Prison Plantation - Facing South

The brutal practices and policies of Huey Long's prison appointees, condoned by Long himself, continued into the '50s, with administrators and guards resisting outside attempts to reform Angola. In 1951, an executive committee appointed by Governor Earl Long (Huey's brother) investigated Angola and reported that sanitary conditions were deplorable, that gambling was the prisoner's only recreation, and that flogging bordered on torture. Another committee of penologists condemned the use of convict guards. Still, nothing was done. 

Then, in 1951, 37 Angola prisoners severed their left heel tendons with razor blades to protest inhuman work loads, deplorable housing, lack of recreation and inadequate diets. "We eat weevils and beans," said one convict. The publicity surrounding the protest gradually exposed the facts of life at Angola, inducing Earl Long to appoint still another committee — this time of judges, journalists and others — to investigate. 

At the committee hearings in March, 1951, inmates and guards testified about floggings, lengthy confinements in Red Hat cells, the absence of rehabilitation programs, filthy living conditions, spoiled food, long hours of backbreaking slave labor in the cane fields and on the levees, political corruption and sexual assaults. 

A former prison captain testified that he had whipped a prisoner until his arms could no longer lift the lash, had given the whip to a younger relative, who also flogged the prisoner until he was tired, and then returned the whip to the captain, who finished the beating. The prisoner was black. His offense — he "brushed" against the captain's white daughter. 

Governor Long was embarrassed by the committee's findings, which blamed his administration in part for conditions at Angola. "I thought the committee would have to vindicate me," Uncle Earl said later, "but they hanged me instead." 

Suddenly, "prison reform" became an issue in Louisiana. Gubernatorial candidate Robert Kennon seized on Long's inability to oversee and operate Angola, and promised to run the prison with a more humanitarian philosophy. Kennon was elected governor in 1952, and almost immediately brought in outside progressive penologists to run Angola. From the legislature, Kennon obtained $4 million for new buildings at the prison. Orders against corporal punishment were posted. Disciplinary boards were established. Dietary needs of prisoners were met. Prisoners were paid two, three or five cents an hour for their field work. 

These reform measures were short-lived, however. The legislature, admitting that physical conditions and treatment at Angola were bad, still felt that Angola should make money, and that prisoners should be required to work the fields six and seven days a week. 

By the early 1960s, progress at Angola had tailspinned. The lash and Red Hat cells were replaced with more modern forms of brutality. Overcrowding became a major problem — over 3,000 prisoners were housed in 50-yearold facilities built to accommodate 2,000. The custodial staff was unprofessional and recruited from Louisiana's poor, white, rural dwellers. The majority of Angola's prisoners were black, and they were verbally and physically abused by the racist clique of white guards. Medical care did not exist. Every year, guards or inmates killed as many as 40 prisoners, and over 150 prisoners were stabbed and so severely wounded that hospitalization was required. Rehabilitation programs were nil. Angola's legacy of horror and inhumanity continued. 

IV 

In an unprecedented move in 1962, the US Supreme Court applied the phrase "cruel and unusual" to a state law in a California prison case. Two years later the Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, directly approved the right of a prisoner to seek relief in federal court. These decisions provided the legal groundwork for prison condition lawsuits and led to a series of challenges by inmates to the constitutionality of prison systems. 

The first such challenge came in the 1969 Holt v. Sarver case, a suit filed on behalf of all inmates at the Tucker Reformatory and the Cummins Farm Unit at the Arkansas Penitentiary. The prisoners charged that life at the prison amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. To give relief to the plaintiffs, the federal judge ordered Arkansas to devise a plan to correct the situation. 

Then, in Gates v. Collier, a 1972 suit against the Mississippi prison farm at Parchman, Judge William Keady found a range of conditions similar to those in Arkansas: inmate guards, abominable living conditions, rampant violence. He asked the state to substantially upgrade conditions and procedures and to abandon some of its worst facilities. 

It was inevitable that Angola would be the next major prison conditions case. By the late 1960s more than 4,000 men were crammed into Angola's facilities, built to hold no more than 2,600. Inmate-on-inmate violence, stabbings, sexual abuse and killings had reached epidemic proportions. Both guards and prisoners feared for their lives. Adequate medical care was lacking. Sanitation hazards existed everywhere: a 20- year old accumulation of raw sewage under the Main Prison kitchen and dining hall had created an unbelievable stench and rodent problem. 

In late 1968, four Angola prisoners — Lazarus Joseph, Hayes Williams, Lee Stevenson and Arthur Mitchell — filed suit against the state. In 1973, after the US Department of Justice intervened on behalf of the prisoners, Federal Judge E., Gordon West, a former law partner of Senator Russell Long, appointed another federal judge to investigate conditions at Angola and hold hearings. West said that conditions at Angola should "shock the conscience of any right thinking person." In 1975 he declared conditions at Angola to be unconstitutional and prohibited the prison from accepting any more prisoners until the population declined below 2,640. He ordered the state to improve security, medical care and food service; to decentralize the penitentiary by building full facilities elsewhere as well as at Angola; to eliminate fire, sanitation and health hazards; and to desegregate the prison. 

