John Whitley

John Whitley (born January 1944 in Hammond, Louisiana) was a Louisiana corrections officer who served as the warden of Louisiana State Penitentiary (or Angola Prison), the largest maximum-security in the United States, from 1990 to 1995. Time magazine credited Warden Whitley with turning around hopelessness and violence at Angola with "little more than his sense of decency and fairness."

John Whitley attended Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana, and graduated in 1968. He enlisted in the United States Army that year, and served during the Vietnam War before his discharge in 1970. Shortly after, he began his career in corrections.

Whitley started his career as a classification officer at Angola in 1970, and rose through the ranks during its bloodiest years to become Deputy Warden of the prison. He moved on to become the warden of another Louisiana prison, Hunt Correctional Center, and left the state to run a private prison in Texas. He was asked to return to Angola in 1990 to restore order in the wake of enough stabbings, suicides and escapes to cause a United States Federal Judge to declare a state of emergency at the prison. Within two years, he had stemmed the violence with incentives for good behavior, like extra visits, and by increasing educational opportunities with literacy tutoring, and computer and paralegal courses. And he enabled some trustworthy and deserving inmates to travel outside the prison as part of athletic teams and inmate bands that provided entertainment for churches, nursing homes, and other charitable organizations.

He launched an outreach program to all criminal justice programs in the State of Louisiana, offering to send both prison officials and inmates to college classrooms to help both students and faculty better understand the realities of prison management and prison life.

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