Woody Overton AND Jim Chapman lay out the details when prisoners incarcerated at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola die. What is the funeral procession like....Do family members claim the bodies...where and how are they buried? Answers to all this and more on this 5th episode of Season 3 titled Dying in Prison.#BloodyAngolaPodcast #Dyinginprison #Podcast #Podcasts #truecrime #prison #convictFULL TRANSCRIPT:BLOODY ANGOLA: A PODCAST BY WOODY OVERTON AND JIM CHAPMAN (DYING IN PRISON)
Jim: Hey, everyone, and welcome to Bloody-
Woody: -Angola. 
Jim: A podcast 142 years in the making.
Woody: The Complete Story of America's Bloodiest Prison. 
Jim: And I'm Jim Chapman. 
Woody: And I'm Woody Overton.
Jim: And we're going to talk to y'all about some amazing programs that take place in Angola today. It's going to be a little different episode. No murder stuff going on today.
Woody: Right. Well, it's got a lot of death in it. 
Jim: It sure does. [laughs] 
Woody: Not necessarily murder. Some of them, I'm sure, were murders that occurred inside the wire. 
Jim: That's a great point. 
Woody: But ultimately none of us are getting out of this life alive.
Jim: That's right. 
Woody: Always talk about almost 6000 inmates and how 80% of them are going to die inside the wire. Well, think about that, y'all. If you get sentenced to life Angola, let's say you're 20 years old and you're going to have family members and they care about you and love you and all that stuff. But over the years, what happens? Your mom and your daddy are going to die. Your grandparents are going to die. Your siblings are going to have lives of their own and life goes on. We've heard so many times that the inmates say everybody forgets about them. If you live another 50 years in Angola, then really you don't have anybody to care about you on the outside anymore but the people that you're locked up with basically become your family and your best friends.
Jim: That's right. A lot of these people or probably the vast majority are locked up for things that are just horrific, and you don't end up in Angola for life if you were an altar boy. In a lot of cases, family maybe turned their backs on them and was the black sheep of that family or whatever and they don't have anybody to pay those respects at the end of their life and so they get buried at Angola in the prison. We're going to go into of that information. 
Point Lookout Cemetery is the prison cemetery in Angola. It's located on the north side of Angola. It's at the base of the Tunica Hills. This is obviously a situation where what we just told you about, family members are also deceased or there's just no family members that want anything to do with them. 
Woody: Or maybe they don't have the financial means to come and claim the body when the inmate dies. So, they're forgotten about. But Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any US state and of course, sentencing is extremely harsh. But at Angola, 73% of the 6250 inmates are serving sentences of life without parole. The average sentence for the remaining 27% that aren't serving life without is still 90.9 years.
Jim: Pretty much alive.
Woody: Right. Prisoners aren't even sent to Angola unless they're sentence is over 50 years. Y'all, I believe that's more likely 80 years, like I said in the past. Basically, the result of this is with sentences of this length, most inmates lose touch with the family members and there's no one to collect the remains when they die. 
Jim: This prison has been around a long time. Go back and listen to The Walls and how Angola got started, but Angola has been around forever.
Woody: 140 some years.
Jim: 142 years in the making, if you want to get specific. During that time, they did have another cemetery. Woody's going to give you a little heads-up on what happened with that.
Woody: Well, the first Angola cemetery got destroyed by a flood in 1927. Now, y'all remember, Angola is surrounded by the Mississippi River on three sides, and every few years, it grows outside of this bank and floods everything. But in 1927, when the flood happened and the water receded, the remains and caskets were found along the levee, and it was impossible to identify anyone. The bodies were reburied in a mass grave in a new cemetery called Point Lookout. It was about two acres, but it was full by the mid 1990s. It contained 331 marked graves and an unknown number of people in the mass grave. An annex, Point Lookout 2, is now in use, and it has a capacity of 700 plots. Approximately 100 of those graves now have been filled, and with the aging inmate population, it will likely max out-
Jim and Woody: Near future. 
