By Karen Feldscher
Photography by Tom Roster

In the 1980s, Donald Cabana, CJ'72, spent five years as the director of a maximum-security prison in Mississippi. When he could no longer stomach presiding over executions, he left his job, going on to enjoy a successful academic career. Now Cabana — who receives an Outstanding Alumni Award from Northeastern next month — has returned to head the same penitentiary he left in 1989. Why would a man with so many options go back to a place like Parchman?

Head west from the picturesque hills of north Mississippi through the small town of Batesville, turn south on two-lane Highway 49, and you'll find yourself surrounded by delta land as flat as a pancake, covered with vast fields of cotton, soybeans, and rice. Winters here are brown and stark. In the summer, days hit 90 degrees or hotter; come evening, the humid air buzzes with mosquitoes the size of B-52s.

Parchman landscape: Coming back was a "no-brainer" for Cabana.

On the road, you pass grand plantation homes and dilapidated shotgun shacks. Then a sign. "Penitentiary Area Next Two Miles: Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers."

The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman is a sprawling former plantation of more than 20,000 acres. Back in 1972, when newly minted criminal justice grad Donald Cabana began working there as a guard, inmates spent long days laboring out in the fields. Any of them trying to escape might wander for days without ever reaching the prison farm's boundaries.

Cabana quickly realized that many of the corrections practices he'd learned on his co-ops at Massachusetts prisons were irrelevant at Parchman. It was one of the country's most corrupt and inhumane penitentiaries.

Ultimately, he was fired for speaking up about the deplorable conditions he saw around him. But he vowed to come back as warden, and, amazingly, he did, running the place more sensibly and humanely, just as he'd envisioned doing as a young guard.

He served as warden for five years, until his distress at having to carry out executions overwhelmed him. He would detail his pain and confusion in a 1996 memoir, Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner, an insider's dark view of capital punishment.

Cabana left Parchman a second time upon receiving what his wife, Miriam, calls the "ultimate compliment" — he was named commissioner of corrections for the state of Mississippi. Later, he spent twelve satisfying years teaching criminal justice at the college level. He earned a doctorate in philosophy. He became chair of the Criminal Justice department at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.

At age fifty-eight, he could easily have stayed in the comfortable world of academia. But last spring, the job of warden (now called superintendent, though Cabana still prefers "warden" for the respect it implies) opened up again at Parchman.

After getting the okay from his wife and six grown children, Cabana decided to return.

"I loved teaching," the Massachusetts native says in the Mississippi drawl he's picked up after thirty-plus years in the South. "There was only one thing that could have possibly pulled me away from that, and that's this job." The decision, he says, was a "no-brainer."

In spite of the fact he may someday have to preside over another execution.

An uncommon career

Cabana understands corrections is not a job most people warm up to.

"If you ask little Johnny or little Mary what they want to do when they grow up," he says, "they may say, ‘I want to be a policeman.' But you don't hear them saying, ‘I want to be a prison warden.'"

The job is "very stressful," Cabana says, and thankless. "If you're looking for gratification in terms of public kudos and thank-yous, this is the wrong business to go into. Really, the only time you get noticed is when something bad happens."

Cabana never seriously considered the field before college. In fact, when the Lowell native (reared in Easton) first came to Northeastern, he says, "I thought I was supposed to major in baseball, or football, or frat parties. And my grades reflected that."

He interrupted his education in 1968 to serve two years in Vietnam, where he was exposed to the defoliant Agent Orange (Cabana blames the exposure for the high blood pressure, diabetes, and coronary disease he developed years later). Returning to Northeastern at age twenty-three, he still dreamed of playing pro baseball or football, or coaching, until his football coach gently suggested he think about other careers instead.

At first, Cabana considered law or politics. He worked as a State House intern ("a glorified clerk," he recalls), and on Michael Dukakis's campaign for lieutenant governor. But when co-op gave him a taste of the corrections field, he was hooked.

Doing bed checks on his very first night at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, he met Albert DeSalvo, the so-called Boston Strangler. Encounters like these intrigued Cabana (DeSalvo was "a slick operator," he says). But as time went on, he also remembered the corrections problems he'd seen firsthand when his brother got into trouble with the law as a teen. He began to think maybe he could help solve some of them.

Then he ran across a buddy from Vietnam, incarcerated at Bridgewater on a drug-related charge. Like many inmates, the vet insisted his charge was bogus. Cabana went to Norman Rosenblatt, the College of Criminal Justice dean, to enlist support for his friend.

It turned out the friend was telling the truth. Ultimately, he was set free.

"You begin to realize it's not all that difficult for people to end up in prison," says Cabana. "It's a thin line, in many respects, between the keepers and the kept. That experience always stayed with me."

At the office: "A significant number of near-misses."

Parchman blues

Cabana's original introduction to Parchman was rocky. He'd been hired for the new position of inmate counselor. But after he'd traveled twenty-two hours from Boston just days after graduating from Northeastern, with his wife and thirteen-month-old son Scott in tow, he learned the man who'd hired him had been fired, and the inmate-counselor job didn't exist anymore. He would be a prison guard instead.

