Angola

And he bit them in two, and I chewed on them.

He'd just gotten out of Angola Prison.

And I guess he was trying to impress me.

If he was trying, I'm sure he did.

And so I started thinking, well, what has been the actual consequences of the war on drugs? And I think I found my answer, you know, when I went to the prison that I was representing our clients at.

which is Angola Prison in Louisiana.

And for listeners who might not be familiar, Angola Prison is not only the largest maximum security prison in the entirety of the United States, it is also a prison that derives its name from its history as a former slave plantation where the slaves came from, Angola in Africa.

And it commonly maintains that name to this very day.

And that gives you just an indication of what you might see when you actually step onto the grounds of Angola prison.

You will see people chained together as they're walking around.

You will see people working the fields.

I know there's racial issues in your country like most places in the world, but did you find that the U.S.'s racial problem looks extremely different? Especially when you went to...

They play his touchdown run at beginning of every LSU game still in twenty twenty-six.

He ends up doing like a lot of the p-- athletes you write about, um, after the end of their career, going through existential crises, gets in trouble, comes out the other side, ends up working at Angola.

And, um, you kind of went and met with his family.

Just talk about that kind of arc a little bit, and then I've got a follow-up for you on Angola.

So Billy Cannon, a- he went to prison for counterfeiting in the eighties, and he lost his dental license, and so the only place he could practice was Angola.

And he went down there first as the dentist, and then he just re-- he overhauled their medical system, and all of it was rooted in a deep sense of fundamental fairness.

I mean, one of the things his daughter Bunny says is that he was really drawn to people who'd been thrown away, and he developed these long relationships with people who worked at Angola, with people who'd doing life at Angola.

I mean, his trustee in the medical office was a guy, uh, Mr.

And one of the things that the progressive reform movement in New York did was actually end a lot of the sort of use of slave or not slave labor, but incarcerated labor and incarcerated market or labor markets for incarcerated products, products made by incarcerated people.

Talk about Angola prison.

You know, we're kind of jumping forward a little bit, but you went to Angola and you witnessed an inmate rodeo there.

Can you talk a little bit about what that was like?

Yeah, for my story, I did a bit of reporting, jumping around.

I went to Eastern State.

I went to Lorden Reformatory in D.C.

But I think the most interesting place I went to was the Angola Prison Rodeo.