Speaker 1: I walk straight line.
Speaker 2: Shackle change, Oh weesome, gird, it's calling my name. There
is no mercy and it's been a tentery juice as
the hill stream game Wrangle three, I'm here but by
mere to die inside these walls, inside the wild and
went no girls.
Speaker 3: I Hey everyone, and welcome back to Bloody Angola, a
podcast one and forty two years in the making, the
complete story of America's bloodiest prison. I'm Jim Chapman, and look,
today I am going to open your eyes, maybe a
little bit, to the horrors for lack of a better word,
of what it is like to die in prison and
Angola specifically, be bare read there, what happens to you
and what happened back in the past before Bloody Angola
was bloody Inngla and it was still a slave plantation
just starting to grow. I guess you could say it's
prison roots. So that's what we're going to talk about today.
And what got me thinking about this was an article
that I read from Wilbert Rido and of course I've
talked about him in the past. Did a full episode
on Wilbert Rideau, certainly the best author and writer to
ever come out of Angola, but one of the best
authors of all time in my opinion, whether he was
in prison or not. So I'm going to read you
that article that he wrote, and it's going to give
you an idea of what this is like in a
way that only Wilbert Rideau paint it. And it reads.
It was a nice spring morning, with a soft breeze
rustling the leaves of the tall trees, but its beauty
was lost upon a handful of the maids who had
just finished digging a deep, rectangular hole that would be
the final resting place of James Crepps number seven six
zero six ' nine. Laying their shovels aside the grave,
diggers inspected their work. They had done a good job.
The hole was deep and the sides were smooth and
even tired and dirty. They loitered around the grave, chatting
as they waited for the scheduled funeral to take place.
It wasn't what they wanted to be doing, but it
was better than working in the field. A few prison
officials arrived, soon followed by the warden. Then a yellow
school bus pulled up on the side of the road
directly across from the burial site. Some two dozen inmates,
all trustees, filed out of the bus. Slowly. They began
to wander through the cemetery, exploring it with a wide
eyed fascination and calling out to each other in odd
voices as they were recognized for many names of former
inmates on some of the tombstones. Point Lookout was a
place they had all heard about throughout their imprisonment, but
one that most were seeing for the first time, in
a significant departure from the typical prison funeral normally attended
by only a chaplain, the undertaker in one or two officials,
and the grave diggers. The warden had granted the request
of the prisoners, all friends of Krups, to attend that funeral.
Murmuring voices signaled the arrival of a black hearse, which
pulled up alongside the road in front of a grave
and stopped. The driver conferred briefly with Warden Ross Maggio
and Chaplain Gary Pitton. Maggio turned to the waiting inmates,
give me six of y'all to serve as pallbears. Six
inmates moved forward, took hold of the coffin as it
was slid out, and slowly walked the short distance to
the grave. The chaplain led the procession, with the warden
bringing up the rear. Two inmates carried Flora Reese, purchased
by the inmate organizations. The typical prison funeral had no reas,
but Cripps have been popular. He was well liked by
the inmates. The coffin was placed on the wood planks
above the grave, and the pallbearers stood on each side
in a strict formation. It was a cheap, beige coffin
made of some synthetic material that looked unmust like wood.
Someone had written head across one end of it with
a mark a lot so people would know the difference.
Penton stepped to the head about his head and began
the service by announcing to the gathering that Crypp's mother
was an aging and seriously ill lady who wanted them
to know that her son was not being buried in
the prison cemetery because he was unloved, but because she
was financially unable to bring him home and have him
buried near her. She would have liked to have attended
the few funeral service, Penton told the gathering, but was
too poor and ill to make the trup. She requested
that the thirty third Psalm be read over. Her son,
Maurice pop Bickham, stepped beside the chaplain at the head
of the grave. He was normally a spry man who
moved about pretty well. Despite his sixty seven years of age,
Bickham moved with a slowness that mirrored his depression. He
had been a prisoner for the past twenty six years
and had been a close friend of Crupps. He first
met Crups on death Row, where they had spent many
years awaiting the execution that never came. When the US
Supreme Court spared the nation's condemned prisoners with its nineteen
seventy two ruling that the death penalty as administered violated
the Eighth Amendment, they joined the prisoner's regular populations to
serve life sentences. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall
not want he maketh me lie down. Faltered as he
read the passage from the Bible. The words soon blurred
from tears that filled his eyes. He continued to recite
from memory, fighting the anguish that stirred in his gut.
