**
- I had so many thoughts leading up to this assignment
as to what it was going to be like.
Trying to imagine going down this road
knowing it's a one-way trip.
You know, this moment where you get
your last glimpse of the world around you,
but that glimpse is through steel mesh.
- Louisiana's Highway 66.
Its beautiful countryside is undoubtedly not lost
on the countless men driven to the place
where they'll most likely die.
That road ends here.
The Louisiana State Penitentiary,
a former plantation the size of Manhattan.
28 square miles.
Most people call it Angola,
named after the African country that was home to the slaves
who once worked these very fields.
Now, Angola is the largest maximum security prison
in the country,
where today I'll be housed with about 5500 men.
I'm heading into ground zero
of mass incarceration.
- There's certainly a heightened awareness
as I walk through here with no guards.
- For the next couple of days, I'll be staying here,
exploring key issues of the prison reform debate.
Juveniles sentenced to life without parole.
- We were children when we got incarcerated.
- The lasting effects of the war on drugs.
- My sentence was 150 years.
- The power of rehabilitation.
- You know that you've done something,
your life is worthwhile.
- And the demand by many for punishment.
- Personally, I think he's where he needs to be.
- I'll also be staying in a cell.
Not to play prisoner, but to better understand
the purpose and experience of prison
all from the inside.
**
- Hello and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
Whether the American penal system
is truly effective
has long been a source of debate.
Does mass incarceration keep society any safer?
And do lengthy prison terms
rehabilitate inmates as intended?
Lester Holt spent three days
in one of the nation's toughest penitentiaries,
and this is what he witnessed.
Here's his special report: "Life Inside".
- Life at Angola prison isn't what you might imagine.
The vast majority live just like this.
More than 80 men in open dorms,
sleeping on bunk beds.
But I'll be staying on a unit next to death row
for high-risk offenders.
Or, as in my case, a high-profile guest.
- All right, we're going to go down the tier here...
- My home for the next two nights
will be on a tier called CCR,
or closed cell restriction.
The men here are locked in their cells
23 hours a day.
I'm given sheets, slippers, and some toiletries,
and shown to my cell.
- Cell 11.
Go in here, please.
Go ahead and close.
[claps hands]
[cell door locks]
- Naturally, phones aren't allowed.
All I have is my journal, a pen, a novel,
my watch, and an AM/FM radio.
I also have cameras all around me
that were installed by our crew
to record my experience and my thoughts.
- You know, as journalists, we know that, you know,
to get to the heart of something,
you have to get inside it.
The closer you are to something,
the more-the more is revealed to you.
- I soon meet my neighbor, William Curtis,
who is serving a life sentence for second degree murder.
He tells me he's locked in CCR
because he's tried to escape multiple times.
- How far did you get?
- Not very.
- He's only allowed out of his cell
one hour a day.
- Do you go out?
- Um, not very often.
The last time I went out there
was probably about four years ago.
- You haven't seen the sun in four years?
- Four years. It's hard to imagine.
I just want to get through the night.
- All right, man, you take care of yourself.
We'll be here a couple of nights.
- All right.
- I quickly learned that falling asleep
in prison is challenging.
The toilets flush loudly and often.
Cell to cell chatter lasts well into the night.
And my bed is attached through the wall to Curtis's.
So believe it or not, when he moves around,
I feel it.
- Bed's not much for comfort.
It's kind of a plastic mattress, uh,
but it did the trick. I slept okay.
- Breakfast arrives at 5:30 a.m.,
delivered by a prisoner.
- In case you're wondering, it's, uh--
looks like scrambled eggs, grits...
[toilet flushing]
And biscuits.
To the sound of a flushing toilet.
- No country on Earth locks up more of its citizens
than the United States.
While we make up less than 5% of the world's population,
we lock up more than 20% of the world's prisoners.
Politicians, academics, and activists say
mass incarceration is an American crisis.
- We've gone from $6 billion in spending in 1980
on jails and prisons,
to $80 billion today...
- Civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson
is one of the nation's leading prison reform advocates.
- I think we have hundreds of thousands of people in prison
who are not a threat to public safety.
- But is it about safety or is it about punishment?
- I think we've created a culture
that makes it entirely about punishment.
- And you might be surprised who else thinks
mass incarceration is a problem:
the people who run Louisiana's prison system.
