My name is Keith Morse and I'm serving life in Louisiana. My name is Hannibal
Stanfield I'm serving life without parole in Louisiana State Penitentiary.
My name is Aaron Brent and I'm serving life in Louisiana. My name is Michael
Doggett and I'm serving life without parole in state of Louisiana. My name is
Tommy Franklin and I'm serving life in Louisiana. My name is Sabrina parks and
I'm doing life in Louisiana. My name is Aubrey Sikes and I'm serving
life in Louisiana. My name is Sandra Starr and I'm doing life in prison
in Louisiana. My name is John Richard and I'm doing life in Louisiana.
Basically what we do in here is we furnish the clothes for all the main
prison and cellblock inmates in this location. They're eligible to get certain
items every 90 days some some things that can only get every six months and
and they turn in a list and we fill it and send it to him. I came here I had just
turned 24 when I got arrested on my charge and by the time I got to Angola
I was 25 had just turned 25 and been here ever since and haven't spent a
night away from here almost almost 38 years now.
Believe me I'm a whole lot different now from what I'm ... my attitude when
I first come here I hated authority and I resisted
authority. I was rebellious. I guess it's the thing of you mellow out with age but
as you get older in life you learn life's lessons too and it's just wrong to keep
somebody too locked up past a certain point. Past a certain point it just
becomes torture. You look at the guys that's laying up in the medical dorms
right now. Some of them been locked up over 50 years.
That makes no sense to keep these guys locked up.
I came the Angola when I was 19 years old. This particular incident happened in 1976.
I was young, dumb,
stupid, naive, and I wanted to be have a reputation. It was pretty rough when
I first come here. Real rough. It was real ... we call it off the chain. One of the
changes reason why I changed because one of my best friends end up
getting sick, and he end up dying. That what made me get involved with the
health care program. All I try to do now is give love and respect to everybody. You know
it's just like like the patient's I got in here now. You know it's
like if you got a patient friend in here and you pass down that walk every day
every other day you're gonna come in here and you're gonna visit your friend
every so often you're gonna bring your friend something to eat and but you got
a patient that next to them and one that's right across from him that don't have nobody.
So why you feeding that particular patient those two got to act like they
asleep or they doing something because they hungry. So what I do I go
out and I talk to the different clubs I go talk to the different churches and
stuff like that, and I let them work with me and they'll give me food enough to
feed all the patients. And when I bring a smile on those patient's face it does me
all the good in the world. It helps my heart and like I say say you know it's a passion with me with
these patients. I love them to death. They're like my kids and I'd do anything for them.
My mom raised us as a single mom. I'm the oldest. In my home it was a lot of abuse.
I went into a dark place and couldn't come out. So I started to rebel in all
manners. I got with the wrong crowd so I
did messin with drug dealers ... fell in love with one and had a little girl.
Beautiful little girl and he turned out to be abusive also and I felt that that was
the perfect way to live life because that's what I saw and if he didn't hit
me he didn't love me so. It got to the point to where it got so severe I
couldn't take it anymore so I fought back and when I decided to fight back
it became a tragedy which led me in prison with a life sentence.
I've been gone for my kids for like 24 years. I left them when they were 4 and 7 so in my mind that's
how I still picture them. That has been the hardest part.
I missed my daughter's graduation. I miss my daughter's first boyfriend.
Her first kiss. When she was hurt I wasn't there to hold her.
My son when nobody would listen to him ... the world he ran to the world for support
because I wasn't there. My greatest thing is I just want to sit
down with my two grown children and just
talk to them and tell them how much that it was my fault.
I was 27 years old and 27 days when I got arrested. A year and a half or so
later I was convicted of second-degree murder and sent straight to Angola.
I've been here since January of 1988. You know there was a lot of violence going
on around here and it wasn't as a matter of fact my first day I woke up in
Angola I woke up sat up my bed and watch somebody get stabbed.
And I'm saying wow where am I? You know what kind of place is this?
So it was it was definitely a mental journey that I had to take.
