First it was the Red Hat, brutal.....Then upon the closure of the Red Hat Cell Block came its replacement, even more brutal was the notorious Camp J.
Closed in 2018 forever, Camp J was feared by even the convicts of Death Row and the most infamous solitary cell block in America.
Woody Overton and Jim Chapman of Bloody Angola Podcast share the story of Camp J and the details that made it so bad.
#CampJ #WilbertRideau #PrisonPodcast #BloodyAngola #LouisianaStatePrison #SolitaryConfinement
FULL TRANSCRIPT
BLOODY ANGOLA: A Podcast by Woody Overton and Jim Chapman (Camp J)
Jim: Hey, everyone, and welcome to Bloody-
Woody: -Angola.
Jim: A podcast 142 years in the making.
Woody: The Complete Story of America's Bloodiest Prison.
Jim: And I'm Jim Chapman.
Woody: I'm Woody Overton.
Jim: And we're going to talk about Camp J today, Woody.
Woody: Yeah, y'all. Camp J was always controversial, and certainly we can't cover all of Camp J in one episode, but we're not going to make a series out of this. We're just going to bring you some as we go along. Everything from Jim's phenomenal research on stuff and some of the stuff we're going to play today to, in the future, having former inmates that were in Camp J and all that. But let me tell you real quick about Camp J. If you go back on the history part, you remember when they closed the Red Hat cell block, they had to come up with a new area to house the worst of the worst, and that was Camp J.
Jim: If you're sitting there and you're wondering, "What is the Red Hat cell block?", well, we covered that, and I believe it was Season 2's opener of Bloody Angola. One thing I'll make sure I do is link that in the description, because this may be your first episode with Bloody Angola.
Woody: The Red Hat Cell Block, y'all, was notorious and they ended up shutting it down. How bad does a fucking place have to be if you're going to shut it down, when it's housing people that nobody cares about? But to get locked up in these places like the Red Hat before they shut it down and the new and improved Camp J when they opened it up, you have to be a real, real problem. Now, it doesn't matter what your crime is that you commit on the street, when you get to Angola, you get classified and most convicts do their time in dormitories. But you get locked down on Camp J was an extended lockdown-
Jim: CCR, Closed Cell Restricted.
Woody: -cell block. To get locked up there, you didn't just get in a fistfight with another inmate. That's a regular working cell block or admin seg thing. You had to either attack a guard with weapons, not just a fistfight. Weapons could be feces or urine also. Or get caught smuggling drugs and/or escape or try to escape.
Jim: Rape.
Woody: Rape. Yeah, you could call it raping somebody. You had to do something so bad that they wanted to lock you away from the rest of the prison population.
Jim: Think about it as a prison inside a prison. One of the questions you may have had was, "Well, you're already in prison. What else can they do to you?" Well, they have to have a place they can send you that is even worse than the situation you're already in. You're already in jail. You're already being told when to shit, when to eat, all those sorts of things. So, what can they do to you outside of that in CCR units or lockdowns or whatever you want to call it? Camp J was the place that you went to when you broke the rules in prison.
Woody: The worst rules. They like killed somebody or whatever.
Jim: Shanked. Jugged them up.
Woody: Killed them good.
Jim: Killed them good. [chuckles]
Woody: When you get sent to Camp J, you have to do 90 days before you come up for a review to be released back in general population. Now, that's 90 days without a low court or a high court writeup. And that means no rule infractions. If you're back there on your first day, and most of them do, and you fuck up, you do something wrong, guess what happens? You know you got to finish your other 89 days, or you're going to automatically get rejected. These guys aren't model convicts by any means, and they get the other 89 days to fuck up, and you can't do them anymore. So, when your review comes up again, you automatically get them denied, and then you get a clean slate for the next 90 days. But they got convicts in Camp J that are housed there forever.
Jim: Forever.
Woody: I mean, like so many years. I guess we should tell them a little bit about it.
Jim: One thing I want to go into before we do that, just paint the picture.
Woody: Oh, yeah. Paint the picture of the cells and everything else.
Jim: Think of it like this, y'all. If you were like me and you were raised and your parents would do this to you, maybe you'd say a cuss word, you see how that helps us [crosstalk] saying-- Cusswords every now and then. So, maybe--
Woody: [cros...