A rare moment of grace broke through the concrete bars of Louisiana State Penitentiary (also called “Angola”) this month, when guards and organizers hosted the facility’s first-ever “father-daughter dance,” giving incarcerated fathers and their daughters a night of music, tears, and reconnection.
Nearly 30 inmates, selected for good behavior, donned tuxedos with pink boutonnieres and waited as daughters, some dressed in formal gowns, were led into the prison’s Bible college transformed into a makeshift dance hall. Fathers and daughters embraced under string lights and drapes, as Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” played, a song created by Wonder originally for his own daughter.
For many, it was a moment decades in the making.
One of those men, serving time for armed robbery, said the reunion brought a rush of memories: “Seeing her in a dress, crying and running to me … that broke me down.” For some daughters, the night marked the first time they’d danced with their father, a bittersweet reminder of lost birthdays, prom-nights and graduations.
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Organized by the nonprofit God Behind Bars, the dance did more than offer a photo-op. It offered a glimpse of humanity behind the prison walls. Organizers and prison officials called the event a potential new tradition for Angola.
The largest maximum security prison in America has a rough past, previously known for its history with enslaved people and harsh sentences and as “America’s Bloodiest Prison.” It was also the setting for the popular book and movie “Dead Man Walking.”
But in the past two decades, it has rehabilitated itself to include incentives for good behavior like an annual rodeo, an inmate-run radio station and magazine, a 9-hole golf course and recreation area on site and life skills training for careers like cook, firefighter and mechanic and in graphic communications.
For one night, the inmates were not labeled by their conviction. They were just fathers reconnecting with daughters they feared they’d miss out on forever.
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