Can a place as beautiful as this have been a "prison"? It's true........prison for lepers. Hawaii. "For millennia, a diagnosis of leprosy meant a life sentence of social isolation. People afflicted with the condition now known as Hansen’s disease—a bacterial infection that ravages the skin and nerves and can cause painful deformities—were typically ripped from their families, showered with prejudice and cruelly exiled into life-long quarantine. In the United States, patients were confined to a handful of remote settlements, where over time, a crude existence evolved into one with small touchstones of normalcy. But patients were consistently deprived of fundamental civil liberties: to work, to move freely and see loved ones, to vote, to raise families of their own. Some who bore children had their babies forcibly removed. By the 1940s, after a cure emerged for the condition—and science made clear that most of the population had a natural immunity to it—other countries began to abolish compulsory isolation policies. But in the U.S., even as leprosy patients' health and conditions improved, old stigmas, fear of contagion and outdated laws kept many confined for decades longer." "Although leprosy, or Hansen's Disease, was never an epidemic in The United States, cases of leprosy have been reported in Louisiana as early as the 18th century. The first leprosarium in the continental United States existed in Carville, Louisiana from 1894-1999 and Baton Rouge, Louisiana is the home of the only institution in the United States that is exclusively devoted to leprosy consulting, research, and training. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy_in_Louisiana Man With Leprosy Many were given new identities. Some were highly productive, given their circumstances. The popularized image of a leper-stricken individual depicting a loathsome being far outweighed the truthful portrayal...... Frank