Class has ‘date with death row’:
UNCP students take a look inside Raleigh’s Central Prison

By Andrea Vukcevic
Features Editor

Death row inmates stare blankly like portrait models behind Plexiglas. They wear red jumpsuits to distinguish them from the rest of the prison population.

“Don’t make eye contact,” said tour guide Lt. R.J. Bowden.

Too late.

A red jumpsuit tries sign language, curious to know where the visitors are from.

“High school? College?”

Welcome to Central Prison, home of the state’s most violent offenders and 193 men on death row.
UNCP English professor Dr. Kim Gunter wanted her students to visit death row to see if it would influence any “kill ‘em all, let ‘em fry” attitudes towards capital punishment. Her classes wrote argumentative papers and discussed the subject from different points of view all semester.

“Today, I wanted this issue to not be theoretical,” she said. “Lots of people can banter about it like it’s a political issue, but its not. It’s a life or death issue.”

Most students knew how they felt about capital punishment before the tour began. Junior Lauren Newsome was troubled by the double standard of executing someone found guilty of murder.

“It’s [doing] the same thing they just did,” she said. “For example, if you tell your child not to curse, why are you going to curse?”

From the street, the prison looked like a large industrial plant surrounded by high fences and razor wire. Students immediately noticed a nauseating, “high school bathroom” smell when they entered.

After a briefing session, Lt. Bowden took the students to the “death watch” area and execution chamber where they saw a gurney on the other side of a double-Plexiglas window. The gurney was used to execute John Daniels by lethal injection on Nov. 14.

The state’s seventh execution of the year is scheduled for this week.

Inside, a labyrinth of windowless hallways made it impossible to tell if the group was above ground or below it.

“You can’t tell if it’s light or not outside,” said student Brandon Michael. Death row inmates get natural sunlight one hour a week if they choose to exercise outdoors in a cage surrounded by razor wire.

“They basically walk around in circles and look stupid,” said guard D.J. Desjardins, who was herding the end of the tour group.

Inmates are assigned different jobs in the prison and make 40 cents a day. They work as janitors, cooks in the cafeteria, barbers or in the store, called a canteen. Therem they can buy everyday items – a comb costs 10 cents, Ivory soap is 40 cents and a holiday photograph is $1.75.

“It’s like its own world, it’s own little community,” said junior Michelle Shenberger.

Death row prisoners are considered too dangerous to eat with the general population so cafeteria workers prepare meals that will be delivered to their cells.

Colored jumpsuits identify inmates – white for cafeteria or canteen workers, yellow for pretrial detainees and brownish-gray for the general population. An inmate in “prison gray” and handcuffs passed within inches of the students, led by a guard in the opposite direction.

“I can’t believe I just walked through the same hallway as murderers and rapists,” said student Meredith Crowe.

The two-hour tour drained students emotionally because they no longer saw inmates as faceless criminals

“Overall, people were a little more thoughtful,” Gunter said.

However, opinions were not swayed. Students thought inmates would not be on death row if they hadn’t done “something.”

“I don’t feel sorry or emotional for any of [the inmates],” Gunter said. “The point isn’t ‘do they deserve to die?’ It is, ‘do we have the right to kill them?’”