Editors’ Note: William Kissinger, an Inquest contributor, reached out when we were midway through copublishing our series with Acacia, 25 Years Since 9/11, to say that he’d been inspired by it to write this essay on how 9/11 was experienced inside of Louisiana State Penitentiary. We offer it here as a supplement to the series. It speaks powerfully to how the desperate desire to reach loved ones that day—to be sure that they were safe—was felt even more acutely within prisons, where communication with the outside is a challenge even on the best of days.
It was a Tuesday morning, and I had the day off. A day off at Angola—Louisiana State Penitentiary—was incredibly rare. Twenty-six years into a life sentence, it was enough to feel like a holiday. Soon after waking up, I headed to the hobby shop, a rare bubble of freedom where Angola’s residents could work on handcrafted goods.
The hobby shop was its own little world. In it, we were not prisoners—we were leatherworkers, woodworkers, artisans, old-timers. We had workbenches and the chance to make crafts for people in the outside world. We traded materials with each other: a scrap of leather for a cigarette, a dab of glue for a favor, half a bottle of dye for some spare varnish. It was the only method we had. We argued and bartered, laughed and insulted one another across the room, and somehow managed to get our projects finished.
On the morning of September 11, all I needed was a little piece of lining leather. Somebody said Earl, the miserly curmudgeon of the shop, had some.
Earl had everything. What Earl didn’t have was any intention of giving up anything just because somebody else needed it. My friend Mikey—who sat near my workbench with no project, no tools, and plenty of advice about what everybody else was doing wrong—jumped in.
“Man, let old boy here get a piece of lining leather. He’s got to finish that coin purse for me.”
Earl looked at him. “Lawyer don’t need your help making a deal. What the hell you think lawyers do?” I was considered the lawyer of the shop as I was an inmate counsel paralegal and was supposed to know everything. Everybody loved reminding me that I was supposed to know how to negotiate the best of deals.
Before long, half the shop was involved in a negotiation over a scrap of leather that could have fit in my hand. Somebody said I owed Earl from the week before. Somebody else claimed he was losing money on a deal nobody had offered him. But eventually, the leather reached my bench.
My next order of business was wandering down to Specs, another one of the old-timers. Specs had thick glasses, good tools, and strong opinions. If you had a problem you didn’t know how to fix, you sought out Specs—and I needed help with the leather belt I was working on. Specs carefully looked it over.
“You planning on selling that?”
“That’s the general idea.”
He nodded. “Well, quit putting holes in it till I get my glasses on.”
“Put your glasses on? They’re sitting on the end of your goddamned nose!”
He pushed them up quietly and showed me how to fix what I’d messed up. It was one of those rare mornings in Angola when things felt almost normal: coffee, leather, arguments jokes. Men arguing over pieces of scrap material because there wasn’t anything more serious to worry about.
More from our decarceral brainstorm
Inquest—finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award for General Excellence & cited in The Best American Essays 2025—brings you insights from the people working to create a world without mass incarceration.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest in your inbox every Saturday.
Newsletter
Suddenly, a few minutes before 10 a.m., a sergeant came running through the hobby shop door. It wasn’t our usual sergeant.
“Let’s go! Lock your boxes and put your tools up. You’ve got five minutes. The shop is closed!”
Surprised groans and curses came from around the shop. We didn’t go in for count for another half hour; what could they need us for? I shut my locker box where I kept my tools and materials, headed for the door, and just as I reached it, another sergeant pushed his way inside.
“Let’s go! Get moving!” The second sergeant yelled.
The Walk—a long passage running the length of Angola’s main prison complex—was packed that morning. Men crowded the passage, moving in every direction, talking over one other, pushing through the crowd. Up ahead of me, guards were shuffling people into their dorms and slamming doors, twisting those big old brass keys while shouting commands. What the fuck was going on? This wasn’t normal. It wasn’t even a little bit resembling normal.
The dorm sergeant touched each of us on the shoulder as we entered, silently counting us and adding us to the men already sitting on their bunks. When the last man came in, he turned the key and locked the door. Then he faced the dorm. “All right, something really bad has happened in New York City, and we’ve—”
Somebody immediately cut him off. “New York City? This is fucking Angola, Louisiana, man! The fuck that got to do with us?”
