WARDEN Burl Cain swats the bugs away from his face and lifts a plastic spoon above a styrofoam box of salmon and macaroni cheese.

“Wait!” he commands, bringing the table to silence.

“First we gotta say grace: Oh Lord, please help all the poor people in America, and all the poor folk here in New Orleans, and please forgive us all our sins, Amen.”

With that, the first proper meal of an 18-hour shift begins. The stench of death and human waste is ignored.

Warden Cain, a big, squat man with big steel-framed glasses, is America’s most controversial prison chief.

At Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, the 63-year-old born-again Christian has held the hand of every Death Row inmate he has executed — and he has executed many.

He says he turned to Christ after he felt the first man’s soul go to Hell. Now, draped in an XXL black T-shirt, black trousers and black boots, Warden Cain has been sent to a different kind of hell — downtown New Orleans — and told to restore law and order.

The result is the “Greyhound Correctional Centre”, a dirty Greyhound bus and Amtrak train terminal that has been converted into a temporary jail.

It is surrounded by a defensive circle of Department of Corrections tactical teams, FBI agents, National Guardsmen and US Army soldiers with flak jackets and rifles.

Since Sunday the Greyhound Centre has taken in 220 alleged looters, snipers, rapists and burglars, as well as several petty criminals, 176 of whom have already been transferred to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Centre in nearby St Gabriel.

“When the jails in the parishes of Orleans and Jefferson flooded, the Department of Corrections and the Attorney-General’s office realised they had to do something,” Warden Cain says. The immediate response was to evacuate the 8,000 prisoners displaced by the flooding, a move that infuriated civilians stranded in the Superdome, who could see inmates being carried to safety on rafts, then bussed out of the disaster area. About 2,000 prisoners were sent 120 miles north to Angola.

The prisoners have not yet been able to make phone calls to check whether relatives are alive. Regardless, conditions at Angola are said to be difficult, but stable.

That is still not the case in New Orleans. “The state realised we couldn’t have law and order in New Orleans unless we had a jail,” says Warden Cain. “So I was assigned to manage it. Now we’ve got the facilities here to book ’em, fingerprint ’em and put their sorry asses in jail.”

The only remaining problem is money: the justice system in Louisiana is funded from the bottom up, through parking fines and other fees collected mainly in the city of New Orleans. And now, with the city empty, the income is quickly disappearing.

After dinner, Special Agent Roland Ladreyt, a criminal investigator for the state of Louisiana’s Attorney-General’s office, gives The Times a tour of the Greyhound centre. The vast Amtrak ticketing, waiting and restaurant area now resembles a prisoner-of-war camp, with cordons and plastic chairs surrounding makeshift desks where fingerprints are taken.

Finally, he takes The Times to the “temporary holding facility”, which turns out to be the platform of the train station. It has been turned into a row of 16 sweltering cells, each with its own portable lavatory and marked according to the sex of the inmates and severity of their crimes.

Prisoners, mostly black, but with some Latinos and sunburned whites, stand in groups or lie on the concrete floor. The cells marked “felony” are full; the cells marked “misdemeanour” have only one prisoner — a glum, dreadlocked white rasta. Opposite is a huge, grunting Amtrak locomotive that is used to generate electricity for the prison.

Agent Ladreyt says he does not have the authority to allow interviews with the prisoners. “Not that you’d hear any happy stories,” he says.

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