A room decorated with pink flowers and soft fabrics offers no hint that it is inside Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States.
There, 29 fathers donned tuxedos for the first time in years. It wasn’t to go to court or a hearing: it was to dance with their daughters. The organization God Behind Bars held the first father-daughter dance in the prison’s history. The young women arrived wearing dresses, flowers, and gifts; some had not hugged their fathers in more than a decade.
Among the most moving moments were a line dance that the fathers secretly prepared and a slow song, “Butterfly Kisses”, that left more than one of them with a breaking voice. As they spun around the dance floor, they stopped being case-file numbers for a while: they were simply dads hugging their daughters, trying to reclaim in one night what the years behind bars had taken from them.
