does it surprise you to say that? my mother worked here as a security guard and i used to tell her all the time, how can you work there with those people? but no one is the same person they are from when they were younger to now. decades in prison would change anyone. there is an aging crisis in american prisons, a gray wave as some have called it. more than 130,000 inmates older than 55 are incarcerated today. that s costing taxpayers more than $9 billion a year. the aging and the dying are the most expensive people to keep incarcerated. and yet they pose the lowest risk to society. this is what a life sentence looks like when life is running out. dying prisoners being cared for in hospice by other incarcerated men. 63-year-old frank has been in prison for 45 years. when he
Offenders should never be treated the same as an adult. we put thousands of kids in adult jails and prisons. we started prosecuting these kids. even today we have states with no minimum age for trying a child as an adult. so, i don t think we should ever put children in adult jails in prison. what about ones that committed violent crimes like murder? we were children when we got children incarcerated. i m sitting in on a support group run by an assistant warden. all these men committed their crimes before they were adults and were given sentences of life without the possibly of parole. they re called juvenile lifers. i was 16 years old when i committed my crime. i was 17 years old. i committed my crime at the age of 16. there were about 2,000 juvenile lifers like them in u. s. prisons today. i was a lot different at 17 than i am at 60 now. but still at 17, i still knew right from
Him in the dorm where he lives. this is my bed right here. this is your home? yeah. this is mine out here. he s been locked up 61 years. since you have been here, we have landed a man on the moon. yeah. think about that. yeah. there s been a lot of changes. hampton says six decades in prison have changed him, and thanks to the man sitting next to him, hampton will now have a chance at freedom. why do you think you deserve parole? i wouldn t say that i deserve parole. i wouldn t use that word deserve, because i took someone s life. i could say that i have earned parole. in fact, both hampton and montgomery will see the parole board the same day, and i ll be there. how you feeling? business.
Around trying to revive the rehabilitation debate we have abandoned. we have people locked up with nothing to do. and we know that education is transformative. it reduces recidivism. education and programs have also proven to reduce violence inside prison. angola was once known as the bloodiest prison in america. but things began to change here in the 1990s when the prison began to focus on more than simply locking up people and feeding them. go ahead. now in addition to its popular annual inmate rodeo, there are a variety of programs. all right. ready? go. these men are training service dogs for veterans. there is even a radio station run by incarcerated men. the only one in the nation, the station that kicks behind the bricks. you can get a lot more freedom here depending on your behavior. you know, we have a
Inmates get paid pennies per hour. how much do you get paid to come out here? two cents an hour. at one time we made four cents an hour. and for some reason or another, the budget got cut. it s injustice. so this particular job is not one of the more desired ones. no. this is bottom of the barrel. the field? nobody wants to be in the field. angola is not like any other maximum security prison i have ever been to. all of this, as far as the eye can see, is angola. it s a series of prisons, they call them camps. you guys from camp d. yes, sir. and doing work like this. today, we happen to be picking carrots. so, should i be worried about my safety here?
In spending in 1980 on jails and prisons to $80 billion today. civil rights lawyer, brian stevenson, is one of the nation s leading prison reform advocates. i think we have hundreds of thousands of people in prison who are not a threat to public safety. but is it about safety, or is it about punishment? i think we have created a culture that makes it entirely about punishment. and you might be surprised who else thinks mass incarceration is a problem, the people who run louisiana s prison system. and i think nation-wide, we lock up people too long and too many of them. seth smith is the director of operations for louisiana s department of corrections. it s not working. it s not giving us the results that we want. it s costing a lot of money. we send people to prison that aren t necessarily a danger to society, and then we keep people that their time for danger is over. they re no longer a threat.
and andrew hundley is here to help hampton, because in 2016, hundley started a nonprofit called, the parole project. by 2020 it had helped more than 40 juvenile lifers re-enter society. that the spot? oh yeah. hampton s first taste of the outside world, a fast food hamburger with everything on it. first apartment. this is for you. his temporary apartment, painted with bright colors to remind him that he s no longer in prison. i m seeing so much that s really new to me. you know, i m excited about it all. two and a half years later, and we have the joy of assisting another juvenile life or as in his free moments as a new man. in november 2021, 75-year-old henry montgomery,
Lot of programs that are mentor led, led by other guys serving life sentences and it giving them purpose. it looks like a shop. yeah, it does. i talked to a master mechanic at the prison s auto shop. i didn t know how to change a spark plug before i went to prison. don t let the uniform fool you. he has been incarcerated since 1989 for killing his wife with a shotgun. even know he ll likely never get out, he mentors nonviolent offenders in a re-entry program. when you can see a man, come in here change his life, go back out and stay out, you know that you have done something. your life is worthwhile. many graduates of the program now work at a car dealership outside of new orleans. but there are other nonviolent offenders at angola who might never get a second chance. this man was sentenced to more than a lifetime. my sentence was 150 years. you ll hear his dramatic story next.
breakfast arrives at 5:30 a. m., delivered by a prisoner. in case you re wondering, it is scrambled eggs, grits and biscuits, to the sound of a flushing toilet. no country on earth locks up more of its citizens than the united states. while we make up less than 5% of the world s population, we lockup more than 20% of the world s prisoners. politicians, academics and activists say mass incarceration is an american crisis. we have gone from $6 billion in spending in 1980 on jails and prisons to $80 billion today. civil rights lawyer, brian stevenson, is one of the nation s leading prison reform advocates. i think we have hundreds of thousands of people in prison who are not a threat to public safety. but is it about safety, or is it about punishment? i think we have created a culture that makes it entirely
Television all the time, and they re like, your dad is about to be fried chicken. and by me having the same name, when people would call my name, i would put my head down because i was ashamed of what i believed that name had meant. but over the years, he says programs at angola helped change him. opportunities that weren t available when his father was here. and still aren t available at most prisons across the country. there is a whole movement around trying to revive the rehabilitation debate we have abandoned. we have people locked up with nothing to do. and we know that education is transformative. it reduces recidivism. education and programs have also proven to reduce violence inside prison. angola was once known as the bloodiest prison in america. but things began to change here in the 1990s when the prison began to focus on more than simply locking up people and feeding them. go ahead.