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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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The Death Penalty

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This past June the state of Georgia executed Marion “Murdock” Wilson, Jr. He became the 1500th person put to death in the United States since Gary Gilmore’s January 17, 1977 execution—an execution he requested—that effectively reinstated the death penalty following a ten-year moratorium on executions throughout the nation.

America has always had a special, although somewhat peculiar, affection for the death penalty.

Between the nation’s Declaration of Independence in 1776 and over the next 23 years through 1799, some 618 persons were executed in this country. The death penalty affection intensified in the 1800s as the nation executed 5,381 persons, a significant proportional increase from the previous two-plus decades. By the 1900s America was in a full-blown love affair with the death penalty, marching 7,980 persons into death houses between 1900 and 1967.

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Law of contradictions.

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When is a table is not a table?

This past week the law of contradictions reared its ugly head in the nation’s death penalty arena.

Stephen West was put to death in Tennessee’s electric chair for the double murder of a mother and her 15-year-old daughter in 1986.

During his 33-year stay on death row, West became a man of faith and a model of rehabilitation.

Dexter Johnson was scheduled to die by lethal injection in the Texas death house but was granted a stay of execution by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals because the condemned man may be intellectually disabled.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author