- Yeah, I think nationwide, you know,
we-we lock up people too long and too many of them.
- Seth Smith is the director of operations
for Louisiana's Department of Corrections.
- It's not working.
It's not giving us the results that we want.
Uh, it's costing a lot of money.
And we send people to prison
that aren't necessarily a danger to society.
And then we keep people
that their time as a danger is over.
You know, they're no longer a threat.
- He says it's time for Americans to rethink
the purpose of prison
from simply punishment to rehabilitation.
- You say it's about rehabilitation,
but I think a lot of Americans think it is about punishment.
That should be hell.
- Sure. You know, they've done some awful things,
but if this is just punishment,
you know, we can make somebody worse.
- But as I'm about to hear, plenty of the incarcerated
do believe it's just about punishment.
- Another day in the field.
- "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered"
returns after the break.
- Much of Angola prison is farmland.
Thousands of cattle are raised here
to be sold on the open market,
and a variety of crops are grown here as well.
All of it happening with inmate labor.
That's one of the many hot button issues
in the mass incarceration debate.
- Another day in the field.
- I'm on my way out to the fields,
riding on this truck they call a hootenanny.
Many of the men are convicted killers,
including the ones sitting on either side of me.
- Javonte Sanders beat a woman to death
and stole her car.
- What's your sentence?
- It's, uh, life without parole.
- Without parole.
- Terry Mays shot a man in the neck during a drug deal.
- You've been here how many years?
- 30. - 30 years.
- Here, like prisons everywhere in America,
most inmates get paid pennies per hour.
- How much do you get paid to come out here?
- 2 cents an hour.
At one time we made 4 cents an hour,
and for some reason or another, the budget got cut.
It's injustice.
- So this particular job
is not one of the more desired ones?
- No. This is, like, this is the bottom of the barrel.
The field? - Yeah.
- Nobody wanna be in the field.
- Angola is not like any other maximum security prison
I've ever been to.
All of this, as far as the eye can see, is Angola.
It's a series of prisons, they call them camps.
These guys-- you guys from Camp D?
- Yes, sir. - They're from Camp D,
and then doing work like this.
Today, we happen to be, uh, picking carrots.
- So should I be worried about my safety here?
- Well-- - If you was an inmate, yeah.
- Yeah?
- If you was an inmate, most definitely.
- A majority of the inmates here are people of color.
In fact, Black men in America are six times as likely
to be incarcerated as White men.
I certainly can't escape the optics.
Look around.
Mostly Black men working on a former slave plantation
under the watch of armed guards on horseback.
It's unsettling to many.
- I know this is a sensitive subject,
and it troubled me a little bit, made me uncomfortable,
you know, talking to the guys, looking around,
most of them look like me, African-American.
The history of this land as a-as a slave plantation,
do you see that as an issue?
- You know, I can see
where someone could have an issue with it.
Any piece of farmland in the state of Louisiana
was a slave plantation at some point,
and these guys were sentenced to hard labor.
At least when they're working the field,
growing vegetables, it's something that
is giving back to the prison itself.
- Smith tells me the crops not only provide
the inmate population fresh food,
but he says it also saves taxpayers money.
It costs $1.70 a day to feed each offender.
This will be the life for many of these men
for decades to come.
And some have left young children behind,
who are among the five million kids
in America who have had a parent in prison.
Javonte has two of them.
- I mean, you know, the way it works sometimes
is you're in prison 'cause your daddy was in prison,
and your kid will be in prison.
Are you afraid for your children?
- Yeah, I definitely am.
I mean, when I was growing up-- see, I didn't know my father.
My father got murdered, um, when I was three years old.
I never knew him.
- Have they come here to visit you?
- Oh, yeah. They came one time.
- So what's that-- what is it like to have your--
to have your child see you in prison?
- Man, it hurts for me.
I mean, I'm happy to see them,
but it hurts at the same time.
- Because you wanna- - Especially when they--
when they leaving and they looking back,
it's like, oh.
- It's hard to imagine knowing that you'll be spending
the rest of your life here,
especially if you're convicted as a teenager.
Advocates like Bryan Stevenson say juvenile offenders
should never be treated the same as an adult.
- And we put thousands of kids in adult jails and prisons
and we started prosecuting these kids.
