0:00

WNYC Studios is supported

0:02

by Amazon Music. Amazon

0:04

Music now offers Prime members the largest

0:06

catalog of ad-free top podcasts.

0:09

You can listen to shows like Death, Sex, and Money,

0:11

Radiolab, and On the Media ad-free

0:14

on the Amazon Music app. I'm Anna

0:16

Sale, host of Death, Sex, and Money, and

0:18

I'm hosting Hold On, a series of national

0:20

live call-in specials from WNYC

0:23

about our mental health.

0:25

Join me as we talk together. Listen

0:27

wherever you get podcasts.

0:36

This is The Takeaway, and I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

0:41

People come and see us, and

0:44

they tell us how great we are and how

0:46

we've blessed their lives, and

0:49

yet they leave us in

0:52

this condition.

0:54

More than 55,000 people across the U.S. are

0:58

incarcerated with the sentence of

1:00

life without parole. And then we

1:02

lose our hair. We

1:05

begin to get gray,

1:08

and then we start having

1:10

a stoop. We bend over, and then

1:13

they have to visit us on the ward, and

1:18

then it's all over.

1:21

Thousands sentenced to a living

1:23

death. I realized that

1:26

I could possibly

1:28

die in Angola, that this

1:31

could be the sum total of my life. Angola.

1:36

It's the common name for the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

1:40

4,400 men in the state are serving life without parole,

1:43

and it's the highest rate in the country. You've

1:45

been hearing the voice of one, Mr.

1:47

Darrell Waters, who was sentenced to prison

1:50

in 1992. Now,

1:52

Angola takes its colloquial name from the

1:54

plantation that preceded it, an

1:57

8,000-acre slave labor camp, which in turn

1:59

was named after the state.

3:59

of myself, especially with these

4:02

mentees, I tell them, man,

4:04

don't waste me. Don't

4:06

waste me. When you get out of here, utilize

4:10

me. Everybody I talk

4:12

to, my mother, my family, friends,

4:15

when I do interviews, whatever I do, a

4:18

part of me will leave here with

4:20

you. Whomever I come into

4:22

contact with, I'm going to love

4:24

people so passionately until

4:27

a part of me will always live

4:29

outside

4:29

of the gates of Angola. I

4:33

recently spoke with two folks who've been intimately

4:36

involved in the Visiting Room Project. I

4:38

am Marcus Condacar. I am the chair

4:40

of the sociology department at Loyola University

4:42

in New Orleans and co-creator

4:45

of the Visiting Room Project. My name is

4:47

Arthur Carter. I'm barely known as

4:49

AC,

4:50

and I've been just recently released from Louisiana

4:52

State Penitentiary, July 7. I

4:55

was incarcerated for 35 years

4:57

and four days.

4:59

AC is one of the men who told his story

5:01

on camera for the Visiting Room. He

5:03

was originally sentenced to life without parole

5:06

in 1989 at just 25 years old,

5:08

and his sentence was reduced this

5:10

year.

5:11

At the time of our interview, he'd only

5:13

been outside of the prison for 48 days,

5:16

and the pressure

5:18

to readjust and to succeed on the outside

5:20

can be enormous. But

5:23

AC told me

5:24

he was eager to tell his own story.

5:27

I'm doing great. I'm really doing

5:29

super.

5:31

I'm having an opportunity, you know, in

5:33

the 35 years that I was incarcerated. Of

5:36

course, I had a lot of time to just reflect

5:38

on things that I wish I could

5:40

do.

5:41

And once I got the opportunity to be released,

5:43

I'm actually just involved in doing some

5:46

of the things that I really, really thought was

5:48

really important to me. And one of the

5:50

most essential things is reunite

5:52

with my family, because the 35 years incarceration

5:55

takes you totally out there lives. So that's

5:57

what I've been definitely focusing on.

6:01

Now, AC, you were, you know, I'm

6:03

old enough to say that at 24, you were just, you were a

6:05

baby. You were a baby when

6:07

you were given a life

6:10

without parole sentence. Can you tell

6:12

me a little bit about the circumstances that

6:14

led to your incarceration at Angola?

