Abstract
Extending the burgeoning body of work on the penal tourism industry, this project investigates how slavery is forgotten and remembered at a US plantation prison. Through a case study of Angola, I explore if and how the prison’s plantation history is acknowledged at the prison rodeo and arts and crafts festival, commemorated in museum exhibits, and discussed in prisoner writings. My analysis reveals the contested nature of Angola’s history and the place of slavery (and racial inequality more generally) in it. In an act of racial violence, the administration tells a story of progress that disregards slavery along with its parallels to the present. On the other hand, some prisoners resist this narrative and evoke memories of slavery in protest of their current circumstances. I conclude with a discussion of what this struggle over Angola’s, and the nation’s, history might mean for the prospect of penal reform.
The reciprocal relationship between penality and “culture” has received much attention from scholars in recent years. Whether critically interrogating what goes on at penal history museums (e.g. Brown, 2009; Fiander et al., 2015; Shearing and Kempa, 2004; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Walby and Piché, 2011, 2015; Welch, 2012, 2013), analyzing films, television shows, and prints (e.g. Brown, 2009; Carrabine, 2011), or discussing the development of the guillotine and the electric chair (Smith, 2008), these scholars have outlined the ways in which penal institutions, practices, and artifacts communicate meaning, shape values, and are influenced by and reflective of broader cultural beliefs, customs, and ways of thinking. This article extends this body of work by investigating how slavery is both forgotten and remembered at an operational plantation prison. In a case study of the Louisiana State Penitentiary (known popularly as Angola)—where a subset of the mostly black prisoner population 1 continues to “work” land that was once a series of slave plantations—I explore if and how Angola’s plantation history and the connections between slavery and imprisonment are acknowledged at the prison rodeo and arts and crafts festival, commemorated in museum exhibits, and discussed in prisoner writings.
I find that the past is almost as inescapable at Angola as it is unsettled. When individuals visit the prison—thousands go each year for the rodeo and arts and crafts festival as well as to visit the Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum, located just outside the prison’s front gates—they are presented with a narrative of positive transformation. The story they are told goes something like this: while Angola was once the “bloodiest prison in the nation” (see Rideau, 1993: 19) in need of sweeping reform, today, because it is both relatively safe and home to numerous progressive programs and initiatives, it serves as a model for prisons across the country. Angola’s plantation history—and thus, the penitentiary’s link to slavery—is almost entirely absent from this “official” narrative. A small number of prisoners also mobilize the past in order to understand and comment on the present. But they do so in a very different way, claiming in their writings that their experiences at Angola are analogous to those of enslaved individuals in the antebellum era. I argue that the prison administration disregarding slavery and its parallels to the present is an example of what Ward (2015) calls “race crime” and this should alert us to the various ways in which racial power continues to operate in the US criminal justice system (see Murakawa and Beckett, 2010). However, it is also important to recognize prisoners’ efforts to resist this narrative. Incorporating prisoners’ writings into the analysis highlights their ability to contribute to our understanding of prison life as well as the contested nature of Angola’s history and the place of slavery (and racial inequality and racial violence more generally) in it. As such, this article makes both theoretical and methodological contributions to the growing body of work on the penal tourism industry in the USA. I conclude with a discussion of what this struggle over Angola’s, and the nation’s, history might mean for the prospect of penal reform.
Penal tourism, museums, and slavery
This article is grounded in the growing body of work exploring the reciprocal relationship between penality and “culture” (e.g. Brown, 2009; Carrabine, 2011; Garland, 1990, 2001, 2006, 2010; Melossi, 2001; Smith, 2008; Walby and Piché, 2011, 2015; Welch, 2012, 2013). Collectively, scholars in this subfield have redirected our focus to the ways in which punishment is influenced by broader cultural arrangements, relationships, and trends and how penal practices, representations, and discourses communicate meanings and help shape our ideas, not only about crime, deviance, and punishment, but also about justice, morality, pain, progress, class, gender, race, and much more.
Most relevant for the current project is the literature on the penal tourism industry, and penal history museums more specifically (e.g. Bruggeman, 2012; Fiander et al., 2015; Shearing and Kempa, 2004; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Walby and Piché, 2011, 2015; Welch, 2012, 2013). Scholars who have visited these penal history museums report several key findings. First, museum displays typically focus on the harsh punishment practices of the past and ignore parallels or linkages to the present penal system; the story being told is often one centered around reform, progress, and hope (Fiander et al., 2015; Shearing and Kempa, 2004; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Walby and Piché, 2011, 2015; Welch, 2012, 2013). It follows from this that penal history museums are selective in what they present and usually avoid potentially sensitive topics (Fiander et al., 2015; Welch, 2012). Moreover, historical narratives and representations are fluid, reflecting the priorities, and helping us make sense, of the present (Strange and Kempa, 2003; Walby and Piché, 2011). Scholars (Fiander et al., 2015; Shearing and Kempa, 2004; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Walby and Piché, 2011) have also suggested that numerous, sometimes contradictory representations of the past can exist simultaneously—there is not always one coherent narrative about the past being chronicled—and the public may interpret the display(s) in different ways. Other scholars (Welch, 2012) have highlighted the resistance efforts of those individuals and groups forgotten or overlooked in the state’s narrative. Still others (Fiander et al., 2015; Strange and Kempa, 2003) have drawn attention to sites that encourage visitors to question dominant penal strategies, approaches, and/or rationales.