And even today, we have states with no minimum age
for trying a child as an adult.
So I don't think we should ever put children
in adult jails and prisons.
- But what about ones who committed violent crimes
like murder?
- We were children when we got incarcerated.
- I'm sitting in on a support group
run by an assistant warden.
All these men committed their crimes
before they were adults and were given sentences of life
without the possibility of parole.
They're called juvenile lifers.
- I was sixteen years old when I committed my crime.
- I was seventeen years old.
- I committed my crime at age sixteen.
- There are about 2,000 juvenile lifers like them
in U.S. prisons today.
- I was a lot different at seventeen
than I am at sixty now.
But still, at seventeen, I still knew right from wrong.
So how do you reconcile that?
- You have to be accountable.
There's no excuses for what I did,
and there's no excuses for anything
that any of us have done.
- You know, if you wanna change,
like you say, it starts within yourself.
- They tell me they're no longer the boys
they once were and say they are no longer a threat to society.
But how do I know they're not conning me?
- When we do get the opportunity to show that we are different,
the people'll be able to see.
- And in the past few years, they've all gotten new hope
to make their case for a second chance.
- What gives you the hope?
- Right there. Right there.
- This man?
- That's our Mount Rushmore right there.
Montgomery, State of Louisiana.
- Montgomery versus Louisiana is a landmark Supreme Court ruling
named after the oldest and longest serving member
of this group, Henry Montgomery,
who was seventy-two years old when I met him.
- You were seventeen years old when you were sentenced.
Do you remember what it was like being seventeen?
- Yeah. Young, wild, and stupid.
- Montgomery was indicted for murder in November 1963,
the same month JFK was assassinated.
He's been at Angola for fifty-five years.
- Man I'm behind fifty-five years.
In technology, I'm home 150 years behind time.
In 2012, the United States Supreme Court ruled
that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles
are unconstitutional,
pointing to science that says it's clear
that adolescent brains are not yet fully mature.
But that ruling didn't apply to people like Henry Montgomery,
who had already been sent away as a juvenile.
So that's why Montgomery took his case to the Supreme Court.
And in 2016, he won.
Now, all juvenile lifers,
no matter how long ago they were locked up,
can make a case that they deserve parole.
- Mostly older guys over here?
- Seventy-eight year old Clifford Hampton,
is one of them.
I went to see him in the dorm where he lives.
- This is my bed right here.
- This is your home?
- Yeah, this is mine out here.
- He's been locked up sixty-one years.
- And since you've been here, we've landed a man on the moon.
- Yeah. - Think about that.
- Yeah. There's been a lot of changes.
- Hampton says six decades in prison have changed him.
And thanks to the man sitting next to him,
Hampton will now have a chance at freedom.
- Why do you think you deserve parole?
- I wouldn't say that I deserve parole.
I wouldn't use that word "deserve"
because I took someone's life.
I could say that I've earned parole.
- In fact, both Hampton and Montgomery
will see the parole board the same day.
And I'll be there.
- How are you feeling?
- One of the things that struck me
while walking around Angola was how many men I met
who seemed to be focused on changing their lives.
One of them is Dalton Prejean Jr.
- I just knew I had to do something different
than just do time and die in prison.
- Since coming to Angola back in 2004,
he says he's turned his life around by taking advantage
of the prison's programs.
I graduated with a BA, a 3.91 average.
I was selected to be a social mentor.
- At the prison, he earned a master's degree
from a Bible college.
He even became an ordained minister.
- Thank you, Lord God.
- A couple of times a week, Prejean Gospel raps,
his form of preaching, to the population.
- ...I'm seeking your face,
and turning from my wicked ways.
- It's hard to square the man sitting across from me
with the horrible crime that he committed.
- Your actions cause the death of a baby?
- Yeah.
- When he was twenty-one, he was watching his stepson.
He says the child was inconsolable.
Prejean shook the baby so violently, he died.
Now he's serving a sixty-year sentence
for manslaughter.
- How do you move past that?
How do you become a different person?
- At first, to be honest,
I didn't know what I was gonna do.
It was sickening to my heart that I would actually have done
something like that.
- Prejean says he was filled with anger,
which had its roots in his childhood.
This is a picture of Prejean and his father,
Dalton Prejean Sr.
