"The sad truth about capital punishment is, those without the capital get the punishment."

Philip Workman's comment set the mood for the rest of our interview. Thirty-nine at the time of our meeting in July 1992, Workman was the prototypical convict, complete with tattoos & bandanna. He was straight out of central casting. Workman wore prison-issue denim, with the prison name big & bold on the pants legs.

While in prison, Philip had found Jesus. In fact, he looked a little like the popular image of Jesus: long hair, mustache, & goatee. He had obviously cultivated the look, & somehow it worked.

Though he had had a tumultuous youth, his newfound religion seemed to have calmed him down. Tempered by the eleven years he had spent on death row, he had found a new language to express himself. It sounded familiar to us. Many occupants of 'the last cells on the corridors' embrace some form of religion; there is no shortage of converts in prison.

Now & then Philip talked about the more macabre aspects of his sentence: "Each walk had like thirteen cells... My cell was twelve cell... on three walk. And twelve cell on four walk was where the electric chair was. So like if I ever tried to escape & drilled through the wall. I'd just wind up in the electric chair room...I used to think about that sometimes. The first years I didn't even know it but where I laid my head every night over there...I slept for eight & a half years about four feet from the electric chair."

Workman had married since his conviction--the first of many inmates we were to meet who performed the ceremony inside the walls. He had answered a personal ad placed by a single white female seeking a Christian man. Philip figured nothing disqualified him from meeting that description. He now sees his wife six hours a week.

Later Philip placed his own ad, & through it he found a second champion--a woman who is helping him to raise money from religious groups to pay for his appeals. Philip recognizes that he may die in prison, but he wants to go down fighting, with competent representation.

I found myself thinking about his life & ambitions. It must be awful to live knowing exactly what your days & nights will be like, every day, every month, every year, eventually knowing even the hour your life will end. The penal system removes the mystery from life; perhaps that is the essence of punishment. This concept is probably too abstract to appreciate unless you've experienced the degrading routine of prison. Though I probably never will, I can at least dissect it with someone who has--I can come a little closer than many & get beyond the purely theoretical. It is this personal contact that has most affected my notions of prisons in general and the death penalty in particular.

Philip claims that he and perhaps a third of the people in jail with him are innocent. This is an astonishing statement, of which I am wary. Most prisoners are quilty of something, even if they are not guilty as charged.

Because it was Christmas, I included a decorated tree in several of Workman's portraits. The festive decorations seemed out of place. How could there be Christmas in a place like this?

Eventually I went back to my Kmart--size studio, & Philip went back to a cell the size of a mattress. He had a room with a view.

"We have windows. As far as I'm concerned, they can block mine up though because when I look out my window all I see is the door that goes into the execution room over there. So, you know, I don't look out my window a whole lot."