I Went to Prison

When I sat down to write this blog post, I was going to title it “Go to the Unpopular Places.” It was supposed to be about how, when traveling, you should take the time to visit areas that are not frequented by tourists, perhaps by doing a deep-dive into super detailed travel blogs or by talking to locals. I’ll save that post for if/when I run out of blog ideas.

As I reflected upon the “unpopular” places I’ve traveled to in my life, I realized I’ve already been to one of the most unpopular places of all: an American prison.

In spring 2016, as a sophomore at UNC, I took a class called Race, Innocence and the End of the Death Penalty taught by Professor Frank Baumgartner.* It was probably the best class I’ve ever taken. The semester was spent learning about some of the failures of the American criminal justice system and hearing lectures from exonerated inmates, a convicted (and confessed) murderer and the authors of New York Times Bestseller Picking Cotton (one of whom is Professor Baumgartner’s wife).

Toward the end of the semester, my classmates and I were given the opportunity to visit North Carolina Central Prison, an all-male, maximum security state prison in Raleigh. A lot of students opted out of the visit. Their reasons for doing so were completely valid, but I knew I had to go. When was I ever going to get the chance to have an in-depth, up-close-and-personal tour of a prison?

Women going on the trip were told beforehand that we could not have any metal on our person, including underwire typically sewn into bras. We were required to cover our bodies fully, with the exception of our necks, heads and hands. All clothing had to be very loose-fitting and we were discouraged from wearing any make up. We were searched heavily upon arrival and had to present multiple forms of identification.

After all of the members of our group passed through security, we were taken to the general population cafeteria. We stood against the side of the wall while the inmates piled in for lunch. They sat down at the cafeteria tables and both groups were silent for about 15 seconds. The tension in the room escalated while we just stared at each other – the free on one side of the room, the imprisoned on the other. Then, suddenly, one of the inmates closest to us leaned forward and said, “Boo!” The entire room erupted in laughter. Everyone was secretly grateful to him for breaking the ice. When the laughter died down, we discussed college and Carolina basketball (several inmates correctly predicted we would go to the national championship), before being ushered to the next floor of the prison, death row.

All gen pop inmates wore tan uniforms, inmates being processed wore orange and, perhaps as an incessant reminder of their fate, death penalty inmates wore red. The death row inmates never get the chance to interact with those in gen pop living one floor beneath them. They have a separate dining area, separate healthcare facilities and separate recreation areas. While there, I didn’t have an unpleasant interaction with a single death row inmate. I shook their hands and walked shoulder to shoulder with them in the hallway. We were shown the separate cells that death row inmates went to the night before their execution. We stood around the table where they eat their last meals. We saw the execution room, only big enough to fit a gurney and a few other people. There was a large, glass window inches from the gurney. On the other side of it, there was an equally small room with about 10 chairs crammed into it. This was where family members of the inmate could view the execution.

The tour was coming to a close, so we walked through a hallway where you could see the fenced-in lawn through thin, vertical windows. Several students gasped. This was the lawn for maximum security inmates. On it were wire cages no bigger than a college dorm room. Inmates in maximum security, with their wrists shackled to their ankles, were led by a CO to their individual cages. Once inside, the guard removed their shackles and they ran in 12x12 circles around the perimeter of the cage, sometimes stopping to do push-ups or other bodyweight exercises. Weather permitting, they were allowed to do this for one hour per day before returning to solitary confinement.

Our group was silent. We watched in disbelief until the sound of the elevator doors opening tore us away from the windows. We took the elevator to the lobby, shuffled through security and walked out the door. This time with a different appreciation for freedom.

*Professor Baumgartner wants everyone to know and understand the material for his course, so he has made it accessible on this website. I cannot recommend going through his lecture slides and assigned readings enough; there’s a lot of really alarming things going on in our criminal justice system that every American should know.