You could tell the sergeant was angry at being interrupted, but he also looked shaken. Ignoring the question, he told us that as soon as the control center cleared his count, we could get up and move around. Nobody knew anything. Nobody even had an idea of what might be happening. So we sat or laid on our bunks and talked across the aisle.
Finally, the call came. The sergeant spoke very quietly into the phone for a few minutes, hung up, then waved his arm around as if to say, Get up. It’s clear. The lockdown was over, at least for the moment. We could move around the dorm again, though nobody knew how long that freedom would last. I was fixing myself a cup of coffee at the hot water pot when an excited voice came from the TV room.
“Man, damn! Look at this shit! C’mon and check this out!”
Because the TV room was already full, guys started moving toward the game room, which had large windows looking into the TV room. More piled in behind them. There was a murmur at first, followed by a few shouts and a couple of groans. Then silence. The entire mood of the dorm changed.
I made my way into the TV room. When I looked at the screen, the first image I saw was a fiery explosion blooming from several floors of a tall building. It took me a few seconds to understand that I was looking at the World Trade Center. The newscasters themselves seemed unable to make sense of what they were seeing. Then we watched the second plane streak across the television screen and disappear into the second tower. The room went silent.
As the minutes passed, even more horrifying images began flowing across that television. We witnessed living, breathing human beings jump from unimaginable heights to their deaths. Some were twisted into grotesque shapes. Some fell with a strange, terrible grace.
What makes a person choose to jump from a building that high? What were they thinking on the way down? At that moment, I wasn’t thinking much of anything. I was too numb to form a coherent thought. Then somebody said he had family up there. That got through to me.
I turned away from the television toward his voice. Another man was asking him where his people lived, what part of New York, and he was trying to explain. I didn’t know enough about New York City to know whether they were close to those buildings or miles away. From the sound of it, neither did most of the men around him.
“Can you call them?”
It was a simple enough question. Anywhere else, maybe somebody would already have been reaching for a phone. In there, the man just looked toward the door. We had only just been allowed to get off our bunks. Nobody knew what they were going to let us do next, or whether the whole prison was about to be locked down again. He went to ask the sergeant anyway. I watched him leave, and then I started thinking about my own people.
They weren’t in those buildings. But I wanted to hear somebody familiar—somebody I loved—tell me where they were. At home, sitting in the kitchen. At work. At school. Some ordinary place that I could picture in my mind and keep them there.
I didn’t know how much more was going to happen. None of us did.
Then word came about another hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, and the passengers aboard who had fought back the hijackers. Later, we learned more about the heroism aboard that flight—how the passengers had successfully prevented the hijackers from reaching their intended target, before crashing themselves in Shanksville, Pennsylvania—and for a while each of us imagined what we would have done in their shoes. Would we have been the Todd Beamers, the Mark Binghams, the Tom Burnetts, the Jeremy Glicks?
Mikey asked me something. I don’t remember his exact words anymore, but he wondered aloud what was going to happen next.
“I don’t know, man.”
I turned back toward the television. Specs took off his glasses and stared at the floor. I think I saw him wiping his eyes.
I began thinking about the people who were waiting for somebody from those buildings to call. We could understand needing word from somebody you couldn’t reach better than most. We lived on letters and visits and whatever conversations we could manage over the telephone. A late letter could worry a man for days. You’d see him going back over the last thing his people had told him, trying to decide whether there was something in it he should have paid more attention to. And all the while, he had to wait. But those families had those pictures in front of them. I couldn’t get past that. What could anybody possibly say to them while they waited?
Earlier that morning, I had been carrying on about a piece of leather. I thought about that while I stood there. Earl and his scraps. Mikey wanting his coin purse. Me carrying my belt down to Specs. It seemed as though we had been doing those things a long time ago, even though my hands still carried evidence of the work. I looked down at my fingers. There was a little dark stain worked into the skin that wouldn’t come off with ordinary soap.
I remember that better than I remember some of what was said on television. I don’t know why. Maybe I needed to look at something close enough to understand.
We were locked inside that dorm in Angola, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do for anybody in New York. I couldn’t even find something useful to say to the man standing beside me.
So I stayed there with him. We watched, and when somebody spoke, we listened.
For that little while, nobody had to work very hard to get another man’s attention.
For a long while afterward, there was a solemn, somber peace in Angola.
Image: [A collection of sūrahs, prayers, and other religious writings] / Spencer Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections.