6:17

Yes ma'am. I had

6:19

graduated from high school before then. I

6:21

went to the United States Marines. I

6:24

had honorably discharged at 21.

6:26

I was working for my father as a painting

6:28

contractor. And

6:31

in the midst of that,

6:32

on one evening, I had

6:34

made a life changing decision.

6:37

I had ran into a female

6:39

that was involved with the use of crack cocaine.

6:41

And that

6:42

was my first time ever using the drug.

6:46

I used it. I had no idea how

6:48

powerful that drug was, how weak

6:51

I would be coming to the drug.

6:53

And once I used it, within a

6:55

year, my whole life had changed. It wasn't

6:57

even a year.

6:58

I began a practice of just

7:01

getting high all the time.

7:03

And

7:04

it just brought me to a situation where

7:06

I was going back and forth out of rehab centers.

7:09

I lost total control of

7:11

every piece of wheel and everything that I've

7:13

ever accomplished in my life.

7:15

And it's one evening, I brought two guys

7:18

to my house for the purpose of rocking cocaine,

7:20

like I told you before, while they were there,

7:22

supposed to be assisting me in rocking the

7:24

cocaine. We got into altercation

7:28

where I stabbed one of the

7:29

guys once. And that's how I got

7:31

convicted for second degree murder.

7:34

And

7:34

it sounds to me like,

7:37

you know, all those years, those decades

7:39

spent incarcerated, you've done

7:42

a lot of thinking. I know for me,

7:44

when I think about you being 24, you know, sometimes 24

7:47

year olds make not

7:50

the world's best decisions. It doesn't

7:52

mean you shouldn't be held accountable, but life

7:55

without the possibility of parole,

7:58

that seems like too much. It

8:00

does. It is. That is. And

8:03

that's why I got to give all, thank God

8:06

for the Visiting One Project because

8:08

during that particular time, I

8:10

just felt that I had a story

8:13

to tell. And it was a story that it

8:15

seemed to be like going back and forth through the courts.

8:18

Nobody was interested in hearing.

8:20

So when Dr. Marcus came to Angola,

8:23

I was really interested in just expressing

8:25

myself and being able to tell a story.

8:28

And working at the MA Council, a lot of guys come

8:31

to me with different situations. So their

8:33

personal circumstances and the facts of

8:35

their case, I understood about them.

8:38

And I just knew my predicament was a lot

8:40

different.

8:42

A lot of guys

8:43

were products of being in foster

8:46

home.

8:46

They didn't have parents. And

8:49

I just felt, I'm from New Orleans,

8:51

but I never lived in a project. I had a mother

8:53

and father that was buried, nourishing

8:56

for me, that was right there with me. I had a stay at

8:58

home mom that practically raised me every step

9:00

of the way. I went to the Marines,

9:02

I had traveled all around the world.

9:04

And I wanted to tell my story because

9:07

like you said, I just thought that life sentences,

9:10

given the categorical sentence of life

9:12

without parole, was just an extreme

9:14

measure. And I just thought that there's

9:16

different people that's incarcerated

9:19

for different reasons.

9:20

And

9:21

every one of them deserved to be looked

9:24

at in different ways.

9:25

Marcus, talk to me about

9:28

the Visiting Room project.

9:31

I just heard AC say that it was life-changing

9:34

for him. What motivated you to undertake

9:37

the project? And tell us about it.

9:39

You know, I live and work in New Orleans and

9:41

I spend a lot of time analyzing

9:43

data on incarceration and sentencing

9:46

patterns with a focus on

9:48

life without parole sentences. And

9:50

some years ago, I met another

9:53

man who had spent 28

9:56

and a half years on a life sentence

9:58

before winning his freedom with the... actually

10:00

from the Innocence Project,

10:02

named Calvin Duncan. And

10:05

Calvin ended up being one of the co-creators

10:08

of the project and he had spent

10:10

most of that time at Angola as what

10:13

they call inmate council, very similar to

10:15

AC. And

10:17

he knew all these people there, serving

10:19

life sentences because he worked on their cases

10:21

and actually grew up with them. He

10:24

knew their stories of

10:26

change, of transformation. He

10:29

knew that the human beings behind that data.