Given the ways that prisons and punishment pervade US (popular) culture as well as the sheer scale of imprisonment in the country, it is surprising how little consideration scholars have given to its penal tourism industry (see Brown, 2009; Bruggeman, 2012; Strange and Kempa, 2003 for exceptions). What is even more surprising is the lack of attention devoted to the ways in which racialized groups and the legacy of slavery are represented in the USA’s penal tourism industry, when the colonial elements of prison tourism have been discussed in the Canadian, South African, and Australian contexts (see Fiander et al., 2015; Shearing and Kempa, 2004; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Walby and Piché, 2015; Welch, 2012) and given, as Horton and Horton (2006: x) argue, slavery “burdens all of American history”.
Examining if and how the USA’s history of slavery and racial inequality is acknowledged and represented in the nation’s penal tourism industry is important given claims of a “post-racial” or “color-blind” USA (see Murakawa and Beckett, 2010). As Winant (2015) argues, these proclamations of colorblindness obscure the continued existence of racial inequality and violence. Thus, today we find ourselves in an era of “color-blind racism”, where race is presumably no longer a consideration anywhere, particularly in criminal justice policy and practice, but where black Americans remain disproportionately surveilled, policed, prosecuted, and imprisoned, and where skin color justifies this discriminatory treatment (Alexander, 2010; Brewer and Heitzeg, 2008: 633). Mass incarceration plays a key role in the reproduction of racial inequality in the USA, enabling the continued control, marginalization, and discrimination of black Americans (see, for example, Alexander, 2010; Brewer and Heitzeg, 2008; Frampton et al., 2008; Wacquant, 2000, 2001; Weatherspoon, 2007). It is a, and perhaps the primary, “race-making” institution in the USA, helping distinguish “us” from “them” (see, for example, Alexander, 2010; Frampton et al., 2008; Goodman, 2008; Wacquant, 2001, 2002). Investigating how Angola’s plantation history is acknowledged and represented by prison officials takes seriously the various, oftentimes subtle, ways that racism continues to operate in the criminal justice system (see Murakawa and Beckett, 2010; Ward, 2015). In fact, in examining the penal tourism industry this project encourages us to broaden our ideas about the different forms that state “race crime” take (Ward, 2015).
While penologists have yet to consider how the penal tourism industry represents or deals with slavery, scholars from other disciplines have explored how slavery is talked about and memorialized at slave plantation tourist sites across the Southern United States (e.g. Buzinde and Santos, 2008, 2009; Eichstedt and Small, 2002; Modlin, 2008). A quick review of this literature provides a better idea of what we might expect at Angola. Plantation museums are clearly not “apolitical” spaces, observe Buzinde and Santos (2008, 2009: 439), but rather places where visitors are encouraged to recall a particular version of a controversial, contested past, a version that aligns with, reinforces, and extols dominant values. In short, visitors to these sites are taught about life (or a romanticized/idealized notion of it) during slavery (Buzinde and Santos, 2008, 2009; Modlin, 2008). At the Hampton Plantation in South Carolina, for instance, the emphasis is on the economic prosperity brought about as a result of the resourcefulness and cleverness of the white planters; the contributions of, and brutality directed against, the enslaved population are disregarded (Buzinde and Santos, 2008). Similarly, docent-led tours at plantation museum sites in North Carolina focus on the original owners, architecture, and furnishings more than they do slavery (Modlin, 2008). On the occasions when slavery is mentioned, docents often claim that slavery did not happen at that particular site, or that the practice of enslaving individuals was somehow different—benevolent or benign—at that specific plantation (Modlin, 2008).