Shortly before he was executed in the electric chair in 1990
in this very prison for killing a Louisiana state trooper.
- You know, kids watch television all the time
and they're like, "Oh, you know, well,
"your dad is about to be fried chicken".
And by me having the same name, you know,
when people would call my name, you know,
I would-I would put my head down,
because I was-I was ashamed of what I believe
that name had meant.
- But over the years, he says,
programs at Angola helped change him.
Opportunities that weren't available
when his father was here and still aren't available
at most prisons across the country.
- There's a whole movement around trying to revive
the rehabilitation debate that we sort of abandoned.
We've got people locked up with nothing to do,
and we know that education is transformative.
It reduces recidivism.
- Education and programs have also proven
to reduce violence inside prison.
Angola was once known as the bloodiest prison in America.
But things began to change here in the 1990s,
when the prison began to focus on more
than simply locking up people and feeding them.
- Yeah, go ahead!
Now, in addition to its popular annual inmate rodeo,
there are a variety of programs.
- All right, ready? Go.
- These men are training service dogs for veterans.
There's even a radio station run by incarcerated men.
- ...the only one in the nation,
the station that kicks behind the bricks.
I'm your host...
- You can get a lot more freedom here
depending on your behavior.
You know, we have a lot of programs that are mentor-led,
led by other guys that are here serving life sentences.
And it gives them purpose.
- It looks like a shop.
- Yeah, no, it does.
Looks like any-any auto shop I've been in.
- Yes, sir.
- I talked to John Sheehan, a master mechanic
at the prison's auto shop.
- I didn't know how to change a spark plug
before I came to prison.
- Don't let the uniform fool you,
Sheehan has been incarcerated here since 1989
for killing his wife with a shotgun.
Even though he'll likely never get out,
he mentors nonviolent offenders in a reentry program.
- When you can see a man come in here,
change his life, go back out and stay out,
you know that you've done something.
Your life is worthwhile.
- Many graduates of the program now work at a car dealership
outside of New Orleans.
But there are other nonviolent offenders at Angola
who might never get a second chance.
This man was sentenced to more than a lifetime.
- My sentence was 150 years.
- You'll hear his dramatic story next.
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Of the roughly two million Americans
currently behind bars, about 20% of them are in
for drug-related offenses
with some serving life-long sentences,
like the man you are about to meet.
But a parole board is about to reconsider his fate.
Back to Lester Holt with "Life Inside".
- In my three days at Angola, most of the men I spoke with
had committed violent crimes and received long sentences.
- So you're life without parole?
- Yeah.
- But like every prison,
there are also nonviolent offenders
serving long sentences that might as well be life.
John Esteen is one of them.
- I grew up in a middle class neighborhood,
one with the Catholic schools.
Esteen is a Gulf War vet who says he was lost and broken
when he came home.
- Well, I had no direction in life.
- In 2000, he was found guilty of running a massive drug ring
that moved kilos of cocaine between Texas and Louisiana.
It was his second drug conviction.
- My sentence was 150 years.
- That's right, 150 years.
He's served twenty so far.
Esteen's case is a prime example
of harsh sentencing laws for both drug dealers
and especially users.
The legacy of the government's decades long war on drugs.
More than 450,000 people in America
are locked up for a drug offense.
Bryan Stevenson says criminalizing drug addiction
is misguided.
- We said those people are criminals
and we didn't have to say that.
We could have said that drug addiction
and drug dependency is a health problem.
- Is that why our jails are so full?
- Absolutely.
If you're looking for one explanation,
this misguided war on drugs would be at the top of the list.
- But things have been changing.
The First Step Act, which was signed into law
by former President Trump in 2018,
had been projected to reduce the sentences
of thousands of nonviolent offenders
in federal prisons.
But that doesn't affect more than 90% of
the U.S. prison population, which is locked up
in state and local facilities.
Some states had already been relaxing
sentencing guidelines, like here in Louisiana,
which started in 2001.
But Esteen was sentenced under the older
and harsher laws, so he sued the state and won,
which earned him a date with a parole board.
And now he's just hours away.
- I'm not a troublemaker.
I did everything possible to rehabilitate.
And that's what it's about, rehabilitation.
Gettin' a little antsy right now.
A little nervous, you know?
I went to bed kind of late, you know,
just thinking about things, you know,
just trying to get my mind that, you know,
the possibility of me being released.
