In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White

Neil White was a successful magazine publisher with a lovely wife, two beautiful children, a gorgeous home, and an office full of awards. He was living the high life. What no one knew was that he was sustaining his life style and his business by kiting checks.  After bank auditors uncovered his scheme, he was convicted of bank fraud and sent to federal prison.

He was ordered to report to the Federal Medical Center in Carville, Louisiana. What he didn’t know then was that it was the United States national leprosarium. People with leprosy were forcibly quarantined at its remote location on the Mississippi River, beginning in 1894. By the time White was incarcerated, the number of patients had dwindled due to medical advances in treating the disease. Since there were hundreds of empty beds, the Bureau of Prisons transferred federal convicts to the institution. Prisoners lived on one side of the old Carville Plantation grounds, and patients on the other. They were to have no contact with one another.

This memoir is about White’s experiences during the year he spent in Carville. He had been all about appearances, and now he found himself surrounded with people with deformities and disfigurements, as well as thieves, hoodlums and other crooks.  He decided he would not be a federal convict; he would pretend to be an inmate. He pretended to himself that he was an ‘undercover journalist” doing an expose on why the government decided to experiment with mingling inmates and lepers.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the expose.  As he interacted with inmates and patients, he learned a lot about people, and a lot about himself. My favorite quote from the book: “Intimate, prolonged contact, it seemed, made everything commonplace. Beauty and disfigurement disappeared with familiarity.”

I really enjoyed this book. It is as much a journal of self-discovery as a story of a year in prison. It reads much like a novel.

Highly recommend.

352 pages