In an extensive study, Eichstedt and Small (2002) examine the rhetorics used at 122 plantation museums in Virginia, Louisiana, and Georgia. They find that plantation tourist sites, on the whole, present the antebellum South as “genteel, honorable, and romantic” (Eichstedt and Small, 2002: 258). While a small number incorporated discussions of slavery in their tours or presented information about slavery at separate displays or tours, the majority either ignored or minimised it in a practice the authors refer to as “symbolic annihilation” (Eichstedt and Small, 2002: 10). Eichstedt and Small (2002: 258) also toured 20 sites designed to challenge the dominant narrative and tell the stories of African-Americans, but conclude that the approach taken by “mainstream” plantation museums exposes and reproduces a system of discrimination and subjugation based on race. These findings reveal the propensity for ignoring or forgetting a portion of US history that is upsetting and objectionable, in what some scholars have called “social/collective amnesia” (Timothy and Boyd, 2006: 3).
For those interested in how the USA penal tourism industry deals with slavery, Angola is the logical choice for a case study. For one, the Deep South, as Angolite staffer Douglas Dennis (1996d: 30) writes, “has always set the tone, practice and legal framework of sanctioned racial injustice in America”. Moreover, the land on which the Louisiana State Penitentiary now sits was at one point in time a group of plantations, home to slaves “who cut sugar cane and picked cotton for the master” (Nelson, 1995: 20, 2001). At contemporary Angola some prisoners—the vast majority of whom are black—continue to “work five eight-hour days a week in the fields, much of that time tending crops or scraping sides of ditches with hoes or mowing down Johnson grass with swing blades” (Nelson, 1998: 20). In other words, there are clear parallels between the past (slavery) and the present (racialized prisoners participating in forced labor). In what follows, I explore how actors at Angola navigate its history, including whether and how slavery is remembered or commemorated by administrators as well as prisoners, and if memories of slavery shape prisoners’ understandings of their incarceration today.
Data and methods
I attended the Angola Prison Rodeo on 27 April 2014 and 5 October 2014, spending approximately six to seven hours at the prison each time observing interactions among prisoners and between prisoners and attendees, browsing for hobbycrafts, and watching the rodeo events. I also purchased the October edition of the Rodeo Souvenir Program for $5. On 4 October 2014 I visited the Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum and spent about one to two hours there viewing the exhibits and taking photographs of the items on display. In addition, I picked up a copy of The Angola Story—a small pamphlet produced by officials that provides an overview of the prison’s operations, describes Angola’s programs and initiatives, and documents its history—from the museum’s gift shop. The purpose of these trips was to investigate how prison officials documented and commemorated the prison’s history, talked about its current operations, and presented Angola to visitors.
Data for this project are also drawn from issues of The Angolite, an uncensored prison newsmagazine produced by prisoners at Angola. I contacted the current editor of The Angolite and requested copies of every available issue up until 2001 2 —he sent 95 issues from 1979–2001. During the October 2014 trip to Louisiana I acquired six additional issues of The Angolite (from the years 2011–2014).
While The Angolite’s small staff produces much of its content, contributions from outside groups such as The Sentencing Project are also accepted. Every issue contains news briefs, updates on current criminal justice developments across the USA, an investigative feature or features that cover a range of topics, as well as two sections set aside for original writings—normally letters and poetry—submitted by readers (mostly prisoners at Angola). Prisoners’ individual submissions must be of general relevance (e.g. no personal appeals for penpals). To be accepted for publication, prisoners must also refrain from making personal attacks or unsubstantiated claims about their case and must avoid using profane language.
It is important to acknowledge that The Angolite’s limited space, its ban on profane language, as well as the literacy levels of the prisoners, all have the potential to modify or hinder the ability of prisoners to express their views. Similarly, the writings published in each issue of The Angolite are unlikely to be representative of those incarcerated at Angola, or of prisoners more generally. What these writings can show us, however, is what matters to these men on a daily basis, including how they make sense of their incarceration as well as whether, and how, they think about Angola’s racial history.
I take this approach because I believe it is important to investigate not just “official” discourse about slavery and historical racial discrimination—museum exhibits, state-produced documents, and the like—but also how prisoners make sense of these accounts and create narratives of their own. In this case, juxtaposing the different versions of Angola’s history recognizes prisoners’ capacity to contribute to scholarly debates and to the public’s understanding of prison life (see Bosworth et al., 2005; Gaucher, 1988; Piché et al., 2014).
This project extends the growing body of literature exploring the reciprocal relationship between penality and culture, and the work on the penal tourism industry in particular. Specifically, I explore how slavery and racial inequality are considered, represented, and commemorated at an operational plantation prison by both administrators and prisoners. While primarily concerned with Angola, the implications of this project extend beyond the prison’s front gates. Angola’s legacy of hard labor, appalling conditions, and brutality resembles other prisons in the region (see Oshinsky, 1996). As Dennis (1996b: 12) writes, “the Angola experience exemplifie[s] how Southern prisons evolved from cash-crop oriented plantations with little regard for basic humanity […] to bureaucratic human warehouses”.