- You leadin' the way.
You making the way for all of us here.
You have made the way.
- Y'all be blessed, my brothers.
- Bless.
- All right, you all be blessed.
- His thirty-one-year-old son, a law school graduate,
came to surprise him.
A three-member panel must vote unanimously
to grant parole.
Our cameras weren't allowed inside the parole hearing room.
About an hour later,
Esteen's family walked out first.
- He made it. - Yes!
- He made it. - He made it.
- We were there for his first steps
as a free man in twenty years.
- This is my freedom passing.
What? Should I go? Man.
[crying]
- Very good, my son.
- Two other people are eager to follow him out that gate.
Henry Montgomery and Clifford Hampton,
who have served a combined 116 years at Angola,
are about to face the parole board themselves.
- Do you think you should be paroled?
- I should be, 'cause, uh, I ain't the same guy
as that seventeen year old guy.
I'm fifty-five years older, you know,
and I'm mature enough to know I ain't gonna do that again.
- But that might not matter.
This is Montgomery's second parole hearing.
He was denied just a year before.
And it seems clear to many
why Montgomery is still in prison.
- You killed a cop? - Yeah.
- The man Montgomery murdered was Deputy Sheriff Charles Hurt
from East Baton Rouge.
In November 1963, Montgomery, then seventeen years old,
was playing hooky when Deputy Hurt,
in plain clothes, approached him.
Montgomery says as a black teenager
living in the segregated South, he was startled and scared,
was carrying a gun, and he shot him.
- I know I had the gun in my hand,
I know I shot him. I know I did it.
And I'm sorry.
- JP deGravelles says it doesn't really matter
how Montgomery feels.
What does matter is that he stays behind bars.
- An attack on a police officer is an attack
on the very fabric of society.
- DeGravelles is the victim's grandson,
and today he is a police officer himself.
- There's no parole for Charles Hurt.
You know, he-he's--
his life sentence is permanent, you know?
And my mom, my aunt, my uncle, our belief in the system
is that it's equal justice.
- The family of Clifford Hampton's victim
didn't want to speak to us on camera,
but they did tell us
they don't think Hampton should get out either.
In 1958, when he was seventeen,
Hampton got into
an argument with his eighteen-year-old neighbor,
Albertha Gibson.
He flew into a rage and brutally stabbed her to death.
- When I realized what I had did,
I walked to the home of the deputy sheriff
and turned myself in.
- And Hampton has another hurdle to overcome.
In 1961, at age twenty, he killed another inmate here.
He told me it was self-defense.
- Angola was like a jungle, you know?
That's what you had to do, you know, kill or go under.
- Hampton and Montgomery will soon find out
if they will be granted parole.
But if they're denied, they could eventually end up
where I'm heading next, the prison's hospice ward.
**
- Like every maximum security prison,
Angola can be a dangerous place.
On this morning, a knife is found.
And when that happens, this is the response,
a shakedown.
- What we have here is what appears to be
crushed up medication.
- We've seen a couple of shakedowns
since we've been here.
What kind of stuff do you find? - Cell phone.
- Weapons, drugs. - Homemade shanks.
- Then, captains Jarvis Callahan and William Russo,
along with Assistant Warden Anne-Marie Easley,
said being a corrections officer
is among the toughest jobs in the world.
- You've had things that have raised your anxiety here?
- Absolutely.
- The reason why I'm thirty years old
and on anxiety medicine. - He isn't alone.
Studies have shown corrections officers
have a significantly higher suicide rate
than the general population.
- Can you give me, uh, some specific anecdotes
of things that have happened to you on the cell block?
- An offender threw human waste out the cell at me.
What can you do to that offender?
He's already in the cell, he got life.
- Here, like in so many other states,
the institution is understaffed,
and the officers say they're underpaid.
- We start people off at $14 an hour.
People in the free world can go to Home Depot
and make the same amount of money
and not get feces thrown on 'em.'
- These officers tell me that poor behavior
is often the result of hopeless men.
Assistant Warden Easley says one of the things
that's helped,
but something I was surprised to learn,
that the majority of the officers here are women.
- I think there is value in the female officers.
You know, ladies, we can sometimes
talk an offender down a lot quicker.
You know, just because we have a calming ability.