During a previous visit, he'd been told he could live in an attractive red-brick house he was shown on the prison grounds. But now he was led to an old house without a phone, overrun with mice, next door to a turkey pen.

Almost immediately, the new guy "from up North" raised suspicions among the prison staff. And Cabana began to see exactly what he was up against.

Prisoners at the still-segregated facility were disciplined with a black leather strap dubbed Black Annie, or forced to stand for hours on an up-ended soda crate. Tough prisoners beat or raped weaker ones, with little or no intervention from prison staff. "Trusted" prisoners could carry guns to help oversee their fellow inmates, often with disastrous results.

Some prisoners worked as "houseboys" in the homes of prison officials. Others were allowed to leave prison grounds to bring back supplies from the outside. Inmates routinely bartered illegal drugs and weapons.

One longtime guard — Miriam Cabana describes him as a "crazy old man" — occasionally shot his gun into the prisoners' quarters (somehow no one was ever killed). When Cabana complained about the guard to prison authorities, they told him to keep quiet.

Cabana was also criticized for taking a badly beaten inmate to the prison hospital in his own car.

"He was humane in his approach," recalls Miriam. "He came down here with such ideals. He felt the prisoners were human beings, and they needed to be treated as such. But that was not a popular philosophy."

One day, a black inmate — a quiet sort, mentally slow — shot and killed the sergeant in whose house he worked; Cabana says the shooting's circumstances were "questionable." Outraged guards cornered the inmate, then tried to goad him into running so they could shoot him. But Cabana handcuffed himself to the prisoner and held off his colleagues as they yelled "nigger lover" at him, until the warden arrived.

This was the last straw for Miriam. She'd survived three months, much of it curled in a chair with Scott in her lap, feet up to avoid the skittering mice. But now she insisted on living at her parents' house in Oxford, Mississippi, a university town an hour and a half down the road, but worlds away from the throwback that was Parchman.

Cabana began spending weeknights with a colleague who lived in a trailer on the prison grounds, or he commuted, leaving Oxford at four in the morning to be at Parchman by six to take the inmates to the fields.

His work life continued sliding downhill. His humanitarian instincts got him branded as a troublemaker. Fellow guards sneered epithets at him: "Yankee," "college boy," "dago." He received death threats.

Finally, Cabana made the mistake of complaining about Parchman publicly. He wrote an article for the inmate newspaper, which he hoped would be taken as "constructive criticism."

It was not.

He wound up fired just a year after he started. "As a state trooper drove me out the front gate and rather unceremoniously kicked me out of his car," Cabana recalls, "I looked back and said, ‘I'm gonna come back as warden, and I hope you're still here.' And he said, rather derisively, ‘That will be the day.'"

As it turned out, Cabana had the last laugh.

Outside Parchman's gas chamber. Its steel chair is called Black Death.

Reluctant executioner

Coming back to Parchman as warden in 1984 was "satisfying," Cabana says, given his exit. Now he was a seasoned corrections professional, having held warden posts in Missouri, Florida, and elsewhere in Mississippi.

Right away, though, he faced challenges. First and foremost, he had to keep the inmates on an even keel.

"Running a prison, particularly a maximum-security prison, is almost like being a passenger in a commercial airliner," says Cabana. "Probably, it's good the public doesn't know there are a significant number of near-misses daily, because the skies are so crowded. That happens in prisons, too. There are a significant number of near-misses and crises that prisons handle every day that the public never knows about."

He explains, "These places are kind of like flash points. A fistfight can turn deadly here in a minute. Cash is prohibited, so a package of cigarettes can be a life-or-death issue. But a good correctional staff is adept at keeping things down so they don't boil over."

Still, disturbances sometimes get out of hand. Cabana recalls a hostage situation he was the first to reach.

"There were six officers taken hostage by six inmates," he recalls. "The ringleader was a skinny little fella, but he was psychotic as hell. They'd unlocked all the doors for three hundred inmates, but all the guys were just sitting on their bunks, waiting to see what would happen. When security reinforcements came, I whispered, ‘You know, you might want to lock those doors.'"

Then the ringleader started to press his knife into the neck of one of the guards. Cabana says, "I turned my head and said to someone, ‘Hand me a shotgun.' Then I turned to the skinny guy and said, ‘You got ten seconds to let the officer go, or I'm gonna kill you.' Then I said to the other inmates, ‘When I'm finished with him, I'm gonna get the rest of you-all for good measure.'"

That did the trick. All six inmates threw their knives down.

In addition to inmate control, Cabana also had to deal with knotty budget and personnel issues, the patronage-riddled politics of the Mississippi corrections system, and other state government headaches.

Then there were the executions.

Though Cabana left Vietnam believing he could never support capital punishment, his years in corrections had moved him toward accepting the practice as, in his words, "a necessary evil." Mississippi seldom used the death penalty. Cabana felt he'd be able to handle carrying out an execution on the rare occasions he had to.

His first execution, of Edward Earl Johnson in May 1987, went off "flawlessly," Cabana writes in Death at Midnight. But, he adds, "afterward, I felt dirty. I remember standing in the shower at three o'clock in the morning, scrubbing as hard as I could. No matter what I tried, nothing seemed to put my mind at ease. The rest of the world could afford to be matter-of-fact, I thought; they had not strapped a man in a chair and killed him.

"I tried convincing myself," he writes, "that the process would become easier with each execution . . . that I would become ‘used' to it . . . hardened by it all."

Yet his second execution, less than two months later, was even harder than the first.

Cabana had befriended twenty-seven-year-old Connie Ray Evans during the years Evans was on death row. Cabana knew Evans was guilty of murder. But he'd also seen his remorse, seen him become a very different person over time. He was convinced Evans didn't deserve to die.

His entreaties to the governor to spare Evans's life went unheeded. On execution day, Cabana writes, "My eyes fixed on the cold steel chair in the middle of the gas chamber. Contemplating the difficulty of watching a man die, especially when strapped in a chair while his lungs are filled with poison gas, I shook my head. What the hell was I doing here? How had my career come to this? It all seemed so unreal."

Before Evans went to the gas chamber, he asked to give Cabana a hug. And he said, "From one Christian to another, I love you."

"I was shaken to my very soul," Cabana writes. "What does one say to a man who has told his executioner that he loves him? . . . Looking at the man in front of me, I wondered if I would ever sleep peacefully again."

After the execution, which Cabana describes in his book in gruesome detail, he told his wife, "No more. I don't want to do this anymore."

Two years later, without having to perform another execution, Cabana left Parchman to become the state's commissioner of corrections. A year after that, when the governor who appointed him left office, the ex-warden began teaching criminal justice at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, eventually becoming chair of his department last December.

And he spent time on the television and lecture circuit, both in the United States and abroad, questioning the wisdom of the death penalty. For instance, at a 1995 hearing on capital punishment before the Minnesota House of Representatives judiciary committee, Cabana related how executing Johnson, who went to death proclaiming his innocence, had seriously troubled him. Indeed, he says, just days before his Minnesota testimony he learned new information that indicated Johnson may have been innocent. (The case was never reopened.)

"However we do it," Cabana told the legislators, "in the name of justice, in the name of law and order, in the name of retribution, you . . . do not have the right to ask me, or any prison official, to bloody my hands with an innocent person's blood. . . . If we wrongfully incarcerate somebody, we can correct that wrong. But if we execute an innocent person by mistake, what is it we're supposed to say — ‘Oops'?"

The importance of doing good

And yet, since May, Cabana has been back at Parchman.

When he announced his decision to return, the first question reporters asked him was what he'd do if an execution were scheduled. "I said, ‘Well, I'm gonna do my job,'" Cabana recalls.

He also says he'll never allow himself to become close to a death-row inmate again.

Some anti­death penalty activists Cabana has worked with over the past decade were, to put it mildly, shocked by his return.

Norman Greene, a lawyer with the New York firm Shuman, Updike, and Kaufman, who for four years served as chairman of the New York City Bar Association's committee on capital punishment, calls Death at Midnight an extraordinary book. He's as mystified as anyone.

"Don Cabana is a unique, brilliant, thoughtful person who's contributed a ton of things to the anti­death penalty movement," Greene says. "How could he go back and do it again?"

Even Cabana's wife and children were surprised. They were also concerned, given his health problems, which have included three heart attacks (though he says there were only two — he doesn't count the time he had chest pains but refused to go to the hospital), two open-heart surgeries, and roughly nine heart catheterizations.

But Cabana, who admits micromanaging during his first stint as warden, says he's more laid-back this time around. And the pacemaker/defibrillator he got three years ago has left him feeling "great," he says.

He's clear the warden post is where he ought to be. Executions "don't come around that often," Cabana says. "Fortunately, Mississippi is very conservative with its use of the death penalty."

And the rest of the job is so suited to his abilities — and so challenging. For example, in the wake of a $34 million cut in the state's corrections budget, he's currently overseeing reductions "in everything from gadgets and gizmos, to people," he says.

He adds, "I think every one of us in our lives does things out of a sense of duty, or responsibility, or professionalism, whether we're personally in favor of doing them or not. On those rare occasions where I'm doing an execution, it will afford me an opportunity once more to bring a sense of decency and compassion, even inside the execution chamber. And I think that's important."

Parchman, Cabana says, "has always had a special place in my heart. The opportunity to come back here represented one last chance in the twilight of my career to make a difference.

"You really can impact people's lives in a positive way," he continues. "The public has this perception that none of these guys or gals makes a successful transition [to the outside world]. But there are success stories out there — some darn good success stories.

Now, the numbers are overwhelming in the other direction. But the way I see it, whatever good you can do is a good thing."

Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.