He and Crips had struggled for many years for a
freedom that neither had realized they had been through a
lot of good and bad experiences, had slept only a
few beds away from each other, and now he had
to read the Psalm over his friend. It unleashed his
own fears of death and dying in prison. Though I
walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I
will fear no evil. With the Psalm read, the chaplain
asked another prisoner to lend a song to the occasion.
Warren Lewis stepped forward and began, Here I stand before
your throne. His strong voice filled the hush stillness of
the cemetery. I stand at your throne, Oh God, plead
my case, Oh Lord. Following Lewis's solo of the other
inmates were invited to step forth and say whatever they
wished about the man they had known. Crips was born
and reared in rural Michigan and was an only child.
While living in New Orleans, he and a traveling companion
murdered a man, and in nineteen sixty eight he found
himself under a death sentence. After his death sentence was
set aside, he was resentenced to life imprisonment in nineteen
seventy three. He adjusted well to prison life despite its
then violent nature, and according to prison officials, he was
never a disciplinary problem. Like so many lifers, Crips tenaciously
clung to the dream that he would one day regain
his freedom, but since he was poor and essentially alone
in the world, it was a lonely struggle. With his
mother living so far away, he rarely received visitors, except
for a male religious adviser who occasionally came by to
see him. For a long time, he worked in the
prison's print shop, A tireless worker who rarely complained. He
was always cooperative and willing to do whatever he could
to help others. A sports enthusiast, he rode the animals
in the annual prison radio for several years. He also
played softball and football, once even playing on an otherwise
all black softball team and earning the moniker the White Shadow.
Several months before his death, Crips was transferred to the
main prisons maintenance crew, but something was physically wrong with him.
He didn't know what it was. He started losing weight
rapidly and was finally admitted to the prison's infirmary. Over
the next month, he was admitted several times to the
hospital in Baton, Rouge and New Orleans, and he died
in New Orleans Charity Hospital of heart disease. He was
thirty seven. At the end of the service, the pawbears
lowered crips into the ground. The men picked up small
clods of dirt and through them atop the coffin in
a farewell gesture. As mourners departed the grave, diggers immediately
began shoveling dirt into the hole. The dry, hollow sound
of the dirt hitting the cheap coffin unnerved pop Vickim,
and he looked back as he climbed onto the bus
Point lookout is the prison's barrier ground, its cemetery, located
a short distance from the prison's employee residential area. The
cemetery is nestled among a forest of pine trees. A
paved road runs in front of it, across from which
is a dilapidated horse form for employees. A deep gully
runs behind it, separating it from a thick wooded area
where some of the employees hunting dogs are pinned. It
is a quiet and tranquil place. It's silence interrupted from
time to time only by the wishing sound of a
passing car. Clusters of sweet gum and oak trees dot
the well tended lawn. The graves are laid out in
scattered clusters toward the front. Seven rows of two hundred
and ninety six white concrete tombstones stretch out across the
entire width of the cemetery. On a few of the stones,
names or names and numbers appear, but most only carrying numbers.
In the past few years, the prison administration has tried
to bury the dead in a uniform manner and has
attached little white metal tags with the deceased name and
number to those headstones. Point Lookout is not a typical cemetery.
No one goes there except to clean the grounds or
to bury another prisoner. There are no visitors. Prisoners are
not permitted to go, Employees generally have no reason to visit,
and since those buried there are dispossessed and unclaimed, there
are no friends or relatives to come and lay out flowers.
Even if there were, Bickam points out, they would have
to make special arrangements to enter the prison and visit
that grave. If they're poor and they lack transportation, the
prison is too remote for regular visits. There's no way
in the world that someone can catch a ride with
somebody all the way to Angola, be dropped off at
the cemetery, and then catch a ride all the way
back to where they came from. Pop Bickham told the
Angelite people can do that at cemeteries in the free world,
but not way up here. You'd have to find someone
coming to Angola in the first place just to catch
a ride. And Bickham knows about such matters. He spent
over two years working as an attendant at the cemetery.
