WASHINGTON, D.C. (KSLA) — A Shreveport man who spent 30 years in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is fighting for better conditions behind bars.
During the final week of May, Terrance Winn testified in front of a U.S. Senate subcommittee looking to improve working conditions in prisons.
Winn, who is in his mid-40s, spent most of his life behind bars. He said he’s not fighting why he went to prison, but the forced labor he was made to do while incarcerated.
Winn went to prison for second-degree murder at just 16 years old. He said it was during a fight, and he was trying to defend himself, but the bullet ended up killing an innocent bystander.
Cory Booker, Democratic senator for New Jersey and chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism, invited Winn to the hearing called “State-sanctioned Slavery: Examining Forced Labor in Prisons.”
Winn said during his time at what many call “The Farm,” he worked out in the cotton fields. “Every time I was told to pick cotton, I refused to do it. Every time, I chose to go to the dungeon.”
U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, of Louisiana, wasn’t interested in the topic of prison reform, but rather what led Winn there in the first place.
Kennedy: “Did you ever reach out to Mr. Owen’s family?”
Winn: “Sir, you’re a senator from Louisiana. If a person like me was incarcerated reached out to any person that’s a victim, that’s a sentence. You are in prison for that and I was already in prison, so that’s a different sentence.”
Kennedy: “So you couldn’t, you couldn’t write?”
Winn: “No, by law you cannot reach out to the victim or the victim’s family.”
“I felt, I felt, I felt like it was an attack and it went against everything that we was here for, because we wasn’t here because of what I did 30 years, 34 years ago,” Winn said about Kennedy’s line of questioning during the hearing “We was here about what’s going on today in the prison system. It was about prison labor; it wasn’t about Terrance Winn.”
“Frankly, I am disappointed. I just don’t think these emotional arguments are productive. It’s time to solve a problem. You know, people are in prison for a reason,” Sen. Kennedy said at the hearing.
“We get hard on people that commit crimes, but that doesn’t stop them from being a human. They are just humans that did something wrong and they’re paying for it,” Winn said.
Winn also said he’s hopeful his testimony will help change what prison labor looks like.
“I’m very optimistic that it will lead to change because, let’s say it don’t happen today, it’s a conversation where there wasn’t a conversation at one time. So I’m hopeful that something will happen. I’m optimistic that something will happen,” Winn explained.
Since Winn has been out of prison, he has started the nonprofit PIPES. The acronym stands for Priorities, Intentions and Practical Exchanges. The organization advocates for criminal justice reform through letter-writing campaigns, prayer vigils and policy changes, and helps formerly and currently incarcerated people with empowering programs.
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