This is Not Theoretical: Reflecting on a Recent Visit to Louisiana State Penitentiary, By Nicky Gillies

Reposted from our friends at The Oyster Knife.

This piece was written after guest contributor Nicky Gillies participated in the NOLA to Angola bike ride, a fundraiser for the Cornerstone Builders’ Bus Project, which helps people in Louisiana travel to visit their incarcerated loved ones. 

This October I spent three days pushing through the 160 winding bike miles from my home in New Orleans to Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola.  It is still a functioning plantation, much as it has been since the time of slavery.  Angola spreads across 18,000 acres of lauded farmland tucked into a bend in the Mississippi River.  Roughly 5,000 people live and work and eat and sleep and write and shit and dream and shower there, not counting the employees.  Most of those 5,000 people are Black men, young and old, and the vast majority of them—almost 90%—will die inside barbed wire.

Intellectual discussions of the 13th amendment and years of participating in prison-related organizing did not prepare me for the heartbreak and outrage of seeing farmland that is still tilled by a captive and almost 80% Black population.  This is not an antiquated system.  Slavery is contemporary, although it has been refashioned several times, and prison labor is integral to the US economy.  Activist lawyer and former prisoner Paul Wright wrote that simultaneously removing over 2 million incarcerated people from the work force and employing another million as guards “is the most thoroughly implemented government work program in American history since the New Deal.”  Knowing this, seeing Angola—endless barbed wire and guard towers and prison uniforms and eerily beautiful fields stretching in all directions—is devastating.  It is an atrocity.  It is also mundane.

Here are things I saw and learned:  The warden uses dogs bred with wolves to guard prisoners and chase them down, and has even recruited dogs in the area that were supposed to be euthanized for aggression to work in the prison.  There is a golf course in Angola.  You can tee-off there for twenty dollars.  The prisoners manufacture the coffins used when someone passes away inside, which happens on average 32 times each year.  An inmate is paroled and walks out the gates to the free world an average of only 4 times a year.  There are 18,000 acres where cotton is grown.  The operating budget is one hundred million dollars.  The prison museum keeps an old electric chair on display, as if the state no longer murders people, as if this was a fleeting oddity.  And then there’s the rodeo, which was happening the day of our visit.

We blow past several miles of backed up cars waiting to enter through the first set of gates.  A mass of smelly kids on bikes, we press into the surge of 10,000 people there to see the rodeo.  The rodeo has been running since the 1960s, and at $5 per person to enter the inner gates and $15 per person to get rodeo tickets, it brings in an enormous profit for Warden Burl Cain each October.  (Angola proudly calls itself a self-sustaining prison, meaning that its profits—mostly extracted from an exploited labor force—cover its operating costs.)  The rodeo is quite dangerous.  Some events require significant skill and others are designed to humiliate the participants.  Prisoners compete to win extra visitation hours and cash prizes.  The rodeo also features a “crafts fair” where prisoners can sell things they’ve produced and keep about 80% of the profit.  This money can only be spent in the prison—phone calls, soap, cigarettes, underground purchases from guards, etc.

We approach the gates to the rodeo, but cannot bring ourselves to hand over $5 for a closer look.  Instead we wander the perimeter and stare: children jumping on the bounce house next to the guard tower, families excited and laughing and shouting across the crowd, the fake trolley bus that laps the parking lot to transport visitors, the prisoners in their uniforms staffing the event, the hotdog stand, the barbed wire, the guards, the guns.  I wonder how many generations have died inside these gates.  I also wonder why anyone would bring their children to a prison for fun on a gorgeous Louisiana October Sunday.  What does this teach them?  Some in the crowd are probably rushing to see their incarcerated loved ones.  But many, many more of them are shoving through the gates to get good seats.  I pass a white woman walking away from her parked car, yapping into her phone and scanning the crowd for whoever she plans to meet.  “This is a nightmare,” she says, exasperated.  She means the fucking parking.

This is a nightmare.  Named for the country where the original group of enslaved Africans were abducted from when this land first became a plantation, Angola used to be known as the bloodiest prison in America.  The particulars of its atrocious conditions are widely known, documented, and criticized, and must absolutely be reformed.  But narratives of imprisonment often fixate on the sensationalized details—the wrongly accused, the exonerated, the most extreme of inhumane conditions, the gruesome executions gone wrong.  These things matter, but that story is one of exceptions.  How many hours does it take to exonerate one innocent person?  How many lawyers?  And how much media attention?  And the right hand of how many governors?

What about those who are guilty of their charges?  It is morally convenient to assume that they are monsters who deserve to be locked away from society.  But mass incarceration in the US is a recent and economically-driven trend; it does not have to be this way.  If we refuse to accept that over 2 million people are beyond help, and if true safety is rooted in access to living-wage jobs, better schools, counseling, drug treatment, childcare, mediation, intergenerational mentorship, and safe places to live and play, what a great responsibility we then bear.  This is what most fundamentally disturbs me:  We incarcerate the largest percentage of our population of any nation in the world.  The vast majority of people inside prisons are non-violent offenders.  Penal work camps are widely accepted as a logical solution to crime.

We sit outside the rodeo and watch the crowd and I try to burn everything into my cells—what it is to be literally and physically free, what it is to see people living in cages, what it is to have no family inside this or any prison, to have never before schlepped out to visit someone I loved and couldn’t even touch, what it is to witness all this and strive to live a just life.  I pedal slowly back out of Angola past manicured marigolds (prison labor) and stashes of extra barbed wire.  We congregate in the shade of the tiny post-office nearby.  Someone has brought half-eaten funnel cake back from the rodeo.  My friend casually laughs that she almost waltzed into the prison with two joints in her bag.  I wonder how many of these inmates were once kids who forgot to take the joints out of their pockets.

What purpose does it serve for these 5,000 people to be in Angola?  We have long abandoned the notion of rehabilitation for those imprisoned in this country.  Locking up poor people and people of color in the south has never been a means to help offenders re-enter society, but was instead a solution to the economic crisis when the chattel slavery system was declared (mostly) illegal.  But slavery remains explicitly legal as punishment for a crime.  This is not theoretical.  It’s 160 winding bike miles from my house.  It’s the children and parents and cousins and lovers of my neighbors and co-workers and of my political community.  Notably, it’s not my close friends.  The statistical impossibility of having lived in this hyper-policed city with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world for six years without anyone close to me getting locked up is only explained by whiteness and class privilege.

We arrive back in New Orleans, hug, and gather damp tents.  With aching legs I push through the five miles back to my house—five miles now seems like a short flight of stairs or a deep breath.  Flashing blue lights up the Treme and St. Claude Avenue, where I have never once been pulled over despite joints in cars and loud, tipsy bike rides and lots of sober speeding to work and yes that one time we all peed in the gutter when we were lost and drunk and nineteen.  Behind Armstrong Park, I see a young man pressed into a NOPD car.  I hear the cinch of metal cuffs as my wheels clatter past him across raggedy pavement.  I wonder if his white undershirt is hanes like mine and if he has a toddler who pulls on his ears and I wonder if his mom will call his cellphone over and over until she thinks to check the Orleans Parish Prison docket online.  I wonder if he will pick cotton until he fucking dies.  I do not want this world–I did not make it, but it sure as hell made me.  Now the question is can we unmake each other.

I hope that if by the grace of the universe I grow old, the small children I treasure now will become adults who are ashamed that I lived less than 200 miles from this sprawling prison farm camp and did very little.  That I averted my eyes and paid my bills and breathed shallowly and claimed not to smell it upwind of my home, upriver of my life.  I do not want them to know a world where young people are plucked out of difficult and violent circumstances to work until their untimely death behind bars.  I want to make them something better.

Nicky Gillies moved to New Orleans in 2007, works as an ASL interpreter, and strives to learn how to accountably organize against the Prison Industrial Complex and live in a just way.

"I'm The Miracle": The Story of Exoneree Derrick Jamison

From our friends at Resurrection After Exoneration:

“I’m number 119,” proclaims the man sitting beside my desk. His smile is broad and sincere, gold teeth glistening in the artificial light of the office. “Damon Thibodeaux is number 141, you know, the one who got out of Angola a couple weeks ago. Joe Ambrosia is number 140; we was together on death row in Ohio.” He seems so comfortable with these numbers, actually proud of them. Proud to be number 119!

If I were not aware of what he refers to, I might be shocked by his proud announcement, but it isn’t that way for us. Derrick Jamison is here to share his story with me, the story of how he landed on death row for a crime he did not commit, the story of a young man who spent over seventeen years fighting for his life as he awaited execution, and the story of a man who was finally exonerated, the 119th such person in the United States.

Derrick Jamison, from Cincinnati, Ohio, was twenty-four years old when he was convicted of aggravated murder and robbery on October 16, 1985. He was represented by a public defender in a case where the prosecutor and homicide detective withheld thirty-five pieces of evidence. They knew he was not guilty from the start, but getting the conviction was their goal. Apparently, it did not matter who their “victim” was!

