Viewpoint: Angola Will Remain a Slave Plantation

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as “Angola,” is a sprawling 18,000 acre-complex that confines more than 6,000 inmates—more than 4,000 of whom are serving life sentences without parole and the rest serving long term sentences that are virtual life sentences.

The prison sits in a land bowl surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River and on the reaming side by the rugged, often impenetrable Tunica Hills. 

It is said that the bones of the hundreds of slave inmates who died building the levee system protecting the land bowl from the mighty river and whose bodies were left in the mud where they dropped can be heard whispering in the sweaty darkness that engulfs the prison fields at night.

Angola has been a slave plantation since its inception in the 1830s. It was named after the former Portuguese nation of Angola, located on the west coast of Southern Africa, from which thousands of Africans were slave-shipped around the world with hundreds ending up in the new state of Louisiana. Many of the ancestors of those slaves had actually arrived in the Louisiana territory as early 1722.

While Angola was still a thriving slave plantation, Louisiana first prison was established in 1835 in Baton Rouge. It was known as “The Walls” under the administration of Gov. Andre Bienvenu Roman. 

By the time Alexandre Mouton became the state’s 11th governor in 1843, the state coffers were strapped for cash. 

Born on a slave plantation in 1804, Mouton understood the profits that could be made from slave labor. As a way to reduce state expenditures and avoid raising taxes, Mouton in 1844 established the “convict lease system” that allowed private contractors to use the “free labor “of the inmates in The Walls (most of whom were slaves or former slaves) in exchange for nominal fees to the state. It became a very corrupt and lucrative practice for the state’s political system.

The racist that he was, Mouton led Louisiana’s succession from the Union in 1861 and was a devout member of the slave-holding Confederacy during the Civil War.

Five years after the Civil War, and with the collapse of its economy, the State of Louisiana awarded its convict-lease system in 1870 to a former Confederate major named Samuel Lawrence James. James was a ruthless human profiteer. He became part of what Wall Street Journal journalist David Blackmon called in his book “Slavery By Another Name” the “Age of Neoslavery.” It was an age when “freed” black men were hauled off into Southern prison confinement for little or no reason at all. 

To Major James, it was an “age of profit.”

The year before James gained control of Louisiana’s convict lease system, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified to the U.S. Constitution just eight months after the Civil War. The amendment abolished slavery “except as punishment for crime.” 

The 13th Amendment gave Major James a constitutional license to re-impose slavery on the Angola slave plantation through the convict lease system. In effect, the convict lease system provided the Confederate major with the same economic benefits as slavery. He even housed the black convicts in the plantation’s former slave quarters.

During his first ten years with the convict lease, the Major accumulated enough wealth to purchase the slave plantation in 1880. 

For the next three decades, James ruled over a brutal convict work system that left untold hundreds dead and buried in unmarked graves in the plantation’s rich soil. Some died from illness, others from the rigors of forced slave labor while others were either beaten or gunned down by James’ prison guards.

Major James’ convict lease system was so profitable that the State of Louisiana purchased the plantation from him in 1901. The State then initiated its own profitable slave-styled penal enterprise, creating its brutal “convict guard” system in 1917 that allowed “trusted” inmates to carry guns to guard and clubs to beat inmates. 

Even that system reflected the “age of neoslavery” as armed black convict guards could watch over black inmates but could not watch over white inmates while armed white convict guards could watch over black inmates.

That convict guard system, a practice actually as brutal as slavery, ruled over the prison plantation for 55 years before it was effectively abolished in 1972. It was the reputation of the convict guard system that made the term “Angola Prison” synonymous throughout Louisiana’s free and penal cultures with torture, violence, corruption, and unimaginable human abuse, Media outlets at various times referred to Angola as the “worst prison in the nation” or “the bloodiest prison in the South.”

The association between inmates and convict guards with slavery became natural as the State of Louisiana packed thousands of black inmates, as it continues to do to this very day, into the always overcrowded prison plantation. 

Forced inmate labor became, and remains, a brutal relic of the plantation’s original slave practice—now a state-owned prison plantation that continues to exploit forced inmate labor as a corrupt means to line the pockets of prison managers and dirty politicians, including governors like the late Edwin Edwards.

Roughly 75 percent of the inmate population at Angola today is black while the state’s black population is slightly more than 30 percent. The sprawling “prison plantation,” as it is fondly called by locals, is still managed as a modern day slave plantation just as it was in the mid- 1800s.

Louisiana voters had a chance on November 8, 2022 to end the incestuous relationship between slavery and forced convicted labor at Angola. They chose not to do, rejecting a constitutional amendment that would have said “slavery and involuntary servitude” are prohibited in the state’s constitution. 

That same day voters in Alabama, Tennessee, Oregon and Vermont approved similar constitutional measures.

Louisiana has a love affair with racism, although it is one of the most racially diverse states in the country. The state’s Twitter feeds show the state, along with Maryland and West Virginia, to be the most racist states in the nation. The state also has the 7th least racial equality in the nation.

Against this racial backdrop, the dark racist shadow of Major Samuel Lawrence James still hangs over the modern-day Angola prison/slave plantation and the bones of those black souls buried deep in the red clay of the Mississippi levees still moan at night.

I spent 20 years of my four-decade confinement in the Louisiana prison system on that plantation—and the bones of that past still visit my sleep at night. I awaken forever thankful to have survived its rigors, but knowing that the screams of men being burned alive in their cells, the sight of men being decapitated in their sleep, and the sounds of guards kicking and stomping inmates into unconsciousness will never allow me to know true peace in sleep.

Billy Sinclair spent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system, six of which were on death row. He is a published author, an award-winning journalist (a George Polk Award recipient), and the co-host with his wife Jodie of the criminal justice podcast, “Justice Delayed.”