"If the state of Louisiana chooses to run a prison, it must do so without depriving inmates of rights guaranteed to them by the federal constitution," West said in the order. "Shortage of funds is no defense to an action involving unconstitutional conditions and practices, nor is it a justification for continuing to deny the constitutional rights of inmates." 

Prison reformers, abolitionists and socially concerned public officials hailed the court order, calling it a "godsend," a message from the federal courts that would ultimately bring Louisiana's prison system out of the dark ages. 

Their hopes were short-lived. To be sure, some changes occurred at the sprawling prison farm. But today, three years after West's ruling, Angola remains a sewer of degradation — primitive, coercive and dehumanizing. The state's response to the order has been shortsighted and irrational. For example, to reduce Angola's prison population to 2,640, the Department of Corrections began refusing to accept state-sentenced prisoners housed in parish jails. As a result, nearly 2,000 prisoners who would have been transferred to Angola remained instead in crowded, antiquated local jails. Asked about the overcrowded situation, Governor Edwin Edwards callously remarked: "It's not my problem. I don't have any relatives in jail." 

In reaction to the court order, the state convinced the legislature to spend more than $150 million to construct new prisons and expand existing facilities at Angola; $50 million alone was earmarked to build new camps at Angola to provide dormitory and maximum security bed space for more than 1,500 prisoners. This expansion has pushed the prison population at Angola up to 4,300. Angola is fast becoming the largest prison in the western world. And life for a prisoner at Angola remains much the same as it was in 1931. 

Today, as in years past, state and prison officials see Louisiana prisons as a business enterprise. In 1968, 3,000 of Angola's 18,000 acres were planted in sugar cane: 10 million pounds of sugar and 500,000 gallons of molasses were produced. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of soybeans and cotton are harvested annually. Nearly half of Angola's prisoners, most of them black, daily plant, harvest, dig irrigation ditches, erect fences or pick cotton. Armed guards on horseback, most of them white, watch over the convicts who toil in the fields, and occasionally taunt them by firing rifle shots over their heads. The prisoners receive two cents an hour for their labor. 

Medical care is still woefully inadequate. Additional staff has been hired, but prisoners frequently complain of medical neglect, denial of treatment for illness or injury, and of harassment if they complain to prison administrators. In early 1978, 150 prisoners who contracted food poisoning were disciplined and then, oddly, charged with "theft by fraud" for complaining to medical technicians at the prison hospital. Security officials claimed that the prisoners, in making their complaints, were shirking their work responsibilities in the fields that day. In another incident, a prisoner whose leg was broken in an "altercation" with a guard was left in his isolation cell for nearly a week before he saw the prison physician. 

Inmates' claims of brutality continue. Convict guards are no longer used, but inmate-on-inmate violence still rages, and guards are said to curse, threaten and physically abuse convicts. As one Angola prisoner said, "The security people seem to be people who enjoy inflicting pain. Imagine if you can six to eight guards with blackjacks, beating one man with his hands restrained in handcuffs." After 800 Angola inmates staged a peaceful work stoppage in May, 1977, the state Department of Corrections transferred 200 prisoners to then new Camp J, the isolated maximum security outcamp of this maximum security prison farm. These first residents of Camp J were, according to corrections officials, either instigators of the work stoppage or "habitual troublemakers." From the outset, Camp J became known to prisoners, their families and prison employees as Angola's "punishment camp." Indeed, even today prison officials readily admit that Camp J is a place where "fear" serves as the sole "rehabilitative tool." 

Prisoners at Camp J are denied certain foodstuffs: dessert, sugar, salt and pepper. They are locked in their cages virtually 24 hours each day; some cells are without lights. The prisoners' outgoing and incoming correspondence is closely monitored, and they are not allowed to speak unless spoken to first. 

And there is reported violence: beatings, tear gas, abuse. Prisoners who were deported to Camp J in May, 1977, say that guards began systematically brutalizing them from the beginning, and have continued ever since. 

The federal court order of June, 1975, ameliorated some of Angola's problems, but, as one prisoner said, nothing — not court orders, not governor's committees, not more educated and "enlightened" prison officials — can really change Angola. Angola will always endure, its camps rooted firmly in the soil surrounded by the Mississippi River and the Tunica Hills. Nothing, short of abolishing it altogether, can improve Angola. 

"All the reforms in the world," maintained the prisoner, "won't change this place from what it is — isolated, unmanageable, and racist." 

As the mother of a man confined at Camp J wrote, "I've heard my son's cries, and I've heard his pleas, and I can't seem to do anything to help him.    

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