SouthTalks: They Won't Die Alone: Incarcerated Caregivers & the Documentation of the Angola Prison Volunteer Hospice Program

Overview

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola houses more than five thousand men, about 85 percent of whom will die there. In 1998, isolation cells were repurposed as hospice rooms and volunteers from the prison population were trained to provide comfort, care, and last requests to dying patients. To raise money for the program, these incarcerated volunteers began sewing and selling quilts. These quilts—and the artists who create them—are the embodiment of creativity, care, and hope.

The Historic New Orleans Collection’s recent exhibition, Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration, tracked the historical links between the institutions of slavery and mass incarceration that made Louisiana one of the most incarcerated places on earth. Although the exhibition was broad in historical scope, a dozen large-print black-and-white photographs by Philadelphia-based photographer Lori Waselchuk, documenting her time with Angola hospice workers, their patients, and families, formed an affecting centerpiece for visitors. Exhibit curator Kevin T. Harrell will discuss his own work documenting this program through oral history interviews with recently released men who participated in it and continue to shape its legacy.

Kevin T. Harrell is a collections cataloger and historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center. He earned a BA in history from Auburn University, an MA in American history from Jacksonville State University, and a PhD in early American history from the University of Mississippi in 2013, where he specialized in the eighteenth-century Gulf South.