Derrick entered death row at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility on October 25, the very day he was sentenced, and was placed into solitary confinement, behind bars, in a 6’x9’ cell, with no physical human contact for seventeen years. At times the prison would be locked down, and he would not be allowed visits or mail from anyone, even from his lawyer, for extended periods of time. For many years of his confinement, Derrick was allowed only two five-minute phone calls per year, one on Christmas Day.

While on death row, Derrick was granted six stays of execution. One was while he was in lockdown, so he did not even receive the notification. Another stay was granted on the actual scheduled date of his execution. He waited until the last minute, with crowds of protesters and supporters gathered outside the prison. When asked what he wanted for his last meal, he replied ,”A cake with a saw in it! I’m not thinking about no food. I’m thinking about dying.” Six times he went through various stages of this harrowing process, and six times it was halted by an official stay by the governor of Ohio.

For the first fourteen years, until 1999, Ohio had the death penalty as part of its system, and there were many inmates on death row awaiting execution, but the state did not use it. Since 1999, they have executed forty-seven inmates and exonerated six. These statistics do not include the even larger number of death row inmates whose sentences were reduced to life imprisonment during the past thirteen years. At one point, the governor, Richard Celeste, upon leaving office, reduced the sentences of all eight women on death row and of several men who were on their final appeals. One of the women whose sentence he reduced had been sentenced to at least eight death penalties for serial murders. Derrick says that he would not have accepted this condition had it been offered. He knew he was innocent and sought exoneration, not a reduced sentence.

At one point, Derrick was offered the opportunity to go free on time served, if he would admit guilt and stop his appeals. He refused. “People thought I lost my mind. I couldn’t admit to something I didn’t do. I’d rather die.”

“Death Row is the same as Schindler’s List,” Derrick continues. “You’re just watching your friends be murdered time and again.” Derrick watched healthy young men come in “like babies – 18 and 19 years old. I watched them grow into men and then they just killed ‘em. It’s like somebody pointing a gun at you and there ain’t nothin’ you can do. They had nobody to fight for them.” Ohio is second in the nation behind Texas in executions.

In 2002, John Byrd was executed. Another man came forward and admitted to the crime for which John had been convicted, but they still killed him. John and Derrick had become close friends on death row. “I curled up on my bunk watching TV, trying not to deal with it, but when they rolled John out on the gurney to his execution….” He paused and cleared his throat, attempting to regain his composure. “It still haunts me. A healthy young man, my buddy, but he was rebellious on the row.” Derrick, on the other hand, never had any write ups on death row. He was not a rebel. “If I had given in to anger and hostility, I would’ve lost my mind. I seen what it did to those other guys. I’m a miracle. All them men, all them babies were in there, some innocent like me, and I walked out. I’m the miracle.”

On May 23, 2002, Federal Judge Arthur Spiegel granted Derrick a new trial. He was moved to general population for three years while the justice system plodded along the path to his ultimate exoneration and release on October 25, 2005, exactly twenty years to the day from the day he first entered death row. His nephew came to pick him up, and the entire family was waiting for him when he got home…everyone except his two closest and most active supporters. “I didn’t die on death row, but my death penalty killed my parents.”

There were events of celebration for a month straight. It was a busy time, and it was good. “If I could bottle up that feeling and sell it, I’d be a millionaire!” He was enjoying life. “When I first came home, I went to the casinos. I won a lot of money; I lost a lot of money. That’s why they call it gambling. I had been a gambler before I went to prison.” There were parties, media events, and Derrick was in demand to speak at area events, “but my biggest supporters weren’t there. My mom was smiling from heaven.”

Asked about his current situation, Derrick reveals that he is on disability due to post traumatic stress disorder. “We ain’t been to jail; we been to hell and back,” he says. The disability compensation permits him to have a part-time job with limited pay, but he remains unemployed.

He spends a significant amount of time speaking to others, sharing his story. He remembers that he went to Catholic schools as a child and says that God gives him the power to go out and share his message with others. “When I speak to a large crowd, something comes over me. That’s God. God has made me into a teacher. I’m a teacher now.”

Derrick tells kids that he thinks that they are all at risk in today’s society. He urges them to remember him and others like him when they experience bad times. “We need to get rid of the death penalty,” he says. “What are we teaching our young people, when our government says it’s alright to kill?” He compares the death penalty to modernized lynchings, remembering what he learned in history class about families coming out with picnic baskets to watch the hangings in the town square. “That might have been a deterrent then, but this, what we have, doesn’t work!”

Our system will always make mistakes. “To err is human, right? We have to stop executing entirely so we won’t be killing innocent people on those mistakes.”

Derrick tells his audiences that he was never involved in drugs in his life, because he was always against them. “I seen what it did to people in my neighborhood.” He assures them that death row is populated by many different types of people. “A lot of guys on death row were pure evil and dangerous, but that doesn’t give somebody the right to kill them. Some were good guys that made mistakes.”