Findings
Forgetting slavery and celebrating progress—Angola’s “official” history
At the 1998 opening of the Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum, Marianne Fisher-Giorlando, a member of the museum’s advisory committee, remarked: “we have to know where we were to know where we are now. And we need to measure where we are now to know where we are going […] That’s how we’re able to tell how far we’ve actually come” (Myers, 1998: 17). This sentiment applies to Angola, where the prison’s history of violence, overwork, and its harsh treatment of convicts very much informs how we are encouraged to view Angola’s present. In this section of the article I outline what I refer to as the “official” history of Angola, the one that is presented to the outside world.
After decades of brutality and backwardness, visitors to the prison or readers of The Angolite are often told, Angola is now a model penitentiary, both relatively safe and progressive. Referring to the ground on which the penitentiary now sits, Angolite staffer Lane Nelson (1999: 33) hints at the typical tale of transformation; he writes: “if the soil could speak, it would tell of the sweat and blood it has soaked up, of lives it has claimed, and of reform”. The plot of land known as Angola was acquired by Isaac Franklin and set up as a plantation in the 1840s (Foster, 1993). We know that it first began operations as a sawmill and woodyard, when more land was bought and sold, as well as who married whom and who inherited what, but details about the lives of the enslaved individuals that “worked” the land during this period are scarce (Foster, 1993; Nelson, 2001).
Slavery is almost entirely absent from the official documents designed to educate individuals about the history of Angola. The Rodeo Souvenir Program, The Angola Story pamphlet located inside the museum gift shop, and museum displays all begin their history of Angola not actually at Angola, but in Baton Rouge circa 1835, with the opening of “The Walls”, the first Louisiana State Penitentiary (Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2014; Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation, 2011). This, of course, mirrors the findings of scholars (see Buzinde and Santos, 2008; Eichstedt and Small, 2002; Modlin, 2008) who have toured plantation museums across the South only to discover that the horrors of slavery were either ignored or diminished by tour guides, and that the focus instead was on the possessions and achievements of the white plantation owners.
After the abolition of slavery, convicts worked the land under the supervision of Confederate Major Samuel James, who leased all of Louisiana’s prisoners from 1869 to 1901 3 (Dennis, 1997a). The Angola Story notes that James purchased the Angola plantation in 1880 and relocated some convicts there, housing them in the Tenant Farmer Quarters, which would later become Camp A (Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation, 2011). The prison in modern times, writes Angolite contributor Burk Foster (1993: 47), “survives as a lasting memorial” to both Major James and his accomplishments. The welfare of the “prisoner-slaves”—who worked on farms and plantations, cut timber, performed household servant duties, and helped construct railroads and Mississippi River levees—was disregarded throughout James’ rule (Foster, 1993; The Angolite, 1982c: 61). The focus was on turning a profit, and this meant that life was “harsh and often deadly” for these convicts (Butler, 1991: 70).
Louisiana purchased the land and put an end to the convict lease system at the beginning of the 20th century (Nelson, 1998, 1999). Angola became a state penitentiary (or penal farm or plantation prison). Yet, prisoners continued to work long, hard hours in the fields under the threat of physical violence (Nelson, 1995, 1998, 1999). In other words, this was a change “in name only” as James’ strategy informed the approach to corrections in Louisiana for decades after the end of the lease—predominantly black prisoners were still “crowded into large wooden buildings and work[ed] from sunup to sundown in sugar cane and cotton fields—rain or shine, 12–14 hours a day, seven days a week” (Foster, 1993; Nelson, 1995: 20). Profit, and not rehabilitation or reformation, remained the primary concern (Foster, 1993). Management controlled prisoners and maintained order through the use of beatings and floggings (Nelson, 1995; The Angolite, 1985).
For the first half of the 20th century “Angola remained a hellhole of dilapidated quarters, inedible food, political patronage, overwork, corruption, racism and brutality” (Dennis, 2001: 34). It was these conditions that motivated prisoners to cut their heel-strings in the early 1950s, an act that drew attention to their plight (Wikberg, 1991). While reforms followed, they only lasted until 1962, when concerns about the budget and politics negated any progress (Wikberg, 1991). Conditions deteriorated and by the early 1970s “Angola was a full-blown monster” with “violence […] woven into the very fabric of the prison’s daily life” (Foster, 1988: 23; The Angolite, 1984: 15; Wikberg, 1991). A federal court order and a new warden helped bring about real, lasting change in the mid-1970s: additional staff was hired, overcrowding was reduced, the practice of racial segregation ended, and violence subsided (Glover, 1991; Mason, 1987; The Angolite, 1984). The federal court decision is a pivotal moment in Angola’s history, believed to have finally brought “the prison out of its ‘dark ages’” (Foster, 1988: 23) and credited with having inspired a “massive clean-up effort” (The Angolite, 1982b: 43) that “resulted in the institution’s progress and change” (Mason, 1987: 28).
