Dec. 7—KENAI — A sign on the prison wall said Angela Hall could embrace her husband twice, once at the beginning of visitation and once at the end. No more than five seconds per hug.
It was a blustery October evening on the Kenai Peninsula, and Angela had traveled a long way to be here.
First, a cab from her home in Glendale, Arizona, to the airport. A six-hour flight to Anchorage, then a night spent sleeping while slumped in an airport chair. Morning flight to Kenai. Hours waiting at an Airbnb apartment. Then, finally, standing at a chain-link fence outside the Wildwood Correctional Complex, shivering against the wind.
Angela, a 54-year-old state employee and grandmother, waited nervously for the moment when guards would lead her through a series of buzzing locked doors to where her husband waited.
For the entirety of their 12-year marriage and for decades before that, Angela’s husband, Brian Hall, has been in prison, serving a 159-year sentence for a 1993 double homicide in Anchorage.
During that time, she’s learned what it means to be married both to a man and to the prison system — and to face a world that doesn’t understand.
“I don’t see him as a murderer,” she said. “He committed murder when he was 17. That does not define him as a person.”
History
Many of the facts of Brian Hall’s case, litigated over 30 years, are undisputed: On the night of April 16, 1993, he and some of his friends got into an argument at a bonfire party in Anchorage’s Far North Bicentennial Park.
Two young men got into a car and drove it slowly toward the car where Brian and his friends sat, according to an Alaska Court of Appeals narrative of the case. One of the men stuck his arm out the car window, offering a bottle of beer and saying something about not having any beef with them.
Brian would later testify in court that he thought the guy was wielding not a beer bottle but a gun. Brian fired three shots with a .44-caliber handgun, killing Mickey Dinsmore, 24, and Stan Honeycutt, 20.
He was 17 at the time and was tried as an adult. At his trial, his attorney argued self-defense, saying Brian believed he was being threatened with a gun. A jury convicted Brian of one count of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder.
A family member of one of the victims contacted for this story did not want to comment. Family of the other victim couldn’t be reached. But in 1993, relatives of the victims spoke in court about their sorrow at the lost futures of two young men. The sister of one victim described telling her young sons their uncle had been killed. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, she said.
At Brian Hall’s sentencing, the judge described him as a lost cause almost from birth, delving into his childhood psychiatric hospitalizations as well as violent teenage rap lyrics he had penned.
It wasn’t surprising that Brian ended up a killer, the judge said — as early as the age of 3, he was already “exhibiting a proclivity toward violence.”
It was the early 1990s, a time when a series of highly publicized crimes committed by teenagers led to a national panic over what some politicians called “superpredators” — a racially coded term that condemned young offenders as incorrigible and acutely dangerous criminals, and inspired a wave of state legislation that pushed juveniles into adult court.
Brian received one of the longest sentences ever given to a juvenile defendant in Alaska. He’s now 48.
An unorthodox arrangement
Angela met Brian nearly two decades later, in 2011. They were married the following year.
Their marriage is, to say the least, an unorthodox arrangement. They’ve been allowed to kiss exactly once, a “peck on the lips” at their wedding, according to Angela. They speak for hours on the phone daily, in 15-minute paid prison phone call increments. They’ve never been alone together. Angela has an idea of her husband’s living habits — how he drinks his coffee black, how he rolls his socks up into neat little balls to put them away — but only through what he tells her.
Every detail of the marriage is under the jurisdiction of the Alaska Department of Corrections — its policies, its whims, its employees, its institutions.
“Basically, the DOC controls my life,” Angela said.
Angela has become an outspoken activist, founding a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of the families of incarcerated Alaskans, and joining a national movement to reappraise life sentences for juvenile offenders, like her husband.
She dreams of someday sitting with her husband on the couch, eating popcorn and watching a movie. But she knows prison visits are all she may ever have.
“The reality is maybe that won’t happen,” she said. “But maybe it will.”