- And something else I didn't expect to hear,
they believe that life without parole sentences
make prison less safe for everyone.
- If a man has life and he has nothing to lose,
if he knows there's no chance at going home.
- I heard the same thing for many people who work here.
Tonia Faust works in the prison's hospice unit.
- I personally would love to see a lot of these guys
get a second chance.
I worry about backlash that I would get from that
because I know that the outside public's perception
is they're here, they're supposed to be here.
- Do you surprise yourself when you say that?
Was there a period in your life that you would have been
on the other side? - Oh, absolutely.
My mother actually worked here as a security guard,
and I used to tell her all the time,
"How can you work there with those people?"
But then when you actually get here
and you do hear some of the offender stories,
no one is the same person they are, you know,
from when they were younger to now.
- Decades in prison would change anyone.
There is an aging crisis in American prisons,
a gray wave, as some have called it.
More than 130,000 inmates older than fifty-five
are incarcerated today;
that's costing taxpayers more than $9 billion a year.
Experts say the aging and the dying
are the most expensive people to keep incarcerated,
and yet they pose the lowest risk to society.
This is what a life sentence looks like
when life is running out.
Dying prisoners being cared for in hospice
by other incarcerated men.
Sixty-three-year-old Frank Walgamotte
has been in prison for forty-five years.
When he was nineteen,
he and his younger brother robbed a store;
a crime that ended with the murder of the owner.
Now, dying of cancer,
he's asked for a compassionate release.
But the vast majority of petitioners
for compassionate release are denied.
And so was Frank.
- Frank, how you feeling?
Lester Holt.
Frank, do you think you should go home?
Grabbing you a candy?
I can-- here, I can open it for you.
There you go, Frank.
All right. I'm gonna let you rest, okay?
- Okay.
- He's a human being.
I'm not here to judge him.
But I don't know how you not have compassion.
A few weeks later, I learned that Frank died
in his hospice bed alone.
Back in my cell, I had a lot of time
to reflect about everything I've seen.
I've personally wrestled with this question of...
is prison punishment?
Because if it's punishment, it's-it's pretty bad.
Is it a place of reform?
I can certainly see efforts to reform here.
I can't help, you know, thinking
as we're talking to men
who were incarcerated when they were teenagers,
and I think of my own self at sixteen,
seventeen years old, and it's all very complicated.
And now, the two men I met
who committed murders as teenagers,
Henry Montgomery and Clifford Hampton,
are about to find out if they'll finally get parole
and walk back out into the world.
- "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" returns after the break.
** - If there is one state that defines mass incarceration,
it's Louisiana,
known for decades as the prison capital of the world.
In 2019, the state's Governor, John Bel Edwards,
said that tough-on-crime approach hadn't been working.
Let's talk about mass incarceration.
I suppose there was a time that that was a good thing.
We're locking up all the bad guys.
- Well, I don't know if it was ever a good thing,
but we know now, because of our experience,
that it was counterproductive.
We had the highest incarceration rate
in the nation for the last couple of decades,
but our crime rate wasn't any better for it,
the recidivism rate wasn't better.
But the bottom line is,
most importantly, we just weren't safer.
It was costing us $700 million a year
just in Louisiana.
That's third only to education and health care.
So we couldn't afford it.
- In 2017, Edwards, a Democrat in the Deep South,
signed bi-partisan criminal justice reform legislation,
the most ambitious in the state's history.
You have actually reduced your prison population here.
- We have, but we are number two in the country
at present.
And it's a process.
- To see this happen in a deep red state,
Law and Order South,
it's pretty stunning to a lot of folks.
Wouldn't you agree? - It is.
And look, it's counterintuitive
that you can over-incarcerate
and actually be less safe because of it.
- The reforms are projected to reduce
Department of Corrections spending
by more than $260 million over the next decade.
Some of that money will be invested
into re-entry programs for those coming home.
An important investment, because every week
an average of 12,000 prisoners in America
are released back to society.
- 95% of the inmates are going to get out.
And when you do next to nothing to prepare them
for successful re-entry,
then you are creating a future
that is more riddled with crime.
- But Louisiana's reforms focus on non-violent offenders.
So, what about violent offenders,
like the juvenile lifer group I met?
Or the men dying in hospice?
We clearly met people in that prison
who don't pose a threat to society.