This narrative—the nation’s bloodiest prison transformed—is the one that prevails. A reading of The Angolite reveals as much. In one issue, for example, a staffer writes that over the years Angola was converted “from a slaughterhouse into the safest maximum-security prison in the nation” (Dennis, 1997b: 24–25). That it is now the safest maximum-security prison in the USA is a claim made repeatedly and the state of Louisiana is acknowledged for the “progress” it has made in corrections (Dennis, 1996c: 4, 1997a: 30; Rideau, 1993: 21). Readers, then, are encouraged to conclude the “harsh and brutal practices which had been so prevalent” are now something of the past (Wikberg and Rideau, 1989: 15). The focus on progress and hope and the avoidance of troublesome or delicate topics like slavery align with the findings of scholars who have visited penal history museums elsewhere (e.g. Fiander et al., 2015; Shearing and Kempa, 2004; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Walby and Piché, 2011, 2015; Welch, 2012, 2013).
The Angola Prison Rodeo
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—held in April and every Sunday in October—is another opportunity for administrators to drive home to a large audience just how progressive the Angola of today is. Between events that pit prisoners against bulls, the announcer boasts to the crowd of thousands that Angola “stands as a model for the rest of the country” and, just in case they missed that pronouncement, the Rodeo Souvenir Program, sold for $5, notifies readers that Angola is “home to the first four-year accredited college degree program inside a prison in the United States” and a “licensed, award-winning hospice program with professionally trained offender volunteer caregivers that serves as a national model for prison hospice” (Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2014: 12). Today, the Rodeo Souvenir Program notes, many prisoners housed at Angola have been transformed “from selfish criminals into purpose driven citizens who are eager to volunteer and serve others”, with some even certified as vocational and academic tutors and working to help “prepare short-term offenders to successfully return to society” (Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2014: 11, 42). The rodeo itself is said to aid in this endeavor, as “funds from concession sales are dedicated to offender re-entry and other educational and training programs that reduce recidivism and victims of crime” (Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2014: 4). This view echoes earlier editions of The Angolite, which note that the rodeo and arts and crafts festival give prisoners an opportunity to spend their time on something socially “constructive” and to learn important life skills, with the chance for a reward at the end of their hard work (Dennis, 1996a: 16; Sharp, 2011). Baton Rouge Judge Bob Downing offers a similar endorsement:
this is the kind of event that prepares inmates to return to society as productive taxpayers […] Many will be able to earn a living with the skills they’ve learned, but even those that can’t have learned the value of hard work and determination.
But for all its talk about facilitating reformation and rehabilitation, entertaining rodeo attendees appears to be the chief preoccupation. 5 There is no concerted effort to initiate a discussion of the consequences of Louisiana’s extremely harsh sentencing policies or how to go about achieving criminal justice reform. The rodeo, as described in The Angolite, is a “rip-roaring, hilarious and often dangerous affair” (The Angolite, 1986: 9) and is typically advertised as the “wildest show in the South”. Angolite staffer Keith Elliott (1994: 57) recognizes this focus on entertainment when he observes that the “rodeo ground is no longer a part of the prison, but a special magical bazaar that holds all manner of wonderful and beautiful sights, sounds and smells”. In fact, visitors, like Belva Reynolds, can forget they are even at a plantation prison where men still work the fields and have limited prospects of ever being released; she states: “After a while I almost forgot where I was, everyone is so friendly. There’s so many different things. Most of it’s really nice” (Dilosa and Armstrong, 1999: 20). Thus, just like those who go on plantation tours (see Buzinde and Santos, 2008, 2009; Modlin, 2008), those attending the rodeo are encouraged to leave with a rosy perception of life at Angola and without a real understanding of the issues facing those who live(d) there.
Attendees are forced to drive by the Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum on their way to and from the rodeo. A plaque just inside its entrance advises that the museum was set up to “establish and preserve Angola’s past and to educate all who visit about the role this sprawling prison farm has played in our state’s history”. And while a collection of prisoners’ weapons, instruments used historically to punish convicts, and a clipping from the 1952 Collier’s article labeling Angola “America’s worst prison” (Stagg and Lear, 1952) inform visitors of the penitentiary’s brutal past, a display on the prison’s hospice program and the framed copy of an article from The Advocate noting that Angola has been freed from federal oversight help signify to visitors that the prison has been cleaned up in recent years, with conditions and attitudes having improved considerably.