As long as I worked there, he said, not one
person visited anybody in that cemetery. Bickham is right about
the world forgetting about those buried there. Except for the
recent burials, prison officials can tell little to any inquirer
about the dead at Point Lookout. In fact, while there
were two hundred and ninety six tombstones, Assistant Warden Peggy
Gresham pointed out that it seemed inconceivable that given the
number of deaths which have occurred over the years here
at in Goola, there are not more people buried at
Point Lookout. Prisoners were first sent to Angola in eighteen
sixty nine after the state leased out all its convicts
to Major Samuel Lawrence James to ease the financial burden
of housing them. One of the first moves by James
was to transfer state prisoners from the penitentiary then located
in Baton Rudge to his Ngola cotton plantation. James had
huge ambitions about how best to utilize inmate labor to
make money. For the next twenty five years, he operated
the most profitable and brutal enterprise in the history of
the state of Louisiana, often violating state laws in the
terms of his contract. While less prior to the Civil
War had used inmate labor in its manufacturing operations within
the prison facility, James knew there were enormous profits to
be made by taking inmates out of the prison, and
while he started with only a couple of one hundred inmates,
he used them on the Mississippi River levees and railroad construction,
as well as other farms and plantations, utilizing brute force
to maintain the discipline and productivity. The result was a
living nightmare for the convicts, but an empire for James.
In a matter of months. During the first year, James
made a half million dollars which was a king's fortune
in those days. But by the eighteen eighties the least
system began to receive public criticism, which grew louder as
the Major and his subcontractors continued to work, mutilate, and
kill prisoners throughout Louisiana. In eighteen eighty six, a newspaper
in Clinton, Louisiana described what was by then common knowledge
when it stated that the men on James' works are
brutally treated, and everybody knows it. They are worked mostly
in the swamps and plantations, from daylight to dark. Corporal
punishment is inflicted on the slightest provocation. Anyone who has
traveled along the lines of the railroads that run through
Louisiana swamps in which the levies are built, they have
seen the poor devils almost to the waste in the
black and noxious mud. C. Harrison Parker, editor of the
New Orleans Daily. Picky Un, a leading critic of the
horrors inflicted upon the prisoners by James, asserted that it
would be more humane to execute anyone sentenced to more
than six years in james Lee system, because the average
convict didn't live that long anyway. In eighteen ninety state
representative C. W. Seals of Clabne Parish also condemned James
in his brutal system, charging on the floors of the
house that the death rate is about four times as
great in proportion to the number of convicts as the
death rate is in any penitentiary in the United States.
Joseph Ransdell, a North Louisiana attorney who would later become
a US Senator, stated in a trial in eighteen ninety
eight that a friend had told him that he had
seen forty two convicts buried at one camp in either
eighteen eighty five or eighty six, and the deaths were
nearly all caused by overwork, exposure, and brutality. James kept
his books closed from the public and official scrutiny, and
there was no official reports from the prison for the
years eighteen eighty five and eighteen eighty six. However, the
Prison Border Control admitted two years before Ransdeal made his
charge that two hundred and sixteen convicts died in eighteen
ninety six alone, and until the lease system ended in
nineteen oh one, the death rate averaged about ten percent,
with a total of about eight hundred deaths during the
system's last seven years. On the basis of his research,
Mark Carlton of the Louisiana State University estimated that as
many as three thousand men, women, and children convicts, most
of them black, died during the infamous thirty year period
between eighteen seventy and nineteen oh one. During the last
full year of the lease system nineteen hundred, there were
a total of nine hundred and eighty nine prisoners in
the state's leased penal system, one hundred forty nine whites
in eight hundred and forty blacks. The light of those
still alive at the end of the year improved considerably
with the resumption of state control. The more brutal methods
employed under James rule were abandoned, and the morality rate
dropped dramatically. Henry Fuculaw, chief administrative officer of the penal system,
reported to the legislature in nineteen eighteen that the death
rate for convicts had dropped to thirty five point three
per year between nineteen oh one and nineteen seventeen. The
next available statistic on the convict death rate was contained
in a nineteen forty prison report, which stated that between
nineteen thirty one and nineteen thirty five, the number of
deaths had increased under the juil uneral management of R. L.
Himes to an average of forty one per year. In
his History of the Louisiana Penal System, Carlton states that
prison officials, squeezed between the depression and their own venality,
may well have resorted more often to brutality in order
to make the penal system self supporting. On May eleventh,
nineteen forty one, The Time Speaking reported that a study
of prison records revealed that fifteen hundred and forty seven
inmates were flogged with twenty three thousand, eight hundred and
eighty nine recorded blows of the double lash, which were
inflicted on prisoners in nineteen thirty three alone. Thousands have
died in the Louisiana penal system. The question is where
have they been buried? Information on this is even more
scarce than information about what happened to the prisoners over
the years. The problem is the prison system until recent
times operated in violation of state laws, with a criminality
and violence that matched and often exceeded that of prisoners
in its custody. Like any criminal, the system cloaked its
activities in secrecy. Since major James kept his books and
operations closed from the public an official scrutiny during his
murderous reign. There is no way of knowing who died, how,
when or where. Between eighteen sixty eight and nineteen hundred.
