West Feliciana Parish, Angola, Louisiana

Name: Angola Prison (The Louisiana State Penitentiary)

Population: 5,100 people

Founded: 1880

• Angola prison farm came to being in 1880. The state awarded the lease of Louisiana State Penitentiary and all its convicts to a former Confederate Army officer, Samuel L. James. He bought several plantations across Louisiana. Inmates were contained in the old slave quarters and worked on his prison farms. Most of those he took into custody were Black inmates and were subleased to landowners to replace their emancipated slaves. The inhumane conditions at James’s prison plantations caused a constitutional ban on convict leasing in 1898. (Tucker)

Who owns it and general history: 

• Louisiana State Corrections owns it

• At the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, most of the inmates are in for life without the possibility of parole, offering education as car mechanics or engineers. None of this is available in parish jails. “Ironically, in Louisiana, rehabilitation is for people who will never get out,” said Dana Kaplan, director of the not-for-profit law office Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. (Maxime)

• Sheriffs possess great power in the parishes, so they can usually build a prison without anyone challenging them. Sheriffs generally do not need to ask a city or town for their opinion on creating a new prison or jail. Cindy Chang is a writer for The Times-Picayune in Louisiana. She told NPR news, “The big thing is that in Louisiana, over half of the state inmates are housed in local prisons, which sheriffs usually run. And what we tend to think of as county jails are for people who are awaiting trial, can’t make bail, or weren't allowed to have bail, so they're just waiting for their court date. In Louisiana, the system has grown so that sheriffs house many inmates serving state sentences. And the reason the sheriffs are willing to do that is that they get money in return for doing that.” In the 1990s, the prisons in Louisiana became overcrowded. The state offered incentives to open their prisons and would pay $25 a day per inmate. The Louisiana ACLU chapter says, “powerful lobbies in support of long prison terms, and financial motive to reduce spending per inmate to achieve maximum profit have become the foundation of prisons in Louisiana.” (ACLU Louisiana)

• The mandatory minimum sentence for second-degree murder in Louisiana is life without parole. A Louisiana citizen can be sentenced to up to 10 years for minor infractions like writing a bounced check. In simple terms, incarceration doesn’t match the crime and enforces labor while incarcerated, particularly in Louisiana. These “tough on crime” rulings are modern-day Jim Crow laws and Black codes used in the Reconstruction era.

• In 2017, Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator opposed the state’s Justice Reinvestment Package, which could reduce the prison population in Louisiana by as much as 10 percent while cutting over $260 million in government spending by releasing nonviolent offenders. His remarks of self-interest went viral on the internet. One specific quote shocked the country, “In addition to the bad ones … they’re releasing some good ones that we use every day to wash cars, to change the oil in the cars, to cook in the kitchen, to do all that where we save money,” he went on. “Well, they’re going to let them out ― the ones that we use in work release programs.” (Schoenfeld)

Land History:

• Generations of genocide have seeped into the earth which the Angola prison farm now occupies. The French initially colonized Louisiana during the 18th century and, due to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, was admitted to the union in 1812. Several native tribes inhabited the Louisiana region, but the Houma people lived in what is now known as “West Feliciana Parish.” The Houma tribe is still not recognized as a tribe by the U.S. Department of Interior.

*The Equal Justice Initiative provides the following information on the massacres during the reconstructionist era in Louisiana:

• Colfax, Louisiana

On April 13, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, hundreds of white men clashed with freedmen at the Grant Parish courthouse. Three white men and nearly 150 Black people were killed.

Black supporters of gubernatorial candidate William Kellogg, whom a federal judge had declared the winner of the 1872 election, surrounded the courthouse in Colfax to protect it from being overtaken by supporters of John McEnery, Kellogg’s white supremacist opponent who claimed victory.

More than 300 armed white men attacked the 60 Black Kellogg supporters. When a cannon was aimed at the courthouse, some defenders fled; others surrendered after it was set on fire, but the mob shot the unarmed men as they fled.

• New Orleans, Louisiana, July 1866

White mobs attacked advocates marching for Black voting rights, killing an estimated 33 Black people in July 1866.

• Caddo Parish, Louisiana, October 1868

At least 53 Black people are killed by white mobs wielding racial violence to suppress the Black vote.

• In New Orleans, Louisiana, October 1868

White mob attacks and kills 14 Black men on Canal Street.

• St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, October 1868

White mobs attack the Black community to discourage voting, killing at least 35 Black people.

• Algiers, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 1868

White mobs used violence to suppress the Black vote, killing at least seven Black people.

• Bossier Parish, Louisiana, October 1868

White mobs terrorize the Black community in widespread attacks leading up to election day, killing at least 162 Black people.

• New Orleans, Louisiana, September 1874

Three days of violence left 11 dead after the White League terrorist organization attempted to overthrow Louisiana’s Reconstruction government in the so-called Battle of Liberty Place.

• East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1875-1876

White mobs lynched at least 30 Black people in racialized attacks over several months.

• West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, May 1876

White mobs lynch at least 17 Black people in a violent effort to suppress the Black vote.

(Equal Justice Initiative, “Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876” (2020)

Unusual Facts: 

• The longest Civil Rights march happened in Louisiana. The protest was a 105-mile march from Bogalusa to Baton Rouge, LA. The march, known as the Bogalusa Civil Rights March, took place in 1967, four years after the March on Washington. Started by activist A.Z. Young, the 10-day march was a protest against the general treatment of Black Americans, following years of harassment by the KKK in Louisiana.(Asmelash)
  

• Little Union Baptist Church, in Shreveport (outside of New Orleans), is the last place Martin Luther King Jr. spoke publicly before he was killed in 1968.

• The Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the South,” is the largest maximum-security prison in the country.

• The prison grounds occupy a 28-square-mile area. For perspective, Manhattan is 22.8 square miles.

• The prison offers tours, has a restaurant, runs a rodeo that prisoners perform in, and a gift shop, according to The Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections website: “Louisiana State Penitentiary is the state's oldest and only maximum-security prison and, as such, a much sought after tourist destination for school groups, churches, and criminal justice professionals. A regular tour consists of visiting the museum, the historic Red Hat, a dormitory (depending on availability), and the lethal injection table. Lunch is available for a fee at the Big House Cafe’. For more information, please contact the LSP Museum at 225-655-2592.

For more information about LSP’s unique events, visit the Angola Museum website or the Angola Rodeo website”

• Melissa Schrift wrote about the rodeo and its history in The Angola Prison Rodeo: Inmate Cowboys and Institutional Tourism describes the rodeo grounds, “the outer entrance of the prison features a U.S. flag as well as a mammoth, inmate-painted mural of an eagle.” The rodeo starts with a prayer. After the prayer, the rodeo begins with the Angola Rough Riders, incarcerated men, whose main job on the farm is to handle livestock, “each riding a horse and holding one of three flags: the U.S. Louisiana state flag, and the Confederate flag. Only two Confederate flags were displayed, during rodeos the author attended and says, “at least one of the Confederate flags was always carried by a Black inmate.” (Schrift)

• Notorious robbery duo Bonnie and Clyde were shot to death by officers in an ambush near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana, on May 23, 1934. (FBI)