m. on that date, Whitley presided over Louisiana's final execution by electric chair. Later the same day, orders reached the prison metal shop to construct the gurney that would henceforth be used for lethal injections. Two inmate welders balked; then 375 convicts joined their "work buck." Confronted by every warden's worst nightmare -- a prisoner rebellion -- Whitley did the unthinkable: he backed down. He publicly called the idea a bad one and said a private contractor would build the table instead. "He admitted he was wrong," says lifer...
Initially, some prisoners interpreted Whitley's reversal as a sign of weakness. But many changed their mind a few months later. After the state legislature imposed a strict October 1991 deadline for inmates to challenge their convictions, Whitley, alone of Louisiana's 12 prison wardens, helped inmates beat the cutoff. He authorized the prison printshop to run off 5,000 appeal applications. He instructed the prison radio station to hold a question-and-answer program, brought in a lawyer to field questions, then ordered all inmates to listen. He also made sure that illiterate inmates -- fully 70% of the prison...
Some of those men were inmates back in 1970 when Whitley first started out at Angola as a classification officer. Armed with sociology and zoology degrees from Southeastern Louisiana University, he tried and failed to secure an appointment to the state police. Disappointed, he settled for a corrections job. After nine years at Angola, he moved to Louisiana's Hunt Correctional Center, where in 1983 he became The Man. "I never really had a desire to be a warden," he says. "I just kept being promoted up." (Sybil, his wife of 17 years, counters, "He says he's not ambitious...