John Whitley (prison warden)

Time magazine credited Warden Whitley with turning around hopelessness and violence at Angola with "little more than his sense of decency and fairness.

He established incentives for good behavior, such as extra visits, and increased educational opportunities with literacy tutoring, and computer and paralegal courses.

This had enabled the inmates to produce reporting on difficult issues and to win major national journalism awards for investigating problems at the prison.

As he explained to National Public Radio's Fresh Air host, Terry Gross, about his philosophy that lay behind the lack of censorship: "We want … different views of prison.

"[4] In July 1991, inmate welders were ordered by a corrections department employee to build a "hospital examining table".

[5] Even the conservative Baton Rouge Morning Advocate commended him in two editorials for admitting the prison had erred and correcting the mistake.

"[7] Time magazine invited Whitley to New York City to share his management philosophy with its corporate officers and editors, and profiled him in a three-page feature.

This was a concrete measure of the success of reforms he had enacted to increase the safety under which both inmates and employees live and work on the prison farm.

Having accomplished his goal of turning Angola into the safest maximum security in America, Whitley retired as warden in 1995.

In what "may have been a first in the history of U. S. prisons,"[9] more than 100 inmate leaders pooled their money to throw Whitley a farewell party.