Angola Prison
They Know What They Did. They’d Like You to Know Who They’ve Become.
PRODUCED and Edited BY ALEXANDER STOCKTON
The New York Times | Opinion
Listening to the men in the short Opinion Video above is like encountering visitors from another planet. They are serving life sentences at Angola prison, in rural Louisiana, with little to no hope for release. Many are elderly; they have not seen the outside world, or their families, for decades.
They do not face execution, but they have been sentenced to death all the same, their lives spooling out endlessly on the cellblock and in the cotton fields, then ending in a prison hospice bed.
The men are among the thousands in Louisiana — and more than 50,000 nationwide — locked up for life without parole. It costs roughly $70,000 a year for each aging inmate, and this film asks whether the best way to spend billions of taxpayer dollars is on vengeance. The point is not to diminish the severity of the crimes that put these men behind bars. As many of them acknowledge, they have been rightly punished for a long time. But, ask yourself as you watch the video, how long is long enough?