Visitation
Angela’s marriage puts her in a rare category: Those who marry “lifers,” inmates who may never get out of prison.
But the experience of having an incarcerated family member is far more common. A 2018 Cornell University study with the advocacy group FWD.us found that a staggering 113 million American adults have a direct family member who is formerly or currently incarcerated — about half of all adults. One in seven American adults has had a spouse or co-parent incarcerated, the same study found.
On that October Friday night at Wildwood, Angela was surrounded by other people who’d traveled long and far to visit their locked-up husbands and fathers and sons. They all gathered in the reception area, awaiting reunions.
One woman had flown in from Juneau to see her boyfriend. Down there, the guards would let inmates and their visitors hold hands, she reported. An older man and woman with a quivering tiny dog in a service animal vest waited to see their son. They’d flown in from Virginia.
Angela was dressed for a date: dark red lipstick, her dark brown hair blown dry, her “Alaska clothes” — a down coat and warm boots she reserves for her visits north. She wore the wedding band her husband had picked out but that she’d purchased, since his job at the time as a prison janitor paid less than a dollar an hour.
She was antsy. She hadn’t seen her husband in more than a year.
Finally, a guard came out to the waiting room and each visitor was searched. Angela raised her hands over her head as the wand beeped over her. The guard unlocked yet another heavy door, and another after that. Everyone filed into a space no bigger than a dorm room, with colorless institutional carpet, fluorescent lights and, on the cinderblock wall, a painted orca against a brilliant sunset.
Brian Hall stood in the corner grinning at his wife. He’s tall and skinny, with long curly hair and a wide grin with a gold front tooth. He wore spotless New Balance sneakers, clean white socks, a yellow jumpsuit and a bandana bearing Cherokee symbolism around his head. He had sued the state for the right to wear it.
He opened his arms and she folded herself in.
They embraced, for all of the allotted five seconds.
A ‘mouse’ in the world
Angela grew up in a large and close-knit family in Brooklyn, but her childhood was marked by abuse. At 29, she left an abusive relationship, boarding an airplane in the middle of the night with her two toddlers in tow. In New York, she’d been a paralegal. In Arizona, she had to start over. She took a pay cut, focused on raising her children and settled into a comfortable state job.
She remembers feeling like life was just happening to her. She considered herself shy and reticent, “a mouse” in the world. Her childhood mantra was if they don’t notice you, they won’t hurt you.
At 40, she went back to school. In a criminal justice class, an instructor assigned her to interview a person who had been incarcerated as a juvenile. A friend — a former correctional officer — told her about a man she had known from her work at a prison in Arizona.
When Brian started serving his sentence in the 1990s, some Alaska inmates had been shipped out to a private correctional facility Outside because of the lack of prison beds, first to Arizona and then to Colorado.
Brian, a member of the Cherokee Nation, was raised in North Carolina and moved to Alaska around age 10. In Anchorage, he spent much of his youth in institutions, including the Alaska Psychiatric Institute and Charter North, the private psychiatric hospital that was a precursor to the present-day North Star. He remembers being strapped to restraints at Charter North. By the time he was a teenager, he was furious and unruly.
Brian says he is full of remorse about his crime and will always be, but is not the same person he was at 17.
Phone calls
First they spoke by phone, Brian in his housing unit at the Colorado prison and Angela in her living room. Angela remembers right away thinking Brian was charming. She was impressed by his honesty about his crime. The conversation was easy. She was surprised how sincere he seemed.
“He didn’t give me any bullshit,” she said.
She got an A on the project.
They kept talking — about their difficult childhoods, about TV shows they both loved, like the zombie series “The Walking Dead.” She was surprised to hear that Brian loved “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and musicals like “Sweeney Todd” and “Phantom of the Opera.”
At that point, Brian, in his late 30s, had been incarcerated for nearly 20 years. He had 138 years to go.
Angela flew to Colorado to meet him in person. She remembers being nervous — would it be hard to talk?
