About the Film

Justin Singleton has been serving life without parole at the Louisiana State Penitentiary – known as Angola, America’s largest and most notorious maximum-security prison – since he was 22 years old. While incarcerated, he has become an inmate pastor and a vocational mentor in Angola’s pioneering re-entry program, teaching young non-violent offenders valuable trade skills while guiding them away from the paths that could lead them back to prison. 

Through this program, Justin forms a strong bond with Derek Moss, a non-violent repeat offender who is two years from release. For Derek, whose own father is serving 25 years to life in prison, Justin becomes a father figure, passing on the wisdom that might help another man remain free, while he himself is condemned to die in prison.

But when Derek returns home, he discovers that he cannot escape his past. The challenges of rebuilding relationships, finding stability, and resisting old patterns test everything Justin has tried to impart. Meanwhile, inside Angola, Justin’s story continues through Kelly Garrett, his fiancée, who is working tirelessly on his behalf in hopes of one day seeing him set free. Through her, we witness how love and commitment can endure in a place designed to keep people apart. 

Filmed over seven years with rare access inside America’s largest maximum-security prison, Leaving Angola is a story about finding family and uncovering one’s true potential in an unlikely place – about hope in a place once designed to extinguish it – and about the possibilities and limits of change in the state with the highest rate of incarceration per capita in America. 

Film Details