10:32

And as we talked, we realized that

10:35

very few people know about the

10:37

changes that happen behind prison walls because

10:41

they have no access to them. I

10:43

guess it's one of the

10:45

consequences of designing prisons to keep people

10:47

in is that they keep the rest of us out. And

10:50

so the people who are actually serving these

10:52

very long sentences remain a sort

10:54

of abstraction to us. And actually,

10:57

we also remain somewhat logically skeptical

11:00

about transformation because we don't

11:02

see it. We're suspicious of folks

11:04

coming back into our communities because of that.

11:07

And so we realized

11:08

we've got to get in there and get their stories

11:10

out. And rather than

11:13

speaking for the people

11:15

serving life without parole, we had to figure out a way

11:18

for them to speak for themselves in their own

11:20

words. And so I designed

11:23

an Ethographic Oral History Project. It was

11:25

initially for an academic

11:27

audience. Once we started filming, we

11:29

realized that we happened across something really quite

11:31

extraordinary. And it

11:33

needs to be shared,

11:35

I think it needs to be shared beyond an academic

11:37

audience because

11:40

of what we had. Not only the access,

11:43

which is very unusual to be able to go into a prison

11:45

and interview folks one on one with

11:47

nobody else there. That is not

11:49

the experience those of us as family members

11:52

and loved ones have when

11:54

wanting to visit it. I mean, you actually had more

11:56

access than family has.

11:59

Can you?

11:59

Tell us a little bit about that. The

12:02

plan originally was for Calvin and me to

12:05

interview folks together. But

12:07

that fell apart on the very first day

12:10

because Calvin's history with the

12:12

men in the project was sort

12:14

of getting in the way. They were really performing

12:16

for him. And we

12:18

realized that he couldn't be in the room

12:20

with us after that first day. And his role in the project

12:22

kind of changed at that point. What

12:25

we ended up with,

12:26

with this sort of unusually

12:28

private space, it was in the prison education

12:30

building.

12:31

And the door closed. There

12:34

was no security anywhere. And

12:37

I think when I reflect back on it,

12:39

I think

12:40

speaking to a relative stranger such

12:42

as myself

12:44

sort of opened up the possibility

12:46

for something much more intimate

12:49

than certainly I was

12:51

expecting.

12:52

And I was

12:55

suddenly privy to these incredibly powerful stories

12:59

where folks were willing

13:01

to go into very difficult emotional

13:03

spaces about their childhood,

13:06

about coping, in prison.

13:09

And I mean, a number of men told me that I was the first

13:11

grown man to see them cry since they

13:14

were kids. So many of the men have

13:16

sort of internalized the sense of insignificance.

13:19

Because they would say, no one's

13:22

ever asked me about my childhood or

13:24

why do you care?

13:28

And I think a lot of them were confused as to

13:30

why I wanted to do this project at all and

13:36

why what they had to say might matter to anyone.

13:40

AC, can you follow up on that? All

13:42

those years, spending more years in Angola

13:45

than you've been alive before you

13:47

were sentenced. Did you

13:49

start to feel that you did not matter?

13:52

Yes, ma'am, because we all

13:54

give them mandatory life sentences. So it's no

13:56

mitigation or anything from now.

13:58

So if we...

13:59

If we're not awarded a view that

14:02

our constitutional violation is not great

14:04

enough to reverse our cases or

14:06

vacate our synthesis,

14:08

there's nobody actually interested

14:11

in you and why you're there. Is

14:13

nobody interested in the rehabilitation

14:15

or the improvement that you made? Marcus,

14:19

why are there so many people

14:21

serving life without parole in Angola? Louisiana

14:24

does lead the country with

14:27

respect to the rate at

14:28

which people are sentenced to

14:30

life without parole. 16% I

14:33

think now of people incarcerated in Louisiana

14:35

are serving that sentence compared

14:37

to 4%

14:39

of all incarcerated folks in the US.

