Presented at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences 2000 annual meeting, New Orleans, LA, March 2000. Appeared in The Angolite magazine, July/August 2000, as "Slaves of the State," pp. 42-51.
A visitor out for a walk in downtown Baton Rouge might come across a curious historical marker. It stands in front of a long, two-story red brick building that faces Laurel Street north of the Federal Courthouse. The marker is titled, "The Warden's House." "The warden of what?" the visitor might ask. Then, taking a closer look, he would read on to see that this is "the only remaining building of the prison complex which existed from 1834 to 1917. It served as the prison store and clerk's dwelling and later became the warden's house."
What the visitor has found is the last surviving structure that was part of the original Baton Rouge Penitentiary, an institution that has disappeared from the pages of history so completely that even many native Louisianians do not know that it ever existed. "The Baton Rouge Penitentiary?" they might say. "I thought the penitentiary had always been located at Angola. You mean there was a prison in Baton Rouge at one time?"
Indeed, there was, a prison very different--in design, in operation, and, at least at its origin, in philosophy--from the plantation prison that eventually replaced it as the central institution in Louisiana's correctional system. If we had stayed with the Baton Rouge Penitentiary, instead of going with Angola as its replacement, the whole history of corrections in Louisiana might have taken a different turn.
The penitentiary ideal which gave birth to the Baton Rouge Penitentiary was a product of the eighteenth century trend of political and social thought commonly referred to today as the Age of Enlightenment. The penitentiary, which at first was an idea without physical form, was viewed as a humane, reformative alternative to other options in use at the time--capital punishment, corporal punishments, and local jails. Society was becoming too "civilized" to continue making abundant use of the physical punishments that had prevailed since ancient times (and besides, the early empirical scholars pointed out, hangings, beatings, all forms of physical punishment, seemed to have no real effect on the growing problem of crime in the city).
The sensibilities of both the public and officials of the legal system were changing. Although the law insisted that all offenders were equally deserving of punishment, judges were often reluctant to impose harsh physical punishments on youths, women, and many lesser or first-time offenders. Under the English common law in effect through the end of the 1700s, any felony offense was a capital crime, and judges had the authority to sentence any convicted felon to death. In practice, they did not. They used their wide discretion to punish many offenders with fines, with unofficial probation, with forms of what we would call today diversion, or by simply taking no action when they thought a defendant undeserving of punishment.
The legal reformers of the day proposed the penitentiary as not only a more humane alternative to the use of physical punishments, but also as a more certain deterrent alternative to the wide discretion then in use by judicial officials. Cesare Beccaria, in his Essay on Crime and Punishment (1764), argued that in deterring crime what was important was the swiftness and certainty of the punishment, not the severity.
Grafted on to the prevailing winds of legal reform was the concept of spiritual reform of the criminal. For centuries religious leaders had advocated a doctrine of reformation through suffering; evil was to be purged from the sinner by the infliction of pain. The church doctrine supported the practices of civil authorities in punishing criminals as both lawbreakers and sinners. But some of the harshness of the religious leaders was gradually being replaced by a more rational, reflective approach. What was needed was a punishment that would provide the opportunity for true reform based on penance--the idea that the criminal would reflect on his wrongs and express genuine remorse for what he had done. The origin of the penitentiary lies in its perceived ability to bring about penitence in criminals.
In the newly-founded United States of America, the birthplace of the penitentiary was in Philadelphia, influenced by the rational, civic-minded Quaker leaders such as Dr. Benjamin Rush. "Penitentiary" at first referred to a regimen--of isolation, reflection, separation of inmates, and sanitary living conditions--rather than a physical structure. The prevailing institution of that day was the jail, which generally practiced none of the aspects of the penitentiary regime. Jails were filthy, disease-ridden hellholes, mixing men and women, boys and girls, criminals, debtors, transients, and the mentally ill, charging inmates fees for their daily room and board, and allowing the exploitation of weaker inmates by both staff and other inmates. Jails could be cleaned up, but they could never be made the institution of reform the penitentiary was envisioned to be.
