What I Learned About Voting Rights in the Fields of Angola
"We asked ourselves: Do we want to change our conditions, or do we want to change our circumstances?"
This week, The Marshall Project and Slate published a series of stories based on an unprecedented survey asking thousands of incarcerated people about their political views. Today’s Life Inside is part of this series and examines political life inside of prison and out.
When I first arrived at Angola prison in Louisiana, in the 1970s, I worked in the fields like everyone else and then in the “tag plant”’ making the state’s license plates. On weekends, I’d go to law classes taught by some of the other prisoners. Many prisoners only had a fifth-grade education, but I’d been to some college and I loved to read. I played sousaphone in high school and was used