14:42

But I don't think that, I think that

14:44

while we are high on that

14:46

metric certainly, I don't think it's,

14:49

we're unique. I

14:51

think the experience of serving

14:53

life without parole in Louisiana is probably

14:55

very similar to serving life without parole

14:58

anywhere else in the country. One

15:00

of the

15:01

drivers of Louisiana's

15:04

life without parole population is, as AC

15:07

was just saying, is that we have

15:09

mandatory life without parole

15:11

sentencing schemes for a

15:14

whole range of offenses.

15:16

For second degree

15:18

murder, which was AC's conviction, it's

15:20

Louisiana and Pennsylvania, the only two

15:23

states that have a mandatory

15:25

sentence for that. It goes back

15:27

to

15:28

the late 70s. Louisiana

15:30

was not always this way. In

15:32

the 1970s, we had very few people living

15:35

life without parole sentences. Through

15:39

a complicated set of things that happened in the

15:41

70s, by the end of the 70s,

15:43

life without parole was

15:46

for every life sentence. And we have been

15:48

growing that population ever

15:50

since.

15:54

After

16:00

a quick break.

16:05

We're taught

16:07

the Supreme Court was designed to be

16:10

above the fray. But right now,

16:12

are the nine justices living up to that promise?

16:15

I'm Julia Longoria, host of the

16:17

podcast More Perfect. We bring

16:19

the highest court in the land down

16:22

to earth. We'll meet people on all sides

16:24

of crucial cases and give you the history

16:26

that explains how we got here. More

16:29

Perfect from WNYC Studios.

16:32

Listen wherever you get podcasts.

16:40

You've been hearing from my conversation with Dr.

16:42

Marcus Kondkar, the co-creator of the

16:44

Visiting Room Project. It features interviews

16:46

with over 100 men sentenced to life

16:48

without parole.

16:50

We spoke with one of these men, Mr. Arthur Carter

16:52

or AC.

16:55

Now AC had been sentenced to life without parole

16:57

in 1989 when he was just 25 years old.

17:01

But in 2020, Orleans Parish elected

17:03

a new district attorney named Jason Williams.

17:07

DA Williams opened a new civil rights division

17:09

dedicated to re-examining cases with

17:11

excessive sentences.

17:12

One of these cases was

17:15

AC's.

17:16

And he told us about how he came to be released

17:18

from Angola in July of this

17:20

year.

17:21

They found that I did 35 years for

17:23

a crime

17:24

that provocation definitely

17:27

existed in.

17:28

And the civil rights division determined

17:30

that my conviction was greater than it should have been.

17:33

So instead of second degree murder, they vacated

17:36

my conviction and

17:38

gave me a guilty plea to manslaughter

17:40

and they sentenced me to the highest amount of time that

17:42

existed in 1988,

17:43

which was 21 years. Having

17:47

served more time than that already,

17:49

AC was freed.

17:51

Marcus noted that the work of this

17:53

civil rights division not only directly

17:55

affects the men who are released, but

17:58

has potential ripple effects.

17:59

across states. I've

18:02

been able to go back to Angola. We

18:05

were permitted to go back in March. It

18:07

had been a couple of years since

18:09

my last visit, mainly because of COVID

18:11

restrictions. And there was just a palpable

18:14

difference in the way people

18:16

were experiencing hope.

18:18

Even the folks who weren't convicted

18:21

in Orleans were seeing folks

18:24

go home at a rate that they hadn't

18:26

seen in quite a long time. And it gave them

18:29

hope that perhaps something like that

18:31

might happen for them.

18:33

Of course, it's significant for the

18:35

dozens of men

18:37

who have benefited from that review

18:39

process in Orleans Parish.

18:41

In a separate project, we're following up

18:44

with them, and they're all doing rather well.

18:46

There's no recidivism at all in that population

18:49

right now. I'm

18:51

hoping that that

18:55

might lead to a conversation where other

18:58

prosecutors in other parishes might

19:01

use this as an example.

19:04

You can safely reduce

19:06

the prison population without

19:08

affecting public safety for

19:10

some of these guys who have served

19:12

so long that they've simply aged

19:15

out and just are highly

19:17

unlikely to get in trouble again.

19:19

This AC gaining his freedom

19:21

had seemed an impossibility for 35

19:24

years,

19:25

really even up to the moment of his release.

19:27

I just couldn't believe it.

