The scene is similar to that at thousands of gated-community golf courses across the country. Here, though, I’m required to answer an unusual question before I hit the links. “You don’t have any guns, do you?” the security guard asks at the front gate. “All right, you’re good to go. Pro shop’s to the right.”
I pay my greens fees and head to the first hole. The tee markers are white handcuffs, welded shut. Just past the lake, peering at me from the distance, are the eyes of six guard towers.
If ever there were a question about the ballooning scale of America’s prison system, the Louisiana State Penitentiary provides an answer. It has its own golf course.
There is a correctional center in America for every man here at Angola prison: 5,300 and counting. Fifteen hundred are state or federal prisons, 3,000 are local jails, and the rest are a combination of juvenile centers and private detention centers. There are enough prisoners in the United States to fill every NFL football stadium at the same time, with 80,000 inmates left over.
The vast majority of these facilities will never be tourist attractions—America’s prisons are warehouses for the production of premature death. Even the buildings are designed “to make punishment efficient as possible,” geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said. With the exception of a basketball game or a slow jog around the yard, their existence seems mutually exclusive with recreation or leisure pursuits of any kind.
Yet at Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the country, more than 70,000 people a year pay to enter the gates for fun. Most go to see the Angola Prison Rodeo, where inmates have built a 10,000-seat stadium to house “The Wildest Show in the South” every Sunday in October and one weekend in April. Some go for the arts and crafts festival, where prisoners sell handmade items like birdhouses and matchstick replicas of space shuttles for as much as $500. I went to play golf. They sell a t-shirt in the nearby gift shop: “ANGOLA: A GATED COMMUNITY.”
My journey to Angola began earlier this year, when I stumbled on a peculiar image while compiling satellite photos of every American prison, jail, and detention center for prisonmap.com. Next to the entrance to Louisiana State Penitentiary—one of the most notorious prisons in the country, the subject of songs and investigative reports and novels—was a Google Maps marker for “Prison View Golf Course.”
Indeed, Prison View is a public golf course located inside prison walls—perhaps needless to say, the only course of its kind in America. The warden, Burl Cain, had the course built in 2001 to keep the guards around on weekends—“in case of an emergency,” he told the Associated Press at the time. Operated by the Louisiana State Penitentiary Employee Recreation Committee, the course according to its website offers “a spectacular view of Louisiana’s only maximum security prison.” Ten bucks buys a round of golf for anyone who passes a background check.
by Josh Begley, Tomorrow | Read more:
