Hi, I'm Jed Lipinski, the host of Gone South.

I wanted to share a quick note before we begin.

If you've listened to previous seasons of Gone South,

then you might be expecting another limited series,

eight episodes covering one story.

But in season four, we're doing things a little differently.

Each episode will contain its own stand-alone story,

and we'll probably do some two-part episodes here and there.

We'll be releasing new episodes with new stories every week indefinitely.

In other words, more episodes, more stories, more gone south.

We hope you enjoy the show, and thank you for listening.

If you ever have a chance to visit the Louisiana State Penitentiary,

and I hope you don't.

You'll notice something unusual on the way in.

Right outside the front entrance, there's a gift shop, a prison gift shop.

They sell various trinkets and posters,

and you could even walk away with a t-shirt,

a t-shirt with a picture of the prison entrance

and a caption underneath that reads,

a gated community.

Louisiana State Penitentiary sits on 18,000 acres

just south of the Mississippi border. The prison is better known as Angola because the land it occupies used to be a slave plantation and a majority of the people enslaved there were taken from the West African country of Angola.

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