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One day in 1997, a few years after the federal government cut off grant money that funded college educations for inmates, Cain was complaining about the lack of higher education to Baptist ministers visiting Angola. Corrections officials see college courses as a good inmate-management tool, a privilege for only the best-behaved prisoners.

The ministers talked to the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary about opening a program at Angola. "It just fell right into our lap," Cain says.

The prison-based school needed a library to earn accreditation, and that also seemed to fall out of the sky. "We got in touch with Oprah Winfrey's company and, sure enough, they bit like a big fish," says Cain, who has a penchant for cowboy boots and draft horses. "She did something on her show, and the books started rolling in."

The prison was primed, according to Cain, for a four-year college producing trained ministers. "We had had all these religious groups come, and everybody was drinking the milk," Cain says. "They were ready for the meat. The meat was the seminary."

The first seminary class graduated in 2002. "They walked down the aisle in their rented caps and gowns, and their families cried," Cain says. "One mother came to me and said, 'I can't understand my emotions. My son came to prison and found Jesus, and he's graduated from seminary. He had to do this terrible crime to get to here.' I told her maybe the victim didn't die in vain."

One of those seminary graduates was preaching in the Main Prison chapel filled with inmates one drizzly Sunday in October.

"All men need to pray," Harold Savoy, wearing his cleanest pressed set of inmate denim, urged his congregation from the pulpit. "Pray for deliverance. Pray for doors to be opened here at Angola. Pray that we be delivered, not just from prison but from sin and death."

Alone or in pairs, they prayed, they cried. Many fell to their knees, buried their heads beneath clasped hands, and prayed. Their prayers murmured through the concrete block chapel with narrow stained-glass windows perched high on the walls, just under the roof, designed for beauty and security.

About 10 years ago, Savoy began looking at the direction of his life—to be spent entirely in Angola. When he rededicated his life to God, he had no idea he would graduate from seminary in 2002.

In the Main Prison chapel on a quiet weekday morning, as inmate workers sorted books with a bright sun lighting up the stained glass, Cain talked of sending seminary graduates out to spread the gospel.

"We had 80 graduates from the seminary, and what are we going to do with them?" he had asked himself. He had then said to himself, "Man, we need missionaries."

First they sent some seminary grads from the Main Prison to outlying block dorms. Recently Angola inmates have gone as missionaries to prisons across the state. (Prisoners can request transfers, which must be approved by the corrections department.) Leaving Angola was a big step for those inmates.

"They're leaving what's comfortable," Cain says. "This place has become their family. It's their culture, their society."

Chaplains at other camps and prisons were at first skeptical. But they came to see that these trained inmates could help them minister. Chaplains work from 9 to 5, but the inmate missionaries minister to their flocks all day, every day, Cain says. Missionaries will serve two years before returning to Angola.

John Sheehan was one of the first inmate-missionaries Angola sent to another prison. He had been at Angola 14 years. "There are people there who I couldn't ever see my life without, brothers who help you through trying times," says Sheehan, 49 and serving a life term. "Having to leave that comfort zone was difficult."

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May 2004, Vol. 48, No. 5