Information was obtained during the penal system's transition from the
LEAs to the state, but no major report came out
of the prison until nineteen eighteen, and even that report
offered no precise information as to the number of convicts
actually imprisoned at any time between eighteen ninety three and
nineteen seventeen. It produced only muddled averages for prison population, death, admissions,
discharge and so on, some of which don't jive with
reports from other sources. No more official reports were issued
about the prison's activities until nineteen thirty two as far
as records and public information went, and GOLA ceased to
exist during the nineteen twenties. For the most part, what
happened during that period is and will remain unknown and
aside from the brief report issued in nineteen thirty two,
and GOLA was once again removed from public scrutiny until
nineteen forty, when an anti Huey Long administration assumed the governorship.
It's a dark stain on the state's history that no
one probably will ever know what happened to those locked
up in the penal system. Throughout those secret years, prisoners
could die and be buried, and except for a few
notable points on them boom, and except for a few
notable points in time, their fate was of little, if
any significance to the public or to state officials. Penal
authorities could easily keep their activities, even murder secret, given
the public's apathy. Unfortunately, the public's concern for inmates' welfare
and its enthusiasm for their rehabilitation have always been inversely
proportional to the number of black convicts perceived to be
within the system. Prior to the Civil War, when the
convict population was primarily white, the state and even the
leases chose manufacturing as a means of utilizing inmate labor.
When the inmate population became predominantly black following the Civil War,
the public sin confused the crime problem with the Negro
quote unquote problem, a perception that still lingers today. The
further one moves back in time, the less likely it
is that a prisoner's body was claimed by his family
and given a private and decent burial. While prison officials
today can pick up a telephone and immediately contact the
next of ken in the event of a prisoner's death,
communication wasn't always that simple. It was a long time
before telephones or automobiles became meaningful realities for the lower
social class, the class from which the bulk of state
prisoners have always come from, and the ones least able
to afford the expense of transporting and bearing a body.
Given the reality, the frequency in which inmate's bodies remained
unclaimed and the prison had to dispose of them must
have been much greater, if not routine, prior to the
nineteen hundreds. It's reasonably safe to assume that the prisoners
who died between eighteen thirty five, when the penitentiary was
located in Baton Rouge and the Civil War were buried
in the pauper cemetery in that city. During that era
of Crewe communication and transportation, it's highly unlikely that the
body of a prisoner without family and Baton Rouge would
have been kept somehow until the family received a mailed
death notice and could come pick up the body. The
same technological and economic realities governing the lives of people
from eighteen sixty eight to nineteen oh one, a time
when prisoners died like flies under the rule of the lease.
It must be assame that prisoners were buried wherever they died,
and that could have been anywhere, since Major James worked
his inmates all over the state. Given the high mortality
rate of those working under james whip, it stands to
reason that a lot of inmates died on the Angola
plantation between eighteen sixty eight and nineteen oh one, and
the logical inference can be drawn that most of them
were buried on the plantation grounds. It was common practice
in the South for plantations to maintain their own cemeteries
for family members and slaves, and it's unlikely Inngola was
any exception. The earliest recollection of the existence of a
prisoner cemetery dates back to the early nineteen twenties. Jack Davis,
a former Angola postmaster, grew up in and around Angola
during that period. He recalls an inmate cemetery known as
boot Hill and located on a small knoll near the
infamous Red Hat cell block. At some point during the
nineteen thirties, all of the Boothill graves were transferred to
the present location now known as Point Lookout. C. C. Dixon,
who was working at Camp F for a time, recalls
that they would dig up one grave and take it
over there and bury it, then go get another one.
They take one at a time, and they just kept
at it until they finally got through with it. Dixon
and Davis recalled it ironically. During a period of strict
racial segregation throughout the South, including in the Louisiana prison system,
prisoners were buried together at the same cemetery without regard
to race. As Grisham points out, that was something that
didn't happen in the free world. Obviously. The only places
in Louisiana where blacks and white it's achieved equality during
that era were at Angola's boot Heel in Point Lookout.
The overwhelming majority of Point Lookout graves are marked by
tombstones bearing a prison's number in ten thousands, twenty thousands,
and thirty thousands, all of which were issued to incoming
prisoners between nineteen twenty and nineteen forty. It's my guess
that most of them died shortly after their number was issued.
Assistant Warden Gresham says, if you look at the number
of deaths during those years, then it's my guess that
some of those people weren't here very long. It's also
worth noting that prisoners generally served out sentences during those years.