Other materials also highlight this transformation. The Angola Story pamphlet, located near the museum’s entrance, for instance, outlines the prison’s “rehabilitative efforts”, describing initiatives like Character Counts, Parenting Skills, Steps toward Educational Progress, and the Pre-Release Exit Program (Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation, 2011: 9). Moreover, the pamphlet notes that prisoners at Angola may earn Associate or Bachelor degrees from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, with Corrections Departments in states like California, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas having followed Angola’s lead by launching similar faith-based programs (Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation, 2011). Visitors are encouraged to attribute much of the prison’s transformation to Angola’s current warden, Burl Cain. For instance, the final point on a timeline of significant events in Angola’s history, located on the wall in the museum’s gift shop, reads: “1995—Present Burl Cain becomes warden, begins massive expansion of education and moral rehabilitation programming; violence inside the prison is dramatically reduced.” Also located in the gift shop, right beside The Angola Story, is Dennis Shere’s (2005) book entitled Cain’s Redemption; the back cover commends Cain for the “progressive, compassionate programs and sound correctional procedures he has implemented”. An entire room of the relatively small museum is dedicated to the rodeo, while posters and memorabilia from the major movies filmed at the prison fill up another corner—all this helps create the idea that Angola is exceptional, both good at what it does and unique.
Currently, the museum also has on exhibit several farming tools as well as photographs and paintings depicting prisoners laboring in the fields. Hundreds of men at Angola are said to remain “constructively active” by working 40 hours a week in the farm lines, tending crops—soybeans, corn, wheat, okra, beans, strawberries, onions, peppers, cabbage, and tomatoes—for both sale and consumption (Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation, 2011: 9). The Rodeo Souvenir Program asserts that Angola produces over 1.4 million pounds of fresh vegetables a year; this is enough to feed more than 11,000 prisoners in five state prisons (Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2014: 12).
A 2014 short video produced by LSP-TV, the prisoner-operated television station, entitled Farming on the Farm is available for viewing at the museum; it provides an overview of the farming practices, both past and present. In drawing some attention to the links between past and present, perhaps this short video might lead some visitors to question and to critique (see Fiander et al., 2015; Strange and Kempa, 2003). The narrator begins by informing viewers that hours were long and conditions were harsh when agricultural operations first began over 140 years ago. And while “life on ‘the Farm’ improved over the years”, he continues, “the more things change, the more they remain the same”. So-called “primitive” methods are still used, creating a scene reminiscent of a “dark, bygone era”. In fact, in 2013, 38 years after the sugar mill was shut down, prisoners at Angola began harvesting sugarcane again. They make the syrup the “old-timey way” claims Warden Cain proudly, “like your great-grandpa would do it, a long time ago”. While Angola’s previous era of sugarcane production is linked with brutality, appalling conditions, and convict guards, the prison is of course said to be very different now (Hilburn, 2014). Assistant Warden Cathy Fontenot explains that bringing sugarcane back is really a lesson, noting that “Warden Cain wants to show that we can keep transforming this prison into a model for others to follow, while still preserving those things that made Angola what it is today” (Hilburn, 2014: 10). As Cain himself states in the Farming on the Farm video: “it’s a plantation prison, it was that way throughout its entire history, so [it is] very important that we have agriculture here”. Cain does not explain why exactly this is important, nor does he explore the connection between plantation and prison. At Angola, then, a very specific history is presented for consumption: this history mostly disregards the practices and effects of, as well as modern-day parallels to, slavery, choosing to focus instead on the prison’s transformation into a “model” penitentiary.
“Modern day slave labor is what it is”: 6 Prisoners’ perceptions of the past and fieldwork
While Angola’s contemporary public image is tied to ideas about reform, advancement, and progress, some prisoners view the connection between past and present differently. On this issue Nelson (2000a: 18) argues that “Angola’s turbulent history is stitched to the present by threads of oppression.” Continuing, Nelson (2000a: 17) notes that “people have been held in bondage on this land for more than 200 years”. First slaves, then “tenant farmers”, and now prisoners, have all labored—mostly involuntarily—at Angola, home to some of the “world’s richest farm land” (Nelson, 2000a: 18). While fewer hours may be spent in the fields, sugarcane is no longer the primary crop, and the conditions have noticeably improved, the emphasis on work has remained a constant (Nelson, 1998, 1999). Regardless of the extent to which change has occurred over the years, fieldwork at Angola “still conjures historical images of Southern slavery” (Nelson, 1999: 33). The ways in which present-day farming practices at Angola recall slavery does not go unnoticed by prisoners. When Monroe Green first arrived at Angola in 1957, for example, he made sense of what he saw using his knowledge of slavery practices; he reflects: “I saw a big farm. There were a lot of men in the fields. The living conditions were like on those slave ships coming over here, with the quarters filled with slaves” (Nelson, 2000b: 40). Similarly, Roland Pittman (1990: 90) identifies other prisoners as his “fellow slaves”. The poetry of Mark King (1992: 78), which references the brutality and forced labor overseen by “slavemasters”, serves as another example; for him, this means little is different than it was a century ago:
A century of forced labor, blood and pain Lives wasted, buried in the shame Slavemasters oversee their daily tasks Hidden behind century-old sadistic masks The world has passed this deathly land by The inhabitants still ask why
Others, such as Larry Williams (1984: 73), also liken prison officials to “slave-masters and overseers”.
