The Angola Prison Rodeo takes viewers to Louisiana for a public rodeo that attracts a sometimes bloodthirsty crowd to see inmates in risky spectacles. Inmates with nothing to lose Louisiana has some of the longest sentences and toughest parole conditions in the country, and inmates at Angola often die in prison. The rodeo, held annually on Sundays in October, is their time to see the public and win prizes that run into the hundreds of dollars, outstripping the meager 7-cent hourly wage they earn working in the onetime plantation fields. When the bull charges, the last man sitting with his hands on the table wins. Rodeo participants always risk injury, but inmates may be willing to risk even more.
Lifers have nothing left to lose, goes the logic.
Even a stint in the hospital breaks up the monotony of prison life. Errol Morris snubbed again One film that tackles both the Holocaust and the U.S. prison system was not nominated for an Oscar, yet still deserves mention. The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. continues the director's string of critical successes ignored by Oscar voters. Leuchter went from a freelance job re-engineering execution devices for American prisons to being one of the chief Holocaust deniers. A visit to Auschwitz and a few field experiments inside old gas chambers convinced him that prisoners were never gassed.