A nineteen eighty and Golight study of records from that
era revealed that even murderers serving life sentences generally got
out of prison in less than eight years. A nineteen
sixty nine report by the Commission of Law Enforcement and
Administration of Justice stated that the average Louisiana inmate during
the nineteen sixty was freed after only two years in prison.
It has been within the last decade that Louisiana inmates
had been required to serve four more years than traditionally required,
judging by the prison numbers in the years of their issuance.
Point Lookout experienced most of its burials during the twenties, thirties,
and forties, a particularly harsh and brutal era when official
administrative secrecy veiled prison activities, and according to William Woodnear Saddler,
the first editor of the Ngolelight, who came to in
gol in nineteen thirty five, the procedure for bearing inmates
was as mean as the world they were forced to
exist in. In nineteen seventy seven, he recalled a nineteen
thirty five burial practice for the Ngollight, and it read
when an Angolan died or was killed, his body was
taken to the ice house next door to the power
plant at Camp E and kept cold for a period
which did not exceed three days. The man's necks of
ken if on record, they were notified. If there was
no next of ken, the man would be buried in
the penitentiary cemetery at Point Lookout, halfway between the front
gate and Camp I on the old Camp B road.
The burial crew were three black trustees from Camp A,
and they would bring their two wheeled cart pulled by
a mule, to the ice house. A much used pine
coffin was in the cart. The body would be turned
over to them and the crew would wrap the body
in a canvas sheet, put it in the coffin, and
drive the long, slow road to the cemetery. Once there,
the crew would dig a hole not necessarily six feet deep,
or often just deep enough to conceal the corpse. The
coffin would be suspended over the hole and the bolt
on the underside would be slept. The bottom of the
coffin would swing open because it was hinged on the
other side, and the shoty corpse would tumble into the hole.
Two of the crew would reach down into the hole
pull the canvas shroud off the body so it could
be used again. While it was quite evident that the
prison utilized boot Heel and then Point Lookout as burial
grounds for those prisoners whose bodies were not claimed, there
are questions that bag explanation and the two hundred and
ninety six grades of the cemetery only compound that mystery.
The average annual death rate between nineteen oh one and
nineteen seventeen was officially reported by the prison officials to
be thirty five point three, yet there is only one
grave from that period at Point Lookout, that of NH. Waller,
number ten seven three. It's not likely that the bodies
of all inmates who died between nineteen hundred and say
nineteen forty were claimed by friends or relatives and buried
elsewhere outside the prison. As Gresham pointed out, they didn't
know anything about embalming, and they couldn't very well ship
bodies all over the place. It wasn't practical to ship
bodies long distances back in those days. It would take
days to get anywhere by wagons. So it's logical to
assume that the prison probably had to bury most of
the inmates who died, and a lot of them died.
Yet there are not enough graves at Point Lookout to
accommodate the number of inmates who died during that era.
Where were the dead inmates buried, We don't know, Grusham states, Frankly,
we don't know where they died at, whether here in
Angola or elsewhere. If we knew where they were housed,
we could guess where they were buried. The most reliable
indication of who died where and how, and the possible
side of their burial, lies in the manner in which
the prison authorities distributed convicts through its work assignment system.
The classification system employed by penal authorities was simple trned
along racial lines. Levy work in that pre bulldozer era
was deadly, and, according to historian Mark Carlton, was where
most of the recorded deaths between eighteen ninety and nineteen
hundred occurred. After nineteen oh one, the prison assigned only
black inmates to work on the levees. The second and
most onerous brutal work assignment was on the sugarcane plantations,
and these assignments were also primarily given to black inmates. Therefore,
over two thirds of the prisoners, primarily black, were not
even at Angola, giving the brutal nature of their work assignments.
Most of the deaths among prisoners in the early nineteen
hundreds probably occurred at levee camps or sugar plantations. There
may be more truth than fiction to the tales that
the state's massive levee systems were built atop inmate workers.
Those inmates certainly were not shipped back to Angola for
burial at Point Lookout. Imprisonment and penal operations in Louisiana
are no longer crue primitive affairs that they used to be.
Federal courts, recognition of prisoner's rights, and enlightened and sophisticated
penal management have put an end to the harsh and
brutal practices of the past. Medical care, which was once
almost non existent for prisoners, now exist. It made violence,
which used to tear at the very fabric of the
prison world, has long ceased to be a major factor
in the inmate mortality rate. Men now die of old
age or illness. Today's circumstances being what they are, more
of our prisoners are dying of natural cause, as Grusham said,
and are more likely to die in a hospital away
from Angola than in Angola. The prospect of dying in
prison is a nightmarish fear that haunts every prisoner like
a ghost. Dying anywhere isn't a pleasant thing, Mordan Maggie
had pointed out in those dying here pretty much the
same as people in nursing homes, while dying in prison
is perhaps not the same as dying at home. We're
trying to make it as comfortable as possible for them.
