Angola Prison

Angola Prison, or the Louisiana State Penitentiary, was originally the site of multiple cotton plantations named Angola, Bellevue, Lake Killarney, Lochlomand, Loango, Panola, and Monrovia.¹The Metropolitan Opera, “Hell on Angola,” Metropolitan Opera, 2018. The popularly used name “Angola” is a living reminder of the West African country where so many enslaved Africans in Louisiana originated. It invokes the Middle Passage, the erasure of humanity, and the forced extraction of human life for profit. While “Louisiana State Penitentiary” offers the sterile language of a state’s bureaucracy, “Angola” forces a reckoning with soil that was tended by enslaved Africans long before it was tilled by incarcerated people.

Imprisoning about 4,500 people, it is the largest maximum security prison in the United States. The 28-square mile facility is on the east side of the Mississippi River atop rich soil that has been farmed by enslaved Africans and incarcerated workers since 1834.²Joanne Ryan and Stephanie L. Perrault, “Angola: Plantation to Pententiary,” Preserving Louisiana’s Heritage, vol. 1, no. 5, 2007, p. 35. Angola’s prisoners, 80% of whom are Black, tend to livestock, and plant and harvest wheat, corn, okra, cabbage, soybeans, and cotton, at gunpoint.³Kat Stromquist, “Angola ‘farm line’ hearings highlight controversies over prison labor, heat,” WWNO, April 25, 2025.

Working the farm line is hot, dangerous work. Most of Angola’s dorms and cells, including death row, do not have air conditioning and heat illnesses are common. In 2024, incarcerated workers filed a class-action lawsuit to end the farm line, followed by an emergency filing to stop work during extreme heat conditions.⁴Heather Hollingsworth and Jim Salter. “Inmates at Louisiana’s Angola prison sue to end working farm lines in brutal heat.” PBS, July 25, 2024. After challenging the order, prison officials reluctantly began providing basic protections such as sunblock and tents. 

Since 1965, Angola prison has hosted a rodeo in October and April called the “Wildest Show in the South.” For 60 years, the rodeo has attracted tens of thousands of spectators to its arena for a full day watching prisoners risk severe injury and death in riding bulls, barrel racing, chariot racing, and “Guts & Glory”—where prisoners try to snatch a poker chip from the forehead of a charging bull.⁵Angola Prison Rodeo, “Angola Prison Rodeo’s Events | Louisiana.” Angola Prison Rodeo, 2025.

Angola prison is notorious for encouraging prison guards to use torture, sexual assault, medical neglect, and solitary confinement and other forms of abuse to maintain its image as the “Bloodiest Prison in the South.”⁶Rick Rojas, “ICE Opens Immigrant Detention Center in Notorious Louisiana Prison,” New York Times, September 3, 2025. 

Angola prison is where three Black Panther Party members, Robert Hillary King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace, were sent in 1974 after being convicted based on dubious evidence for killing a prison guard. Together, they spent more than 40 years in solitary confinement, the longest in American prison history. ⁷Erwin James, “37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three,” The Guardian, March 10, 2010.

In September 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began using Angola’s Camp J for immigration detention and Camp J is being rebranded as the “Louisiana Lockup.” Camp J was used for extended solitary confinement until it temporarily closed in 2018.⁸Ashley Crawford and Elizabeth Kenney, “Reopening the Plantation: Immigration Detention in Louisiana’s Angola Prison,” Vera Institute, January 30, 2026. Louisiana’s governor used an emergency declaration to reopen the prison wing to detain immigrants rounded up in an operation that arrested thousands of people in and around New Orleans.⁹Ibid. More than 200 detainees are confined in their cells 23 hours a day in what was once called the “Dungeon.” Newly named ‘Camp 57’ after Governor Jeff Landry, the 57th governor of Louisiana, the newest group of confined individuals is living in a geographic reminder of the plantation economy on which the United States was founded — a space that has since transitioned into one of punishment and confinement.

Footnotes

• 1
  The Metropolitan Opera, “Hell on Angola,” Metropolitan Opera, 2018.
• 2
  Joanne Ryan and Stephanie L. Perrault, “Angola: Plantation to Pententiary,” Preserving Louisiana’s Heritage, vol. 1, no. 5, 2007, p. 35.
• 3
  Kat Stromquist, “Angola ‘farm line’ hearings highlight controversies over prison labor, heat,” WWNO, April 25, 2025.
• 4
  Heather Hollingsworth and Jim Salter. “Inmates at Louisiana’s Angola prison sue to end working farm lines in brutal heat.” PBS, July 25, 2024.
• 5
  Angola Prison Rodeo, “Angola Prison Rodeo’s Events | Louisiana.” Angola Prison Rodeo, 2025.
• 6
  Rick Rojas, “ICE Opens Immigrant Detention Center in Notorious Louisiana Prison,” New York Times, September 3, 2025. 
• 7
  Erwin James, “37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three,” The Guardian, March 10, 2010.
• 8
  Ashley Crawford and Elizabeth Kenney, “Reopening the Plantation: Immigration Detention in Louisiana’s Angola Prison,” Vera Institute, January 30, 2026.
• 9
  Ibid.