I grew up in a very strict household there wasn't a lot of
time for playing we went to school came back from school we had chores. My dad
was a commercial fisherman for a while. He did things and he needed help I was
the eldest in the family so I primarily helped out with responsibilities of
providing for the family. Bait all the trout lines picking up and running all
the hoop nets and hunting fishing.
Whatever we needed to do to put food on the table.
But I love school. I love learning. I love the experience of learning new things.
My days are extremely full. I tutor for the GED Department,
and we use the stars to motivate the guys in the class. A lot of these
guys couldn't read and write when they were when they came here and they worked
their way all the way up to here and now they have their GED it's an accomplishment
that you know helps build their self-esteem and help them you know to
become better people. I'm not even close to the same person I
was when I came here not even close. Um first and foremost you
know a place like this makes you look at yourself for who you really are compared
to who you think you are.
You know I realize that I hurt a lot of people with that one act that I committed
and it wasn't just the victim it was my family. I had three sons out there they
had to grow up without me. You know the community itself.
I have a lot to pay back and I don't mind doing that because if I can stop just one senseless act
like that from happening again
I feel like I accomplished something.
I had a pretty modest childhood. I grew up in a two-parent household.
My aspiration as a child was to be a professional athlete. I wasn't very good
in sports but my aspiration like most kids you know I wanted to be on TV and I
want to be in the spotlight. I wanted to make my family proud and I wanted to be
somebody when I grew up. When I was arrested I was 18 years old.
It was a pretty traumatic experience all things considered that I never been
incarcerated before. I'd never been any type of trouble before and one bad
decision I took my thinking cap off one time ultimate left me and the court
system while the sentence to life in prison and it was completely different
paradigm shift that transpired because I was still young a teenager and the
culture that I grew up in said that we needed to focus on social skills and I
was thrust into environment that was predicated more on survival skills so it
was a conflict of interest in what I've grown up to know.
Well I've changed dramatically over the course of the last 23 years because I began to start
focusing on becoming a better person. I work here in Interfaith Chapel.
The hardest part of my job is I also have to deliver death messages which I had to do
two this morning and you can never really truly prepare yourself to have to sit
down with a brother and tell him that they lost someone that they love.
So in 2007 I created a ministry called Malachi Dad which is a father ministry
and I'm proud to say that to date it's in 200 plus prisons across the country and
five other countries. All from a vision that God gave me to create an
organization that's gonna be therapeutic for men to come together and discuss their
weakness and failures as a father.
Parole eligibility would mean hope. It would mean redemption.
It means an opportunity for men to go back and be fathers, sons to go back
and be a caregiver to their parents.
You know there's people that's been here for
thirty plus years. Now these people don't have an ounce of vindictiveness on also
of violence in them anymore. They've outgrown that they're well beyond that
and they know that they owe the community. They owe.
We can change you know and all we want to do is show that we have changed. If the public will accept us we'll
be able to go out there and show them that we made a change. See right now I would
like the opportunity to go out there and speak to some of those youth
homes some of them places where the youngsters are at.
You know and restructure their thoughts about the way they are living in the street
so they wouldn't come here. Angola is not gonna I'm gonna let you know this
Angola ain't the place to be. But it'll teach you a lesson and I'm just sorry
that I had to come to Angola to learn the lesson that I learned today.
A totally different person than the person that was arrested.
Today it's not about me.
Before I thought it was just about me but everything we do in life is not about
us, it's for the next person.
So give me a second chance is giving me a chance to provide for my family.
The notion that a criminal is a criminal for life I think is false
The statistics show that and I think people can change. Those in other
states that have gotten out on the same crimes that we have been convicted of
here in Louisiana have shown they've changed they've gotten out and stayed
out and been a productive member of society and I would like to be given that opportunity.
Give us a chance.
I want to start a new life.
Contrary to what people may believe or whatever perception they might have of people who are confined
I like to say to this gated community that rehabilitation does actually
exist in here and basically life without parole
is not a life sentence it's a death sentence. It's like a slow death.
Like I said earlier, I strive every day to be a better person today than I was yesterday and
hopefully tomorrow I'll be a better person than I was today.