When you say tricky, politically, you're
talking about the new work.
And last night, I felt the excerpts of that political--
sociopolitical and personal political statements
from this book.
It's bound to be tricky politically.
What does that mean?
Well, I'm pretty much an unreconstructed lefty.
It looks like that's the way it's going be for me.
Taking it all the way out.
I mean, today, I've been riding around
on my borrowed bicycle in Tucson thinking, yes, I love it here.
I want to live in an adobe house.
I can stay here.
Then I thought, ooh so many Republicans, I don't know.
It'd be really, you know, it'd be hard.
But I'm in prison writing a text for photographs of prisoners.
I mean, it seems to me rather charge from the get-go,
you know?
And photography, of course, is quite voyeuristic.
Being a visitor, a tourist in a prison is very voyeuristic.
People have to sign rights away.
In order for you to get there, you
have to do a lot of negotiating just to get inside.
And then people aren't doing life
at Angola for spitting on the sidewalk.
And so even though I found I liked almost every one I met,
I really enjoyed my conversations,
and I feel sick in my soul that how
our country does things, just how it
goes without doing things.
The rate of incarceration, the length
of the sentences, that we still have capital punishment,
and on, and on, and on.
But it is complicated.
I mean, my friend Deborah Luster's mother was murdered
by a hit man, and it took nine years before they
caught this man who was totally without remorse
in murdering the stranger in her own bed.
And so Debbie's relation to this project is complicated,
but she's very good with people.
She's very-- there's just no borders in her relationship
to the people, which is another reason why
I like to work with her because I can kind of coattail that,
because I'm much more quick to judge.
And people get on my nerves.
I just shut down.
So she's a great--
great interlocutor for me in a way.
And so I'm just--
I'm really trying to be sensitive to people
who are incarcerated and to people who have been hurt,
have been harmed.
I mean, you just look at something
like the address for parents of murdered children
and you know the damage from this deed.
And far-- it's not just whoever particular victim was, but it's
just the spread of that and how it
affects people's own families.
The perpetrator's own families, kind of stuff.
So it's really complicated.
I remember one man at this particular place.
It's quite famous, of course, Angola, and it's huge.
It's 18,000 acres.
It's 53 square miles.
It's bigger than Manhattan.
They've got all these critters.
They've got horses.
They've got cats, they've got dogs.
They've got mules.
They've got cows.
You know, so it's a huge working farm.
They've got a four-year Divinity School.
They've got all these social clubs.
One man we spent some time with was the fisherman.
He's a Cajun fisherman from, like, four generations
of Cajun fishermen.
And there are two lakes at Angola.
And he was fishing Lake Killarney.
And the fish are for the warden and his guest,
of which he has many.
[INAUDIBLE] takes a lot of people.
Politicians and a lot of people.
Press and-- there's a lot of press
that goes through this place.
And the inmates don't eat these fish.
Though the inmates do eat the fruit of their labor.
I mean, they do eat from the fields,
and that prison also feeds the other prisons,
because 300 acres just of okra.
If you don't like okra, you're in trouble.
[LAUGHTER]
So this guy was so sweet.
I mean, he was so sweet I thought I'd met the Buddha.
I came to Angola, and I met the Buddha.
And he had really bad teeth, and it's a little hard
to understand him.
He was very deep Southern Louisiana accent.
And he was bottle feeding a little colt
that he had birthed, and the mother either rejected the colt
or had died.
I don't remember it.
So little tat was being bottle fed.
And then he had a dog that he was rehabilitating
that had been in another camp.
There are five camps at Angola.
And the dog had been abused by whoever had had it.
And so it had -- it's whole back end was totally sunken.
And he said that man didn't need no dog.
And he was bringing his dog back,
and the dog was clearly devoted to know him.
And he could tell you--
I mean, seasonally, he was so adept.
I mean, even if you are a city person, when you come here,
you become a farm person because it's a farm.
And so he knew where all the doves eggs were.
He knew everything that stirred.
He was very acute to it.
I just thought he was unbelievable.
And then months later, I was out for dinner
with a classifications officer named Kathy Jett.
And I started asking her about Nolan
and how his dog Ginger was, and blah, blah.
And she said, oh, yeah.
And I never ask any inmates what they do.
And I said, all right, so tell me what'd he do.
And she said, well, he strangled a woman.
First he raped her, then he strangled her.
She was a young mother; she had two or three children.
And he propped her up on the bar stool,
and then he stuck an aerosol can up her,
and he put her there on display so that her husband would
see her when she [INAUDIBLE].
So this was the Buddha, and I thought, well,
maybe not the Buddha.
I mean, it's really hard.
And I mean, this guy is just a sweetheart.
I mean, I don't think he'd be doing that again,
but still people don't get over things like that.
It's really tricky.
And there's a huge segment of Angola.
It's old people, very old people.
It just won the huge hospice award.
There are people who come in there when they're 16,
and they put them in one of the camps.
It's mainly for younger guys, maybe smaller guys,
maybe more overtly homosexual guys.
So to a little bit of protection before they put them
in the general prison.
And one of the phrase that was used
was, we put them in there until they've got a face on them.
And these guys are going to be buried there too.
I mean, there are two full cemeteries at Angola.
And I spent a lot of time with them,
not a long time, we spent a little time
with Mr. Redwine who builds the coffins.
And build their cason.
It's a hand-built wooden cason.
It's pulled by draft horses.
And crime is a young man's game.
These guys-- you do something really, really awful,
really irreversible, but 40 years later, you
are not the same person.
And then there are a lot of really damaged people.
Of course, there's lots of abuse.
There's lots of poverty.
Poverty is the big common denominator
of the vast majority of the prison population.
There's lots of racism.
In a state that has about 20% Black people,
85% of the people in prison were Black.
You know, something's not right.
This goes from being a plantation called
Angola to being a prison.
There's so many things that are conspicuously
not right with that picture.