In contrast to the administration’s claim that fieldwork keeps them “constructively active” (Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation, 2011: 9), some prisoners argue that forced labor, particularly in the fields, makes them no different than slaves. For example, Donnie Hunt (1986: 52) references Angola’s “fields of modernized slavery”, while Chuck Unger (1998: 63) suggests that prisoners have “become modern-day slaves for the state. We work at hard labor for practically nothing and we make people rich.” Other prisoners express frustration with being forced to work in the “fields like slaves”, this preoccupation with hard labor often coming at the expense of rehabilitative programming (Bronze, 1989: 82; see also Robertson, 1990). On a similar note, George Elliott (1994: 68) observes that prisons today exist not to correct, but instead to “punish and contain” those considered “human waste”; he believes this “warehousing […] has become another form of slave labor”. Arguing that fieldwork does little to prepare prisoners for release, Gibson (1987: 65) asserts that prison officials
want us to slave all day in the field, like in the old slavery days, instead of being sent to school to educate ourselves, by taking up some type of trade, or getting our GED’s so that we can get a job on the streets.
It is “just like the old slavery days”, continues Gibson (1987: 65), “except they do their thing, in a more sophisticated manner”. As the above examples demonstrate, a subset of Angola’s prisoner population sees clear similarities between past and present. For them, forced labor in the fields recalls the practices of slavery. This history, in other words, is not entirely forgotten and is instead mobilized so as to protest their present circumstances.
We already know from Goodman’s (2012) work on California’s fire camps that prisoners’ conceptions and experiences of their labor are complex. Thus, it should come as little surprise that multiple, nuanced viewpoints are expressed at Angola as well. In addition to evoking memories of slavery, forced work in the fields was believed by some prisoners to be degrading. For example, Spencer (1996: 70) writes:
They work us like slaves And treat us like dogs They feed us slop That ain’t fit to feed a hog
Roland Pittman (1990: 90) adds: “we are not recognized as human beings but as a commodity of cheap labor”. This is nothing new, Ardis (1992: 79) writes, because “for 500 years now we as Blackmen have yet to find respect in America as men and human beings”.
Angola’s past as a plantation, and the South’s history of slavery more generally, finds its way into the prisoners’ submissions in other ways as well. This is seen when we look to the writings of David LeFerre (2001: 68), who notes that his “people [have been] in bondage 4 hundred years” or Larry Ardis (1992: 81), who refers to other black men in prison as his “Brothers in bondage”. Similarly, Joe Robertson (1990: 72) writes about being free from the “chains of bondage” and Joe Zina (1998: 67) remains hopeful that prisoners can “overcome [their] bondage”. Others, like Owens (1993: 61), flip the analogy on its head; he believes that “from the time the first of our fathers were bound, shackled and herded into the darks holds of Christian slaveships to the present day, the experience of the black man in America can be summed up in one word—prison”. Still others (e.g. Deboue, 1996: 60; Nelson, 1994: 70; Pittman, 1990: 90) liken the penitentiary to a plantation, while Larry Perkins (1993: 88) adds a descriptor, referring to Angola as “this lonely plantation”. And alluding to Louisiana’s extraordinarily harsh sentencing policies, Willie Peters (1991: 81) expresses concern about the fate of the “mass majority of slave prisoners” who face the “reality of dying on this plantation of old age”. 7 Thus, prisoners’ writings bring to light contemporary Angola’s ties to slavery, even if prison-produced documents and the administration’s narratives attempt to redirect attention towards the prison’s progressive programs and relative safety.
The writings of other prisoners reference the Confederacy, public lynching, and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, thereby encouraging readers to recall the lengthy history of racial oppression in the South, and the United States as a whole, when considering their plight today. While the methods may have changed, these prisoners argue, the outcomes remain the same. Several examples are demonstrative. For his part, former editor of The Angolite, Wilbert Rideau (1987: 61), claims that when “justice by rope ended, it mattered naught because the judicial system could essentially achieve the same results via sophisticated manipulations of the system that were less objectionable to the public conscience”. Johnny Brown (1985: 58) is even more explicit in his views:
the south have a history of disregarding Black people lives, being unfair in and out of the courthouse, no matter what the case. The KKK tries to deceive American people with white robes in public. But in reality they wear every color robe and uniform in this country, even black robes in our state courts. Today they kill with the chair instead of the tree.