What does his future look like? “I’ll never heal; none of these guys will ever heal. We can’t be compensated for what’s been done to us. My life will get better, but I’ll never get over it. It will always be there…the nightmares. It’s something no human being should have to experience.”

A Small, Good Week, By Tom Lowenstein

From Innocence Project New Orleans Policy Director Tom Lowenstein, via Friends of Justice:

The strangest thing about the work we do at Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) is how our greatest accomplishments seem at once enormous and tiny: enormous in the lives of the innocent men we are able to free from prison, and tiny in the context of the criminal justice system as a whole. Enormous in the good that is done when an innocent person is set free; tiny in the fact that the “good” resolution of the legal case has taken far too long, the innocent man has lost 10 or 20 or 30 years of his life and now has been set free without a dime to his name or a job or anything that might help him rebuild his life. It’s hard to imagine there is anything more important, or “bigger,” than saving an innocent life. Until you look at our criminal justice system as a whole, and think about how many lives stuck in it need to be saved. Then you can’t help but feel very small.

This week, IPNO got good news in seven cases: three men were exonerated by DNA evidence, and four other men who had been set free years ago were officially told, once and for all, that they would not be re-prosecuted. Seven exonerations. What a week.

But one of the men newly proven innocent won’t get a chance to enjoy it: he died eight years ago, in prison, having proclaimed his innocence at every opportunity over his 22 years of incarceration. And another of those men has very advanced cancer; he made it out of prison and will, it seems, at least have the chance to die with his family. The third man has no family around to help him, no money to his name, nowhere to stay. So he came to New Orleans with us, and is being helped by Resurrection After Exoneration, a group founded by an exoneree precisely to help other exonerees. Thank god for RAE—otherwise, who knows what would happen to that man. Thirty years in prison for something he didn’t do, then released with a laundry bag holding all his things—the judge even had to order the sheriff’s department to give him some new clothes because all he had was his prison jumpsuit.

The other four men have been out for a while, proven innocent years ago and released, only to have the authorities hang the threat of re-trying them over their heads for years. Now they are, finally, free.

This morning, at staff meeting, we were back to work: every case is a fight, every case takes years, every good ending is really just a slight correction to a decades-long injustice that the wrongfully convicted will live with until they die.

But seven exonerations in a week is a lot. Seven exonerations in a week will hopefully make people who never think about our justice system think about it. Maybe a few more people will realize that, with 2 million or so people incarcerated in our country, even if our error rate is 1% or .5%, that’s a lot of innocent people in prison. And maybe then they’ll realize that our justice system isn’t as good as it could or should be. That there are lots of ways to make it better, which is to say, lots of ways to create a safer, more just society.

Seven exonerations in a week. Our work can feel like pushing and pushing against a big boulder that never moves—but it just moved a tiny bit. So it’s time to push harder.

Resurrection After Exoneration Hosts Fundraiser This Weekend

Resurrection After Exoneration (RAE) is a New Orleans organization dedicated to serving innocent men who were once wrongfully imprisoned.

From their website:

Each year, we hear about more innocent people being released from prison in the United States. Today, there are over 400 exonerated men and women who have been wrongly convicted and victimized by our criminal justice system. On average, each has served more than 10 years in prison before being released. RAE was founded in 2007 by exonerees to promote and sustain a network of support among formerly wrongfully incarcerated individuals in the South. RAE works to reconnect exonerees to their communities and provide access to those opportunities of which they were robbed.

RAE was founded in 2006 by John Thompson, an exoneree who spent 18 years in prison – 14 on death row – for a crime he didn’t commit. RAE now provides exonerees with case management, social services and education, and the opportunity for exonerees to share their stories with the world.

RAE is hosting their first ever fundraiser on June 19 - Juneteenth - from 5:00pm - 7:00pm. As an organization dedicated to helping emancipate modern-day prisoners and captives–those wrongfully incarcerated in the Louisiana state penitentiary–RAE is dedicating this event to celebrating freedom in every form, while commemorating the long road ahead to providing true freedom to all.

The fundraiser will be at the Angela King Gallery, at 241 Royal Street in the French Quarter. It will feature music by the Leroy Jones Jazz Trio, art and a silent auction, hors d'oeuvres from area restaurants, and will be hosted by special guest Jed Horne, the Pulitzer-winning author of Breach of Faith and Desire Street.

Above: John Thompson holds picture of Jim Williams, the man who sent him to death row. Williams is posing with model electric chair he had made.
Photo by Frank Aymami.