NBC's Lester Holt spends 2 nights in prison for news show

NEW YORK (AP) — Lester Holt laughed when his colleagues proposed that he spend a couple of nights locked up in the Louisiana State Penitentiary for an NBC News report on criminal justice reform.

"At first, I was like, 'it's dangerous,'" Holt said. "This is one of the most notorious prisons of the world, and you want to lock me up? What about safety?"

It also had the whiff of a stunt that could overshadow serious intentions. Instead, the sobering trip frames Friday's "Dateline NBC" report about 1990s-era "tough on crime" legislation and what it has meant for society today. The show is repeated Sunday night on MSNBC, along with a Holt-moderated town hall meeting from inside another well-known prison, New York's Sing Sing.

Holt gained access to the sprawling Louisiana prison known as "Angola" because the desire to confront these issues coincided with Gov. John Edwards' attempts to lower the population inside his state's facilities. As Holt rode a prison bus to the 28-square mile (72-sq. kilometer) former plantation that houses some 5,500 inmates, he reflected on how many people took the same ride knowing they might never return.

For two nights, he slept in a cell in Angola's death row, alongside prisoners who were locked inside except for an hour a day of recreation in the prison yard. The man in the cell next to him hadn't been outside in four years.

"The only time I did feel perfectly safe was inside my cell with the door locked," Holt said.

He felt far less safe riding in an open-air vehicle, back-to-back with convicted murderers, to a work assignment picking carrots. For a black journalist, it was hard to escape the symbolism of working in a field with mostly black inmates, as white corrections officers on horseback watched them.

The number of older people he saw...