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| Angola inmates are taught life skills, then spend their lives behind bars |
| By www.nola.com - Cindy Chang, The Times-Picayune |
| Published: 05/15/2012 |
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ANGOLA -- People always said Johna Haynes was lucky because of the white hair that sprouted from the crown of his head since he was a baby. He acquired the nickname "Patch" from New Orleans police officers, who came to know him all too well. At 31, the patch has turned into a bald spot, the pale strands now dispersed throughout his close-cropped dark hair, leaving him prematurely gray. "And still lucky?" someone asked. He looked around incredulously at his surroundings -- a late summer Sunday afternoon in the Louisiana State Penitentiary's west yard, men playing basketball and lifting weights, stray cats sunning themselves on concrete ledges, an idyllic scene if one did not look to the barbed wire fences in the distance. "I'm lucky I'm alive," he finally said. Something -- the white patch, divine intervention or just plain luck -- spared Haynes from a violent death, the fate of his brother, stepfather, stepbrother, cousin and innumerable friends. It did not spare him from another well-traveled path out of the Florida public housing complex: the winding, achingly bucolic bus ride to the penitentiary commonly known as Angola, where his own father served more than a decade and where Haynes is slated to spend the rest of his life without the possibility of parole. Haynes estimates he stole at least 160 cars and committed at least 130 robberies in a brief, prolific criminal career before he was locked up forever at the age of 21. When he worked at a Shoney's restaurant in Metairie, he never once took the bus -- he always arrived in style on stolen wheels. The guns he took from parked cars at Carnival parades or the Bayou Classic became the guns he carried while selling drugs and the guns he used to rob people. He was shot at many times and watched others die, but he was never hit. Nor, he said, has he ever killed anyone. His dangerous lifestyle caught up to him in a different way -- life without parole for pointing a gun at a man and making off with his car and valuables. Two previous convictions, for stealing a car and for trying to escape from police custody, made Haynes a habitual offender. A young thug was off the streets for good. Read More. |
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