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Successful entrepreneur, award-winning publisher, community pillar and all-around golden boy, Neil White was eager to impress. To keep his expensive luxury magazine business afloat, he began transferring funds he didn’t actually have between bank accounts—a practice commonly known as check kiting—and wound up in federal prison in 1993 on charges of fraud. To White, a sentence of 18 months and a tarnished record meant that life as he knew it was over. But the real shock was yet to come.
On his first day in prison, he learned that he would do his time in the last leper colony in the United States.
In remote southern Louisiana, a federal medical facility known as Carville forcibly quarantined and treated people who had leprosy. Likely one of the oldest and most feared diseases on the planet, leprosy—also known as Hansen’s disease—is a bacterial infection that damages nerves in the skin, nose and eyes. In the 1990s, beds at Carville became available, so the Bureau of Prisons transferred federal convicts to join 130 patients who lived at this bucolic bend in the Mississippi River.
When he was released from prison, White, now 48, owed more than $2 million in restitution payments and child support. He has lost his well-crafted reputation, his marriage and precious time with his two young children. But while incarcerated at Carville, he learned some lessons about living simply and honestly—and he learned them from the most unlikely sources.
Q. You were in prison. The prison was also a leper colony. When people find out, which of these two facts gets the biggest reaction?
A. Absolutely the leper colony. I have to be careful about bringing it up. First, they don’t believe me. Then they have a thousand questions. A leper means outcast to many. Many highly religious people who believe in the word of the Bible still believe leprosy is a disease of the soul. God’s curse.
Q. What happened when you realized you’d be living with leprosy patients?
A. The first time I saw the patients up close was when my wife dropped me off. I was sitting in the hallway on a bench, and a man, Harry, was waving to me—and he didn’t have any fingers.
I thought, I’ve got to get out of here. I could recover from a short prison stay and rebuild my reputation. But for someone consumed with image, the thought of getting a disease that would disfigure me was unthinkable. I wanted to be transferred.
Q. What did prison officials say?
A. They told us that the leprosy patients weren’t contagious and they didn’t have the disease anymore. But we saw symptomatic patients, people with huge swollen faces, obvious open sores and every once in a while a patient whose leg or arm had to be amputated. They didn’t have the live leprosy bacilli in their bodies. But their nerves were so damaged from the bacteria that they couldn’t feel their hands when, for example, they burned or cut them, and they got infected. There’s nothing contagious about it.
Q. But you didn’t learn this for a while. Was that part of a strategy among the prison officials?
A. They weren’t real interested in keeping us informed, understandably, and it fostered all sorts of fear and misunderstanding among the prisoners. Knowledge is power, and the guards wanted to keep inmates out of that position. There were a lot of smart convicts there. There were some crack dealers, but there were lawyers, doctors, bankers, accountants—people who could use information to their advantage if they got it.
Q. What did you learn from the patients who lived within the same walls nearly their entire lives?
A. Because they’d been labeled lepers—because they were the last people in mainland America to be imprisoned for a disease and couldn’t hide their disfigurement—they had a perspective that you and I can never, never have. We have so many distractions, freedoms and choices. We live in a complicated world.
Q. Theirs wasn’t complicated?
A. They lived in a very monastic world. They loved their routine, they took care of one another, they had simple lives. Money was not a huge concern. They found a way to find happiness in spite of the facts. After chasing all the trophies and accolades of the world that I thought would make me happy, I was 33, in prison and miserable. I found people who’d been there for 60 years with no legs who found contentment.
With maturity comes wisdom, especially among people who’ve overcome as much stigma as anybody in the United States ever has. There’s something to be learned from them. It was exactly what I needed to see.
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