Brian recalls wondering if getting to know this woman would backfire. He felt funny about her spending time and money to fly to see him, he said.
“I was scared to be vulnerable,” he said.
When Angela arrived, she saw Brian being led into the visitation room. He popped up from behind the double safety glass window in a cartoonish way. She laughed. The ice was broken. They talked until visitation ended. Soon they were speaking several times a day by phone.
As their relationship deepened, Angela said she began to realize the hard limits of the institutional visits might be her only prospect for a life together.
Brian had his own worries. He wanted to be with Angela, but he also wondered about how much of her life she’d be giving up to be with him, how much their time together would be dictated by prison rules.
“It’s a big sacrifice that she makes, and that she made,” he said.
A prison wedding
Brian and Angela married in 2012, about a year after they’d met. There was no proposal. It was more like a conversation during a visit, they said.
It turned out that getting married to someone who is incarcerated was much more complicated than a marriage outside: The Alaska Department of Corrections has the power to allow or deny legal marriage ceremonies for inmates. An institutional probation officer called Angela, and asked her questions like, “Do you know how much time he has?” “Do you realize your marriage is going to be in visitation rooms?”
“I was unmoved,” she said. “No one is going to tell me what my marriage is going to be.”
It took months to get the necessary permissions, including two fly-in visits to Colorado to see a counselor. According to the Department of Corrections, Alaska prisons see two to three marriages a year. In the past five years, there have been more than a dozen prison marriage ceremonies statewide, according to the department.
Brian and Angela married in June 2012, at the Hudson Correctional Facility in Hudson, Colorado. The day was touched by small kindnesses — Angela was allowed to wear a wedding dress and veil. Brian had to wear his institutional jumpsuit. They recited vows. They kissed briefly, for the first and only time. They were allowed to buy microwavable hamburgers and chips from the vending machines. A correctional officer filmed the ceremony and sent it to Angela. Their families — his mother and aunt, her mother and kids — were present.
Angela says she knows some people think her choices are strange.
Being married to a lifer invites speculation by strangers on the nature of her relationship, she said. People have asked her bold questions about intimacy that she thinks they’d never ask someone else.
People turn into armchair psychologists, trying to explain it: No, she says, her history as a survivor of abuse did not lead her to become involved with a man who would likely never live alongside her. She says she has always believed Brian will be released. Most of her close family and friends accepted Brian after seeing that she loved him, Angela said. But she’s aware that some observers find her marriage bizarre, even unfathomable. Incarceration carries a powerful stigma, she said.
“People wonder, like, how can you love somebody who did this thing?” she said. “Hate the sin but don’t hate the sinner. No one would say I’m happy he did this terrible thing. But I separate the person from the act. It happened. It’s a terrible thing. He regrets it happened. You can’t change it.”
Emails from Angela
In the years since they married, Angela has become both an outspoken advocate for her husband and for families with incarcerated loved ones.
It started with small, practical things: When the prison decided on no-contact visitation, she wrote a letter about the importance of human touch. When her husband was moved to a facility without programs or jobs he could participate in, she wrote a letter to the commissioner. She hired a private investigator to track down a witness in Brian’s case, who had lied to investigators early on. The witness eventually admitted to lying, and recanted her story on the record, spurring an appeal that is still pending.
In 2018, she formed Supporting Our Loved Ones Group, to advocate for issues related to families with members in prison. She spoke regularly with the media about the hidden everyday issues that dominate the lives of families of incarcerated people — the high cost of phone calls, the vagaries of adding money to commissary accounts, letters that must be photocopied before delivery, pandemic visiting restrictions. She talks to lawmakers and lawyers and advocates and reporters. Attorneys describe her as relentless.
“Probably every single official in the Department of Corrections has gotten an email from me about something,” she says with a laugh.
Angela also got involved with a national campaign to reappraise life sentences given to juvenile defendants, the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, and has lobbied for “Second Look” legislation that would give youths sentenced to life imprisonment or close to it a chance at release.