In fact, that was a major consideration in the creation
and operation of the Old Folks Ward at the hospital,
to have a more comfortable situation for the elderly prisoner,
with nursing care and medical attention readily available. But that
knowledge offers no consolation to prisoners faced with the prospect
of dying in prison. It's dying away from home, alone
with strangers in the callous atmosphere of the prison. Being
treated and cared for more often than not by an
indifferent hand. It's grossly different from dying in the warmth
of a home, in the bosom of friends and relatives,
which eases the sting of death somewhat. There's nothing in
the prisoner's world that can soften the finality of death.
A longing look out of a window reveals a world
of guns, curses, and noise, as callous as the concrete
it's made of. There is no warmth, beauty or meaning,
no lasting pleasures, touches, joys, or words. In prison, there
is nothing. You suffer alone, and you die alone, feeding
the fear and misery of those who must watched you die.
Roy Fogum was a close friend of James Cripps. Fogum,
a patient at the prison hospital, couldn't attend Cripp's funeral,
but he watched him languish in the prison hospital ward
until Crips was transferred to that charity hospital in New Orleans.
He shared Crip's frustration during the initial stages of his
illness as the doctors tried to find out what was
wrong with him. They slept two beds of port at
the hospital ward. After Crips was transferred to New Orleans.
Fogrum also made a couple of medical trips to Charity Hospital,
and he inquired each time about his friend's condition. I
was told he was unconscious and had a bad heart,
and that they couldn't operate on him. Fogum recounts the
next trip I made the following week, I asked about
him again, and they told me, Roy, your friend is
not going to make it. When word of Cryp's death
finally reached Fogum at the prison hospital, it seemed like
a part of me died, he said. A little later,
Fogum watched another friend, Charles Little One Collins, who slept
three beds away from him, die. Crips had died alone.
In contrast, Colin's wife visited him a week before his death,
although she could not stay with him. He suffered day
and night. Fogum recalls, I sat there in my wheelchair
the night he died. He was hollering about how hot
it was. I told him the air conditioner was on.
Fogram had to watch his friend's agony and death, then
watch the hearst take Little One away the next morning.
That kind of thing can get to you, he said.
You're sitting there helping your friend to die. Looking at
him and knowing that the same thing could happened to you,
it starts bugging your mind, and sooner or later you
can't even think right. Sometimes I have nightmares. I lay
in my bed and cry like little one did. There's
no respirit from the pain of imprisonment. When Folgram is
transported to a hospital outside the prison for medical treatment,
he travels with his leg irons hobbling him around the ankles,
and with his wrist handcuffed and chained to his waist.
A painful black lock box also on his wrist prevents
him from picking the handcuff lock. He goes fully shackled,
as did Crips and Collins, despite cancer eating Collins away.
It didn't matter that Crips and Collins were dying. They
had to lie on their stretchers, weighted down by the
chains that bound them and held them prisoner. It's the
general policy that when a prisoner is shipped out of Angola,
whether they go to court or another hospital, that he
is to be shackled. Maggio said. My first responsibility is
to make sure that a prisoner is secure when we
send him out of the prisident into the public. The
fact that a man is dying doesn't mean that he
won't attempt to escape or that he can't do anything.
If the leg irons and handcuffs would interfere with the
man's medical care, they are not put on the prisoner.
And while it's a general policy to shackle everyone, there
have been numerous exceptions to that policy, and I expect
that there will be more in the future. It all
depends on what the medical staff would say about the
inmate's condition. Cripps died in shackles, chained to his bed
in the Charity Hospital in New Orleans, with the cold
steel biting into him as the prisoners that died before him.
The mere idea drives needles of fear into Fulgram, who
wants to die like that, chained up like some kind
of animal. He said, I certainly don't want to die
like that. He's trying to avoid the possibility. Though he's
been in prison twenty four years time that would have
crushed most family relationships. Folgram's family is still sticking with
him and fighting to prevent his dying chained to a
hospital bed. His family is trying to secure a medical
discharge or furlough from prison for him. I'm hoping and
praying that they can get a medical discharge or furlough
or whatever it is, he said from his hospital wheelchair.
