• • • • • • • • • • • • The Farm: Angola, USA, directed by Jonathan Stack and Elizabeth Garbus Life in prison By David Walsh 23 May 1998 The Louisiana state penitentiary at Angola is the largest maximum security prison in the United States. It houses some 5,000 men, three-quarters of them black and 85 percent of whom will die within its walls. The 18,000-acre penitentiary sits on the site of a plantation that derived its name from the area in Africa that provided the slave labor. Angola has been a prison, at one time one of the most violent in the US, since the end of the Civil War. These are a few of the chilling facts. Jonathan Stack and Elizabeth Garbus have made a compassionate and moving film about Angola prison, focusing on the fate of six of its inmates. George Crawford, 22, of New Orleans, has only just arrived at Angola. Angola Prisoners Timeline made with Timetoast'. And Bishop Tannehill walked out of Angola a free man in 2007. Eugene 'Bishop' Tannehill: Time in Angola. Directors Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack discuss their film with subject Eugene 'Bishop' Tannehill, former Angola inmate pardoned after 51 years. ![]() He faces life in prison without parole. His family is trying to raise $3,000 necessary to obtain copies of his court transcripts to launch an appeal. As his mother says, 'It's bad when you have no money.' Eugene Tannehill, on the other hand, has been in Angola for 38 years. ![]() ![]() ![]() Now a fire-and-brimstone preacher, nicknamed the Bishop, Tannehill has received a pardon; all that remains is for the governor of Louisiana to write his signature. The governor is in no hurry. A judge sentenced Ashanti Witherspoon to 75 years in prison for an armed robbery in which two police officers were wounded, but no one killed. Witherspoon has been in prison for more than two decades. Now a self-educated and thoughtful man, he lectures incoming prisoners on the realities of life. Logan 'Bones' Theriot killed his wife, he says, because she was neglecting their child. 'Your life's not finished just because you're in Angola,' he tells an interviewer. His, however, is nearly finished. He is dying of lung cancer in a prison infirmary. For 12 years John Brown has lived on death row, spending 23 hours a day in his cell. When he attacked a couple, killing a man, he had been doing cocaine all day. 'I needed some more,' he explains. He now faces imminent execution. Vincent Simmons was found guilty of two counts of aggravated rape and sentenced to 100 years in prison. At a parole hearing he presents evidence suggesting that one of the victims was a virgin after the alleged attack. After a minute or two of deliberations, the board turns down his appeal. Angola is a vast operation. Many of the prison's 1,800 employees live in a town, described as the 'safest in America,' in the middle of the penitentiary. The prison has its own radio station and its own newspaper. Angola is a multi-million-dollar enterprise.
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