But in your opinion, do some people
simply belong in prison
because what they did was just reprehensible?
- Well, because what they did was reprehensible.
And there continues to be opposition in the community
and among the victim's family.
And look, whether someone continues to pose a threat
to society is a factor to be considered
in whether they get released.
- But not the only factor? - It is-- Correct.
It can't-it can't be the determinative factor
to the exclusion of all others.
- Both Henry Montgomery and Clifford Hampton
face opposition from their victims' families.
What will happen to them
when they see the parole board?
Montgomery is about to find out.
And someone has come to support him.
His name is Andrew Hundley.
He might look like a lawyer,
but he's actually the first juvenile lifer
in Louisiana to be released
because of Montgomery's Supreme Court case.
- All right. All right. - Today's the day.
- Oh, yes, sir.
- Hundley served 19 years in prison.
At age 15, Hundley was out with a teenage girl
when they got into an argument.
He became enraged and beat her over the head
with a metal rod,
and then tried to get rid of her body
by burning it.
You committed a pretty savage crime.
- It was a horrible crime, it's an inexcusable crime,
and there's nothing I can do that'll be able to undo that.
Thankfully, they were able to look and see
how I had changed.
- So if the parole board said that he changed
after 19 years, what will it say
about Henry Montgomery after 55 years?
You're the first guy that got out,
and he's still here.
- Yeah, there's- there's a lot of guilt.
I went to prison whenever I was 15, a white kid,
um, and got out when I was 34.
Henry went to prison, a Black kid at 17,
and he's still here after 55 years.
- Big day. Big day. - Big day.
- The three members of the panel
must vote unanimously to free him.
They were behind closed doors for more than an hour.
This is the audio from that hearing.
Two yeses for Montgomery's release.
Then came the third and final vote.
- I caught up with Montgomery
right after he heard the news.
He told me that he had already packed his bag.
You were getting ready just in case?
- Yeah. - Just in case
they said you can go home? - Yeah.
- But you're holding together.
- Long as I got life,
I'm gonna keep my mind on trying to get out.
You gotta keep your hope alive.
- Clifford Hampton's hope remains alive.
He is about to face the parole board himself.
I'm realizing he has been in prison
longer than I've been alive.
That's-- I can't even wrap my head around it.
It was a unanimous vote. Parole granted.
I was there moments after a surprisingly subdued Hampton
learned the news.
So now a new adventure begins?
- Yeah. - Life on the outside?
- Yup.
- Can you even imagine what that might be like?
- Imagine it'll be pretty exciting.
- A few days later, Hampton walked free
for the first time in 61 years.
- We'll stop and drop your stuff off
at your apartment...
- And Andrew Hundley is here to help Hampton,
because in 2016,
Hundley started a non-profit
called The Parole Project.
By 2020, it had helped more than 40 juvenile lifers
re-enter society.
- Hit the spot? - Oh, yeah.
- Hampton's first taste of the outside world,
a fast food hamburger with everything on it.
- First apartment. This is for you.
- His temporary apartment, painted with bright colors,
to remind him that he's no longer in prison.
- I'm seeing so much that's really new to me,
you know?
But I'm excited about it all.
- Two and a half years later, Hundley had the honor
of assisting another juvenile lifer
in his first moments as a free man.
- How you doing?
- In November 2021, 75-year-old Henry Montgomery,
the man who paved the way to freedom for Hundley
and hundreds of others, was granted parole
after serving nearly 58 years behind bars.
- In all honesty, Henry probably should have been
the first one of us to come home.
However, he is home today.
- You're gonna do great. - All right.
- You're gonna do great.
- It's a wonderful feelin'. - It is.
[laughing]
- Montgomery and Clifford Hampton
left behind thousands of others
who will never go home.
Their todays filled only with yesterdays,
something my neighbor Curtis knew all too well.
- Who's this little guy? - That's my, uh, son.
He was killed in a motorcycle wreck in '94.
- Oh, man.
**
In my short time here, I learned a lot
about the human ability to cope.
To accept. To survive.
Bye, Curtis.
Take care of yourself, man.
As I wrote in the journal I kept,
"It's too easy to look away from prison and prisoners.
"Dignity is earned, but hope is essential."
- That's all for this edition
of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin. Thank you for watching.