A rare moment of grace broke through the concrete bars of Louisiana State Penitentiary (also called “Angola”) this month, when guards and organizers hosted the facility’s first-ever “father-daughter dance,” giving incarcerated fathers and their daughters a night of music, tears, and reconnection.

Nearly 30 inmates, selected for good behavior, donned tuxedos with pink boutonnieres and waited as daughters, some dressed in formal gowns, were led into the prison’s Bible college transformed into a makeshift dance hall. Fathers and daughters embraced under string lights and drapes, as Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” played, a song created by Wonder originally for his own daughter.

For many, it was a moment decades in the making.

One of those men, serving time for armed robbery, said the re

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