For Leslie Harris, most of his daughter’s milestones have passed without him. Serving a decades-long sentence for armed robbery in Louisiana, Harris knows he will likely miss her prom, graduation, and possibly even her wedding. But for one night this month, inside Louisiana’s largest maximum-security prison, he was able to create a moment of his own.
Harris reunited with his 17-year-old daughter at the prison’s first-ever father-daughter dance, an event that has since circulated widely on social media, according to reporting by The Associated Press. Wearing a custom tuxedo and holding a bouquet of roses, Harris embraced his daughter as Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” played in a room decorated with pink drapery and flower petals.
“Seeing her in a dress, crying and running to me just broke me down,” said Harris, who has nine years remaining on his sentence, in a phone interview from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. “It made me think of all the years I missed out on in her life.”
The event took place at the rural prison complex in Angola, which houses more than 6,300 incarcerated people, including dozens on death row. It joins a small but growing number of similar programs across the country, including one in Washington, D.C., featured in the 2024 Netflix documentary “Daughters,” according to the Associated Press.
Assistant Warden Anne-Marie Easley told the Associated Press she hopes the dance can offer something rare in a place where many men are serving life or decades-long sentences: hope. For some fathers, it was their first time seeing their daughters in months or even years. For others, it was a chance to be seen not as inmates, but simply as dads.
Nearly 30 incarcerated men were selected to participate based on good behavior and other factors. Videos from the event show fathers in tuxedos with pink boutonnieres breaking down as their daughters ran toward them in sparkly dresses. The reunions took place on a pink carpet laid inside the prison’s Bible college, transformed for the evening into a dance floor.
The event was organized by God Behind Bars, a nonprofit that hosts religious services and reunification programs in prisons nationwide. In videos shared ahead of the dance, some men spoke about wanting to apologize for missed years, while others described the night as the most meaningful visit they had experienced while incarcerated.
For Harris, the most powerful moment came during a slow dance to “Butterfly Kisses,” a song about a father’s unconditional love. He said it brought back memories from before his incarceration, when his daughter was still a toddler. Before the night ended, he gave her a Bible with passages he had highlighted.
“That’s really the heart of it at the end of the day,” said Jake Bodine, founder of God Behind Bars. “Show these individuals who is counting on them and once they realize the weight of that, they will hold themselves accountable for change.”