19:29

So now at this point, I'm sitting up,

19:32

I'm talking to my family and friends on a phone, and

19:34

I'm like, I just can't believe it's about

19:36

to happen.

19:37

And showing up July 7, I had

19:39

a Zoom with the court,

19:41

and he vacated my conviction of second

19:43

degree murder.

19:44

And once I came out of that, about

19:47

two hours later, the Department of Corrections had emerged

19:50

and released me because I had already done the time. It

19:52

was like one of the greatest reliefs that

19:54

you could ever think about. It's like

19:56

when it happened, it felt like a ton of

19:58

bricks just fell off me.

19:59

Like a burden that was

20:02

just being

20:03

carried by me all these many years,

20:06

it just went away.

20:07

I just couldn't stop smiling. Nothing

20:10

wasn't frustrating. Everything

20:12

was cool.

20:13

You had to wait a moment for different levels

20:15

to be opening doors and doing whatever

20:17

process they have to do for you to be released.

20:20

It was just a happy moment. And

20:23

then to get to the front gate and

20:25

see members of the Civil Rights Division and

20:27

the lawyer out there waiting for me, I

20:30

just couldn't wait to just get in the car.

20:32

It was a tremendous

20:34

feeling.

20:34

The Visiting Room Project is a powerful reminder

20:37

of the inhumanity of mass incarceration

20:40

and the humanity of those who are trapped

20:42

in it. It really is an

20:45

invitation to come in, bear

20:48

witness, and then perhaps

20:50

engage in a much more meaningful conversation about

20:52

whether this continues to make sense.

20:55

The other thing that has sort of emerged

20:57

from the projects that we realize is also incredibly

21:00

important is

21:01

the ability to preserve the

21:04

historical record.

21:06

To me, I think in many, many years

21:08

from now, I feel

21:10

it's sort of essential to the scholarly

21:12

and human understanding of America's past

21:15

to be able to hear directly from

21:18

people serving these sentences. I hope

21:20

that we will evolve

21:22

from this. One

21:24

day, decades from now, we might look

21:26

back

21:28

with a sense of shame

21:30

as to how we would just throw away

21:33

people. One thing I think that

21:35

the Visiting Room Project does is

21:38

it takes away the stereotype.

21:40

When people think about prison, you

21:42

think about

21:44

different groups of guys being on the yard,

21:46

different divided groups doing

21:49

negativity and doing that stuff.

21:52

The Visiting Room Project shows that

21:54

guys don't do time

21:56

like that. That's not a general

21:59

category.

21:59

of everybody in prison how they

22:02

do time.

22:03

The visiting room gives us opportunity to express.

22:06

Personally, I work as an inmate counsel. This

22:08

guy works on small engines.

22:11

He's teaching other people. This guy

22:13

is a pastor over a church that's in penitentiary.

22:16

This guy is teaching rehabilitative classes.

22:19

This guy is a CPR trainer.

22:21

It is given another description

22:24

on letting the world see

22:27

that people that's incarcerated

22:29

are not just sitting around doing negative

22:32

stuff, doing idle stuff.

22:34

They're productive people. They've

22:36

made a change. They evolved into something

22:38

special. And that person

22:41

needs to be looked at again.

22:42

And the word I keep jumping out of

22:44

my head is proportionality.

22:46

It shows that you can't just put a categorical

22:49

ban on something that's big because

22:52

they have too many different circumstances, too

22:54

many different reasons on why they were

22:56

there in the first place.

22:58

And then it's too many different

22:59

situations that show what they evolved

23:02

into as far as the rehabilitation

23:04

or the person that they've become. And I think that

23:06

once you get a chance to see this is the

23:08

person that the taxpayers are still holding

23:10

in prison, I think the question should

23:13

resonate. Why are

23:16

they still serving life sentences with

23:18

no possibility at going home?

23:24

That's Arthur Carter, who recently regained

23:26

his freedom after spending 35 years in

23:29

the Louisiana State Penitentiary. And

23:31

Dr. Marcus Konkar, the Chair of

23:34

Sociology at Loyola University,

23:36

New Orleans, and the co-creator of

23:38

the Visiting

23:38

Room Project.