The Leprosy Prison Experiment

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The bureau of prisons wanted to turn the facility into this huge prison with a couple of thousand inmates. They assumed that those 130 patients would be dying off in a year or two. What they didn't realize is that leprosy doesn't kill you. The remaining patients were offered an annual stipend of 33,000 dollars to leave carville and move to a nursing home. When i met him two years ago, he was one of six patients left. Mister pete rode around the giant empty hallways on his bicycle. I asked him whether he'd ever consider leaving, even for a night. It's not natual.

In the early 90s, a wealthy magazine publisher was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum security prison in Louisiana. But white collar criminals weren't the only people living there, and the other people inside had basically been forgotten about by the outside world, some of them for decades.

Learn more about Neil White’s time at Carville in his memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts.

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