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needs of the self, he taught the self-abnegation of religion. Spirit over flesh. God over ego. The warden aimed not merely at warehousing inmates safely, but at rebuilding them, at redeeming them, whether in terms of his Southern Baptist belief or in religious terms more broad(“Love thy neighbor…”) or simply in the sense of learning to live in some valuable way, without the impulses that lead to destroying others, to self-destruction.
    “Wouldn’t you like to run this prison?” Cain asked me.
    I laughed but felt: Yes, I would like the chance to bring so much good into being.
    He had to leave for a meeting in Baton Rouge. He asked me to ride with him in his car so we could keep talking. He would have his press secretary follow us and drive me back. His press secretary and I had laid out a different itinerary. I looked toward her. “He’s never made that kind of invitation before,” she said. Cain seemed to sense what I did, an affinity between a Baptist-Cracker-Warden and a Journalist-Yankee-Jew.
    What would become my year at Angola began, effectively, then, though two months would pass before I asked the warden formally for such long-term access to his prison. Already I imagined what the growing affection between us could bring: the latitude to get to know the inmates, to follow them through their daily lives without a staff escort—a rare chance, wardens of maximum-security penitentiaries being notorious for excluding the press, or for directing carefully what little was seen and heard. Privacy would be crucial to answering the first question that would drive my year: Could Warden Cain really change lives? I needed the inmates’ honesty. And to answer the second, I needed their intimacy. Given their endless sentences, what exactly were these men living for?
    Once, I had been through a federal trial of a large-scale drug dealer who received, upon conviction, a mandatory term of life without parole. My wife was the prosecutor. Though I had rooted for her victory and didn’t feel much for the defendant (who stared at her arrogantly throughout the trial and who’d already squandered his second chances), the sentence, however inevitable once the verdict came in, shallowed my lungs and thinned the blood in my legs andmade me want to cry out in panic. How could that man exist—even contemplate existing-for the rest of his life in prison? I would kill myself, I thought reflexively.
    With the most infrequent exceptions, Angola’s inmates did not kill themselves. Each year, scarcely a handful tried. And now, with the warden’s trust, I might understand.
    Out of nothing, out of less than nothing, out of a place where men declared themselves by spraying each other with feces, what kinds of lives could the inmates build and why did they bother? With so few who would ever leave, Angola should have been a pure Hobbesian universe, where sheer animalism ruled. If it was something significantly more, what a miracle that would be. To observe it would bring me more than understanding, it would bring comfort. That even when all the artifice of society, all we erect to blind ourselves to our deepest beings—that animalistic core—was stripped away, there was still something higher, something striving. To witness this would be to know—palpably—that what we call the human spirit was something more than a pretty veil obscuring a darker awareness.
    And if I could find enough that was positive at Angola, whether in its barbaric rodeo or within the prison’s caves of cinder block, I could feel in the improbable goodness a hint that there was, as the true believers say, a reason for everything and that all the world was guided in a mysterious, beneficent direction. Ridiculous as it may sound, I sensed that at the prison I might find affirmation for my own tenuous faith in God.
    So I got into the warden’s car. He pulled out past the the penitentiary sign that bore his name. We discussed Biblical passages and Angola’s bloody