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The Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, is the largest prison in the United States. Louisiana's most-hardened inmates end up at Angola. Most will die there. Angola is home to the state's death row and the most restrictive cell blocks. It's also where every man serving a life sentence in the state waits out his days. In Louisiana, life means life. No parole. No reduction of sentence. Nothing short of a pardon—or death—will release a lifer.

Until the 1970s inmates served as guards, and killing an escaping prisoner could earn one a ticket home. Prisoner-on-prisoner violence was common. Men slept with layers of newspapers and magazines under their shirts as rudimentary protection against nocturnal assaults with shivs, prison-made knives. An inmate's lawsuit in the mid-1970s forced reforms that ended much of the brutality.

Welcoming God into the prison has made even deeper changes for the 5,100 men locked up there. The faith-based programs that Warden Burl Cain has encouraged have led to genuine repentance—and to prisoners graduating from seminary and going as missionaries to other prisons. That is unique in a country of 1,850 prisons.

The beauty of the prison's 18,000 acres belies more than a century of misery soaked into the fertile soil.

"This land has had more human suffering than any land in America from its beginning as a slave-breeding plantation," Cain says. After the Civil War, he notes, forms of slavery continued until 1901, when the state took over the prison. Angola spent a century building its reputation as the most dangerous prison in the country.

Ron Humphrey, a senior writer for Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, says inmate-on-inmate murders sometimes numbered a dozen or more per year before Cain arrived. When Cain took over as warden in 1995, his then-wife balked. "She said, 'There are demons over this place. I don't want to be here,'" Cain recalls. "I said, 'I'm going to run them off, with God's help.' "

Even before Cain's arrival, church services, evangelistic efforts by outsiders, and other Christian programs were routine in Angola. But prison officials considered outsiders security risks and sources of drugs and other contraband. They were skeptical of prisoners' motives. The criminals were adept at manipulating the system, each other, and outsiders.

"That was the mindset in the Louisiana Department of Corrections when I became a warden in 1981," says Cain, a stocky, white-haired Southern Baptist from the densely Protestant woods of north Louisiana. "They told me that one inmate can't have any power over another. Therefore he can't preach or even lead a Bible study."

That mindset is still found in many other prison systems fighting gang problems and violence, he says. "We just quit thinking that negative stuff that these wardens had been thinking all these years."

Not long after he took over at Angola, Cain brought in Experiencing God, a Southern Baptist Convention program based on Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King's book of the same name. Emphasizing obedience based on a relationship with God, Experiencing God is designed to help Christians cope with difficult situations. Cain had gone through the program at his church; he asked facilitators there to come to Angola.

"The first thing you know, 1,600 inmates had gone through Experiencing God," he said. "It helped the prisoners accept they're in prison and that it's God's will that maybe they don't get out—and that while you're here you do your best for him."

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May 2004, Vol. 48, No. 5