Woody: In the past, convicts were buried basically in cardboard boxes, y'all. And today, thanks to Warden Cain, the deceased are buried in coffins made at the prison woodshops by an inmate master carpenter. That's his only job, y'all. These handmade caskets are constructed with brown stained birch and pine. It takes about a week to make just one. Other inmates make the shrouds for the coffins. I want to read you a quote of what Burl Cain said. He said, "Once a man dies, his sentence is complete, and there should be dignity in the passing," Warden Burl Cain.
Jim: There you go. You've heard us mention Warden Burl Cain before, and I can't wait to be in the future we're going to do an episode centered completely around Warden Cain, because like every other human being in the world, he had faults in his life, but be hard pressed to find a more respected warden than Warden Cain, and I'm talking nationally. This guy is well known to people that aren't even in the prison circles. So, that tells you who he was, absolutely-- and still alive today and runs the Mississippi Correctional-- the entire correctional system for the state of Mississippi. So, I don't mean to talk as if he's not with us anymore. 
Woody: Y'all, I've known him for over 30 years. I've worked for him at Dixon Correctional Institute. He is a very religious man, but he's a nonsense man. But he actually cares about the prisoners, as strange as that sounds. He cares about them and he wants to give them dignity, even in death. 
Jim: Yes. 
Woody: He was very instrumental in bringing all the changes to Angola, from healthcare to prison inmate programs and give them hope and stuff like that. But he specifically cares about them in death. And even the executions, he stands with them he eats their last meal-- or he used to when he was in Angola. He would eat the last meal with them, whatever they chose. He was there with them when they took the last breath.
Jim: 100%. I'll tell you a quick story about how Burl Cain transformed not only the caskets themselves, but the entire process of conducting a funeral for these Angola inmates. When he was in his first year at Angola, they had a burial for one of the prisoners that he attended. At that burial, they were lowering the prisoner into the ground. At this time, they were essentially crates with cardboard--
Woody: Basically, like a cardboard box. A big, long cardboard box that holds the body.
Jim: They're lowering this inmate down and the bottom fell out of the cardboard box. If that wasn't bad enough, as they started piling dirt on, the top end of the cardboard casket collapsed. In Burl Cain's eyes, this has got to change. It was a total loss of dignity.
Woody: Right, dignity there.
Jim: At that point, he seeked out who was considered the best carpenter in Angola, talked to him and said, "Look, we want you to head this new program where we're going to build caskets for the prisoners." The guy was more than willing to do it, obviously. And off they went with the casket building that has become world renowned. We'll tell you later about some people you may have heard of that have actually been buried in caskets built by prisoners of Angola.
Woody: Right. Now, think about this, y'all. Everybody gets sentenced to Angola-- well, I can't say everybody, but a lot of them have certain crafts that they're masters of before they went in. This guy was a master carpenter. I mean, you have electricians, you have lawyers, you have doctors, you have painters, whatever. Burl sought out the best carpenter. I know they have a lot of them, but he sought out the best carpenter to make these caskets. Now, I know we're going to talk about more in detail but think about how much a casket costs. It costs you like $7000, $8,000 for a general casket for a funeral now, but think about how much it would cost you to have a hand crafted-
Jim: Custom made.
Woody: -custom-made, just beautiful piece of artwork so you can go to eternal rest in it.
Jim: 100%. And he also instituted some other programs.
Woody: In 1998, Burl, the funeral process, just taking a casket out there, even though it was hand built and all that in the back of a pickup truck, that still is not like a funeral procession. So, in 1998, he had inmates build a black horse-drawn hearse modeled after an 1800s vintage funeral coach for use during the burial rites. Now, this hearse is a beautiful piece of artwork in itself, and it's pulled by two large white Percheron horses. The hearse is driven by an inmate dressed in black tailcoat and a black high hat, which are also made in Angola in the sewing shop. And six pallbearer follow the coach on the road to the cemetery and assist with the burial. Inmate ministers conduct a service, and the living, traditionally sinned, they're departed away with acapella rendition, "Praise the Lord, I'm free. No longer bound. No more chains holding me. My soul is resting. It's just a blessing. Praise the Lord. Hallelujah. I am free." 
Jim: Yeah, it's a sight to be seen, really, these horse-drawn carriages, and so much respect is put into that. You may ask yourself, we're talking