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Expressions Of Love From Prison

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Prison is a world of caged humanity, removed and isolated from normal life. But this enclosed wasteland, with all its conscious and unconscious brutalities, cannot trap love in the heart.

In September 1981, I opened a letter to the woman of my life (now my wife of 37 years) as a prisoner with these words from behind the fenced world of a prison called Angola—a sprawling 18,000-acre plantation where thousands of inmates and former slaves were killed and buried beneath the soil of its rich Tunica Hills:

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PRISON NOISES

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Prison was my world. Forty years, four months, and 14 days.

That’s how long I was locked up in the Louisiana prison system – 11 months in a Baton Rouge jail awaiting trial and sentencing; twenty years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola; eight years at the State Police Barracks in Baton Rouge; nine years at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer; and two years at the C. Paul Phelps Correctional Center in DeQuincy.

Literally and figuratively, I traveled the length and breadth of that state’ prison system: first as a convicted murderer, then as an award-winning journalist, and, finally, as a protected witness and a convict author. I gained vast amounts of knowledge and experience through those travels; some of which were harsh and brutal while others rewarding and enlightening. I do not recommend growing up in prison, maturing from a punk kid to a man. It is not for the faint of heart.

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LIFE OUTSIDE

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Clifford Hampton was released from the Louisiana prison system on parole this past April. He had served 61 years for two murder convictions.

At age 17, Hampton killed an 18-year-old neighborhood girl in Ascension Parish after, according to public reports, she refused to have sex with him. He stabbed the girl 28 times in a fit of rage.

Although a juvenile, Hampton was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment as an adult for the murder. He was placed in the Louisiana State Penitentiary—more commonly known as “Angola.” It was at the time the state’s only adult prison, housing both male and female inmates.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author