Being with Brian, she said, made her feel like she had to speak up because he could not.
Brian said he also felt something change in his life with Angela’s energy behind him. He had been hesitant to talk — or even think — about getting out of prison. He’d made the best of his incarcerated life by excelling in his dog training programs and institution jobs and maintaining close relationships with a group of men he considered family, other juveniles he’d been locked up with since they were teenagers.
A few of those men were now getting out, and for the first time he allowed himself to wonder if he too might see a life outside the walls.
“Angela fights for me like no one ever has,” he said.
“We have transformed each other,” is how Angela puts it.
The biggest fight, and Brian’s best chance at release, is now unfolding: Last year, the Alaska Court of Appeals found that juvenile defendants should be sentenced under criteria that take into account youth, vulnerability and prospects for rehabilitation.
The ruling is part of a larger national reappraisal of stiff sentences for youthful offenders in the 1980s and 1990s.
The ACLU of Alaska has taken up Brian’s case, arguing his sentence is unconstitutional and should be reexamined because it was handed down “without consideration of the factors that distinguish juveniles from adults.”
The case is still pending. Angela and Brian don’t want to risk any complications by talking about it.
Back in the visiting room at Wildwood, the voice of a correctional officer on the intercom broke the room’s hushed conversation. The woman who’d flown from Juneau and her boyfriend had turned their chairs toward each other, and their knees were touching. They were breaking the rules.
“Turn your chairs away, please” the intercom droned.
When visitation was over, Brian and Angela embraced again, five seconds, and said goodbye. Each started the process of moving through a series of locked doors — her exiting to the dark night, a highway framed with Pentecostal churches and cannabis shops, and him to his cell.
Potlatch prom pose
The next morning dawned with the wreckage of a windstorm all over the roads of Kenai. It was potlatch day, one of the most anticipated visiting days of the year for families at Wildwood. The event, organized by inmates, features dance performances, a raffle of art made in the hobby shop and a rare opportunity for hours of casual, open-ended visiting. It was the first time a potlatch had been held since 2019.
Wildwood’s gymnasium had been gussied up as much as a prison gym can be. Carpets had been rolled out on the floor, and white plastic tables surrounded by orange chairs were placed around the room like a wedding reception. Brian was the event emcee, as well as a performer in an Inupiaq dance group — not Inupiaq himself, but invited to join all the same.
Afterward, Brian and Angela sat at a table with their friend Philip Wilson and his brother, who was visiting. Someone brought a plate of cherry Danish pastries made by another friend, a baker in Wildwood’s kitchen.
Angela’s a rare one, Wilson said, a “unicorn.” There aren’t many women who are level-headed and mature and willing to stick with a man serving a lot of time, he said.
“She’s made us all better,” he said.
They sat for hours under the fluorescent lights, chatting over cans of Pepsi and club crackers with reindeer sausage. For a minute it was possible to almost forget where they were, the long sorry litany of circumstances that brought them to this particular gymnasium on the outskirts of Kenai. This is why families fly from thousands of miles away for a chance to visit for the potlatch, Angela said: It’s a taste of normalcy in a place that lacks any.
At the event, inmates could pose for photos with their visiting loved ones against a paper backdrop, like a prom photo.
Brian would be able to keep the photo in his cell, a cherished object. Angela has a scrapbook too, at home in Arizona, containing more than a decade of visitation photos. She pulls it out during what she calls her “the dark nights of the soul,” when she’s wondering about her own decisions, and the future.
Angela says she knows people won’t understand why she married both a man and the criminal justice system, why she endures and why she continues to hope that her husband will be released someday. It’s simple, she says: She loves the man.
It was time for Angela and Brian to take their keepsake photo. They weren’t allowed to wrap an arm around each other, so they stood awkwardly, side by side, not quite touching, staying within the rules.
“I don’t want to jeopardize anything,” Angela said. “I want those five seconds.”
