On Thursday, the NIU community will hear about prison life by the best in the business.

Burl Cain, warden of the Louisiana State Prison of Angola, was recently named Warden of the Year by the North American Association of Wardens and Superintendents.

Cain, who’s in charge of what people call “the worst of the worst,” will speak at 1 p.m. Thursday at the Holmes Student Center’s Heritage Room.

Being in charge of the country’s largest maximum security prison, Cain has a lot to handle.

98 percent of the inmates at the Louisiana State Prison of Angola will die there because of the natures of their sentences. It used to be called “the bloodiest prison in America,” said Jim Thomas, professor of a corrections class and various other criminal justice courses at NIU.

Thomas met Cain at an American Correctional Association meeting in 2002.

“He believes in creative programming, and that inmates can be rehabilitated,” Thomas said. “He tries to break the monotony of cell life for inmates, and give them hope and reasoning behind living.”

Cain uses numerous activities to help rehabilitate violent offenders, but primarily uses faith-based prison programming. The programs are beginning to be established in other prisons as well, simply because “they work,” Cain said.

“Even if I were an atheist, I would have a strong religious program in prison,” he said.

The film “Dead Man Walking” was based on the Angola prison, which has become one of the most progressive, best-managed prisons in the nation, Thomas said.