There is little n Fogram's immediate world to give him
reason to hope. He watched Collins die waited for a
medical furlough that never came. Looking a few beds away
from him, he watches a nurse and an inmate orderly
tending to Joe Brown, another patient. He's got no legs
from the knees down, nothing, said Fulgram. They've got to
take care of him, bathe him and everything else like that.
He went up to the pardon board and asked for
a break, to be allowed to go home, but they
said he ain't served enough time. Hell, how do they
expect the guy to live? I think that any man
who has been here in your years and got bad health,
regardless of who you are, should be discharged. I mean,
as long as there are people who are willing to
take care of you. Maggio believes in the concept of
releasing terminally ill and aging prisoners on medical furloughs, so
long as there's someone to release them too, who's willing
to take care of them. But He also pointed out
it all depends on the man. If an eighty year
old man killed someone and came up here, we can't
very well ship him right back into the community the
next day. The community and the judge obviously won him
in prison, which is the reason why they shipped him
to us in the first place, so they wouldn't appreciate
us shipping him right back the next day because of
his age. Hell, I don't know how you would address
a case like that. Maggio has recommended inmates for medical
furloughs in the past, and if when the medical department
recommends a terminally ill case to me for medical furloughs,
he said, I recommend it to the Department of Corrections
and they take it from there. Folgram is one of
the more fortunate elderly prisoners. He knows it. I've got everything,
he says, I'm one of the lucky ones. Ailing and
elderly inmates are a fast growing problem. They constitute a
class of prisoners with odd needs. Many, if not most,
of them require special attention and medical care in a
slower pace of life than the rest of the prisoner population.
Most are unable to work, and they are more prone
to depression and suicide than any other group. Yet in
most prisons there are no special programs to deal with
the age. They simply vegetate in prison. There are notable exceptions.
Some prison systems provide special accommodations for the age denailing.
The federal prison system operates two minimum security prisons solely
to house its ailing and elderly prisoners. The state of
cal Nia has a similar one hundred and fifty million
facility in Chino, where elderly prisoners are permitted to live
at a slower pace, away from the stress field and
violent worlds of other prisoners. Louisiana is in the process
of addressing what should be done with old sick prisoners.
Upon assuming office several months ago, Governor Edwin Edwards, and
it's important y'all to mention this was written back when
Edwin Edwards was in office. Governor Edwin Edwards appointed a
Forgotten Man Committee to study the prison system and recommend reforms.
Correction Secretary s Paul Phelps is fond of pointing out
that if the state doesn't do something about them, the
Department of Corrections will soon be operating the largest old
folks home in the state. While prisoners generally fear the
prospect of dying in prisons, few of those who do
actually end up buried here. Most are retrieved by relatives.
Only eight prisoners have been buried at Point Lookout during
the past five years. A study of five of them,
selected at random, reveal a pattern. What we're looking at
are individuals with low education levels who were born and
raised outside of Louisiana and whose family lives outside of
the state. Grusham said they were individuals who had been
constantly conflicting with the law and spent considerable amounts of
time in jails and prisons away from their families throughout
their lives. And that's important because individuals who are in
constant trouble are less likely to be able to maintain
a close family tie throughout long periods of separation. And
it appears that this is what happened in their cases
because they have families, so there was an evident deterioration
of family ties. In addition, they were all either single
or divorced, which means no immediate family ties, and they
had no visits. Now, when you put all these factors together,
the accumulative effect is that it appears these people had
earlier in their lives lost initial closeness with other family members.
While the families of two of the inmates refused to
claim their bodies, grush And pointed out the families of
the other three men were unable to claim bodies because
of financial difficulties. They wanted very much to claim the bodies,
and bear was delayed in a couple of cases to
give families more time to try and work out some
of the financial arrangements. In fact, some of the family
members came to the prison for one of the funerals.
You have to understand the background that prisoners primarily come from.
That for me and golis chaplain Gary Penton, who explained
they generally come from poor families, people already caught up
in the trauma of life, and people who don't have
much don't expect to have much. They do well to
keep the car running, for instance, just to go to
work if they got to work to go to and
it's a very real hassle just keeping their own life together.
Then they may live out of state, and in the
case of crips, then you suddenly thrust upon them the
expense of having a body shipped prepare for burial and
the general cost of dying, which is pretty high. They
can't handle it, especially if they're ailing in elderly people
living on fixed incomes crips having to be buried here
is a good example of that. There are always going
to be those men who don't have anybody in their
lives anywhere, Pitton pointed out. And it's not a case
of rejection, but simply not belonging. They've been here for
so long that their folks have all died, and what
other family ties they might have had simply disintegrate with
the passage of time. They're being locked away from them
for so long. Just the natural growing away from each
other when people are apart, it's a natural process. When
I was in the military, Pitton continued, I had to
spend a year on a remote radar site off the
coast of Alaska covering chaplain duties. When I returned home
after one year, my wife and I had to get reacquainted.
