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That only dealt with federal prisoners. there's a conversation going on right now, how far do you go? it's one thing to reduce the prison population of non-violent offenders. how much risk do you take on violent offenders. in some cases they committed crimes as teenagers, they're now in their 40s and 50s and 60s. how do we factor in the families of their victims? it's stirring a national conversation. >> you've done so much work on this whole issue. your interviews of the central park five. what did you learn in addition by being inside angola? >> i think i learned about this power of rehabili...

To the largest maximum security prison in the country as a prisoner would be at least the first timers, do you think they have any idea what life they're about to go into >> no, they find out it's totally different once they get behind angola it's totally different. >> angola, or the louisiana state penitentiary, is a former slave plantation i spent three days here on the inside, my access was virtually unrestricted, and at times i was not in the immediate sight of officers very few of the roughly 6,000 inmates here live behind bars as we traditionally think of prisons in fact, most of them, a...

It wrong >> you're saying if we take hope out of the equation, that's where we get in trouble. >> if you take hope out of the equation, there's going to be a lot of trouble >> there's a lot more from inside angola on a special one-hour "dateline" friday at 10:00/9:00 central and on sunday i moderate a town hall from inside a maximum security prison at 10:00/9:00 central on msnbc there's more here tonight including the college admissions bombshells, e-mails revealing how us officials kept track of big donations, sometimes millions, by applicant's families and 911 calls after the car crash i...

We put the scaffold right here and it went down from this sign. you see the rope still there. the inmates would climb down and we line them up in this row, about 6,000. probably the largest mass movement obviously of inmates in the country. we put the boats in the water right down here under this overpass and run them all the way around here. meanwhile, the folks on top -- at first, they threw stuff at us. that's one of the things they threw off that bridge at us. remember that? that's a spear. >> transported by boat and then bus, close to 2,000 parish prisoners ended up at angola. some perhap...

Circuit system, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. there are religious shows, educational programming, and the most popular of all, sports. >> there's a show called "ringside." a boxing team will fight the boxing team there. >> sports keep people's minds off the tedium of time, and few sports are more popular than boxing. for those who make the team, it's a paid job. albeit the salary range is only four to 20 cents an hour. >> well, you know, doing what you love. i'm a boxer. that's what i love. this is what i want to do till the day i die. to do what you want is a sort of freedom. >> if boxin...