Finally, as Burgess (1999: 60) observes, “the South has truly risen again, in the form of vast prison/industrial complexes in the eleven original states of the Confederacy. There are more private prisons in the Southern region in the United States than anywhere else”. In the men’s writings, memories of the past—slavery, the Civil War, lynching, Jim Crow, and so on—inform how some of the prisoners at Angola make sense of their incarceration and dealings with the criminal justice system.
Discussion and conclusion
In highlighting how slavery is both forgotten in “official” accounts of Angola’s history—in museum displays, in prison-produced documents, and at the rodeo and arts and crafts festival—and remembered and evoked in the writings of some prisoners, this article extends the growing body of literature on the penal tourism industry, expanding our ideas about the reciprocal relationship between punishment and culture. Multiple visits to the prison and an analysis of prison-produced documents reveal that rather than acknowledge or commemorate its plantation history, the “official” narrative about Angola focuses on its transformation from the most violent prison in the USA to the safest. That enslaved people “worked” this same land before prisoners were compelled to—modern-day Angola’s most obvious connection to slavery—remains unspoken or forgotten. This is in line with extant work in this area, where scholars (Fiander et al., 2015; Shearing and Kempa, 2004; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Walby and Piché, 2011, 2015; Welch, 2012, 2013) have found that penal history museums usually focus on the brutal practices of the past and the progress that has been made since, ignoring any parallels to the present. This official forgetting of slavery and its links to the present, I argue, is a form of racial violence and an example of how racial power continues to operate in US prisons despite claims of colorblindness (see Murakawa and Beckett, 2010; Ward, 2015).
The absence of slavery from the prison administration’s version of history reproduces and “reflect[s] the current socio-political order”, an order that seems largely unwilling to engage with issues relating to race and punishment (see Buzinde and Santos, 2008: 470). Today, when tourists flock to the prison for the “brilliant mixture of color, sounds, excitement and thrills” that is the rodeo (The Angolite, 1982a: 15), they hear about the prison’s progressive policies and programs. And Angola’s farming practices are lauded for keeping prisoners “constructively active” and saving taxpayers money (Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation, 2011: 9). This allows the rodeo and arts and crafts festival to remain, in the words of Warden Cain, a source of “affordable family entertainment” (Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2014: 4). This means that we can avoid asking ourselves difficult questions about how we deal with offenders, enables us to carry on as we have been for years, and allows us to disregard, nay forget, the experiences, lives, and humanity of the criminalized and incarcerated.
These projects of forgetting are made possible, and easier, by our continued insistence on viewing this group of—mostly racialized—individuals as wicked, dangerous, predator-like others who must be controlled because they cannot be reformed (see, for instance, Garland, 2001; Mauer, 2006; Welch, 2007). Thus, forgetting a troubling chapter of Angola’s (and the nation’s) history—slavery and its legacy—permits visitors to feel free to engage in consumption, light-hearted fun, and patriotism and provides little incentive to dig beneath the surface in order to critically examine our approach to penology or acknowledge the continued existence of racial inequality and violence and the many forms they take.
In contrast, prisoner submissions to The Angolite reveal the lengthy history of racial discrimination, particularly in the South, as well as of the prison’s own past as a plantation. Some prison authors suggest that working in the fields is analogous to slavery. By mobilizing memories of slavery, public lynching, and racial inequality in the criminal justice system these authors challenge the administration’s monopoly on telling the “official” history of Angola and resisting one of the more subtle ways in which (racial) power functions at the prison (see Crewe, 2007; Murakawa and Beckett, 2010). The Angolite display at the museum, The Angolite booth at the arts and crafts festival, and even the Farming on the Farm video, then, could be considered an example of what Fiander et al. (2015) call “critical punishment memorialization”—artifacts, narratives, and displays that challenge prevailing ideas and discourses about punishment. In what might be another example of this, museum staff members are in the process of collecting narratives from both prisoners and employees as part of an “oral history initiative” (Angola Museum, 2015). While judgment should be reserved for the time being, perhaps all of this will help generate substantive discussions regarding the horrors of what used to occur at Angola and about changing what continues to happen—mass incarceration, the struggle with hopelessness and despair that can arise as a result of a natural life sentence, the consequences of an aging prison population, penal labor, and racial violence—on this land.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Phil Goodman, Adam Green, Candace Kruttschnitt, and the anonymous reviewers at Theoretical Criminology for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.