We'd sort of grown apart. She had taken on out
of responsibilities and learned to function on her own during
my absence, and I had to kind of wiggle back
into her life when I returned. When a person copes
without someone for so long, it becomes somewhat difficult for
them to make a spot for them in their life again,
especially when they've become involved with life and their burden
with so many other responsibilities and demands, you simply grow apart.
And Two, if you're the kind of person who has
been in and out of trouble and in and out
of jails and prisons throughout your life, you don't have
the time and the opportunity to develop those close and
lasting relationships to begin with. Grusham pointed out a lot
of family relationships of people in prison were already strained
and shattered or even broken before they came to prison.
That's one of the factors in your ultimate having no belongings,
having nobody to really encourage you, nobody to frown at you,
so to speak, because they love you, care about what
happens to you. When you add the natural disintegration of
relationships that go with long confinement, it just goes down
the drain completely. The same thing happens in marital relationships
of people in prison. It's just that the evidence of
that natural disintegration in this instance is an unclaimed body.
The other is divorce. The fact of death doesn't change
what has already taken place. I think that it probably
insinuates the dread that a man has. He already knows
that there are tenuous ties. Pitton, a former Air Force chaplain,
has been a chaplain in Gola for five years. The
burial of Creps was his first prison funeral, an experience
he cites as his saddest since he's been at the prison.
The fact of death is no major fear or dread
or terror for me, he said, That's a natural part
of life. But the death where there is nobody to
love you, to mourn your passing, no tears, that's sad.
Standing at the head of his grave, I found myself
identifying with him and those gathered around. I can relate
to the pain the fear a man who is as
much a family man as I, A man who feels
the need for human warth and belonging, I can appreciate
the value of a family relationship. He and his non
belonging represent the fear of not only the inmates, but
that of every human being, a being alone in life.
It's a very human fear. It's just that with the
inmate it's worse more intense because he doesn't have much
control over his life and his being. Life in prison
is much more intense. When you're excited, you're really excited,
and you're depressed, you're really depressed, and your fears are
very very real to you. Whether they're real or not,
they run that much deeper. Oh, I understand their fear.
And then in the postcript, it said on the morning
of May thirty first, nineteen eighty four, two weeks after
being interviewed, Roy Folgram was informed by prison officials that
he had been granted a medical furlough to his family,
effective June first. On the same day, Edmund Ruffing, a
seventy two year old resident of Angola's Old Folks Ward
serving a life sentence for murder, was buried at Point Lookout.
A first defender, he had no family and never received
a visitor during his seventeen years of confinement. Folgram died
on December twenty ninth, nineteen ninety at the home of
his sister. Following publication of dying in prison, which is
what I just Reggie warden Ross, Maggia ordered assistant Roger
Thomas to research old prison records in the state archives
and determine the identity of every person buried at Point Lookout.
As a result of Thomas's efforts, names were placed on
every tombstone in the cemetery.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: What an article that was written in June of nineteen
eighty four by Wilbert Rido. And the reason that I
didn't break that down for you and I just read
straight from it is there is no one on God's
green Earth that can say it better than that, especially me,
And I felt like that's what you needed to hear.
That was strong. That was one hell of an article,
So thank you for listening again. Obviously, know what are
you Everton? This week, last couple of weeks have been
a struggle for both of us to line our schedules up.
He's got some big things coming up with Real Life,
Real Crime Original and that series he's been kind of
teasing that's going to be starting in November, and I've
got some things coming up as well. That lining up
those schedules is really difficult. Look, I'm here every day
in the studio. It's a lot easier for me to
just jump behind here and bring you all something, And
that's what I did today. I hope you enjoyed it. Wow,
what a writer Wilbert Rito is. And that is Bloody
Angla for this week and until next time. For what
do you Everton? I am Jim Chapman, your host of
Bloody Angola, a podcast one hundred and forty two years
in the making, the complete story of America's bloodiest present.
Speaker 1: Peace on the street, line, shackle change.
Speaker 2: Oh gluesome Gurdi, it's calling my name. There is no
mercy and this being a tentery juice as the huge
stream game Rango the three. I'm here but.
Speaker 3: By here to die.
Speaker 2: Inside these wars, inside the wild and when the girls
I know, it's so.
Speaker 1: Bloody.
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