In America, the first true penitentiaries were designed in the period following the War of 1812. Two contrasting models developed over the next 20 years. One model, the Pennsylvania system, was incorporated into two prisons, the Western Penitentiary and the Eastern Penitentiary. The Eastern prison, in Philadelphia, was the more influential--a prison of single-person cells laid out in blocks like spokes around a hub, with the inmates kept in solitary confinement under a strict rule of silence. Inmates did craft work in their cells, called outside cells because they opened to the outdoors and had exercise yards (like a private patio) attached. This was called the "separate system." It emphasized keeping inmates totally isolated from each other to avoid contamination, both physical and spiritual. The penitential mood was also supposed to be enhanced by the time alone. Several other prisons were built on the Pennsylvania model, but it was quickly displaced by an alternative regimen, the Auburn model, as the preferred American prison design.
The New York State Prison at Auburn opened in 1819. The Auburn system housed convicts in "inside cells," smaller, stacked in tiers, and without exercise yards. Inmates worked together in shops during the day and were isolated in their individual cells at night. Discipline was very strict--silence at all times, the lockstep formation to move around, eating facing another man's back, and quick physical punishment of rule violators. Auburn was called the "congregate system," because its offenders worked and ate together, and the "silent system," for the rule of silence that prevailed at all times.
The main advantages of the Auburn prison were that it was cheaper to build, more efficient in managing inmates, better at avoiding the dehumanizing effects of long-term isolation, and above all, economically much more productive, because inmates could work together in groups--what eventually turned into the industrial prison--rather than in individual craft work. The Pennsylvania model might promote penance and reform; the Auburn model promoted profit, which would prove to be a much more long-lasting motivation. By the time of the Civil War, the Auburn model had displaced the Pennsylvania model as the standard of what the American penitentiary should look like.
These two models of the penitentiary were developing at about the time Louisiana became a state and began grappling with many of the social and legal problems facing the more developed states of the North and the Atlantic Coast. Leon Stout, in his 1934 history thesis at LSU, Origin and Early History of the Louisiana Penitentiary, wrote: "The first attempt to establish a house of correction in Louisiana came on January 16, 1818, when a committee presented to the House a bill authorizing the erection of a penitentiary." No action was taken at the time. Governor Villere attempted for the next two years to get legislative approval for the penitentiary, and in March 1820 he was authorized to receive plans for the penitentiary. The plan was submitted by the end of the year, but the governship had changed hands by this time, and the penitentiary was lost in political wrangling for the next two years.
A philosophical split of sorts had developed among penitentiary advocates. Some argued for a very severe penitentiary regime. Governor Robertson, in an 1822 address to the legislature, wrote:
Imprisonment for crime . . . ought to be considered as an almost intolerable punishment. Severe measures, privations of every kind compatible with the health of the prisoners, rigid restraint, hard labor, and occasionally solitary confinement, ought to be resorted to. . . .
Edward Livingston, the transplanted New York lawyer and legal scholar, represented a contrasting view. Livingston's proposed penal code submitted to the legislature on March 21, 1822, two days before the legislature was to adopt Governor Robertson's penitentiary proposal, argued for a different form of imprisonment. According to Stout's Appendix I, "Livingston's Penal Code:"
Livingston's proposals are elaborate, thorough, and "modern." With one fell swoop he eliminates vengeance, banishment, irons, confiscation of property, stocks, labor in public, mutilation, whipping, and death; substituting in their places reformation by "reflection, instruction, habits of industry, and religion." With an almost prophetic vision, he planned a School of Reform for person under eighteen years of age; a House of Detention in which might be confined witnesses, defendants, and minor offenders; and a Penitentiary, with separate compartments, isolated work-shops, schoolrooms, an infirmary, a female ward, and other buildings, all with proper ventilation and heating facilities.
Convicts were to work for wages in addition to their upkeep. Each would have an account opened opposite his name. On one side would be charged items of expense; on the other, his labor would be credited at equitable value; when discharged he was to receive one-half the profit, if any had been accumulated. "Employment," Livingston argues, "should be offered as an alleviation of punishment, not superadded to aggravate it. When admitted, prisoners would have been classified and placed at proper tasks, hidden from the public view. Every convict was to be taught a trade; officials were to aid him to secure employment when discharged, and to prosecute him if he did not try to make an honest living.
Lest we think Livingston had been overcome with beneficent humane rationality, Stout points out that Livingston proposed to confine murders and rapists in solitary confinement, on a bread and water diet, in a black cell bearing a condemnatory inscription.
Governor Robertson's penitentiary proposal passed on March 23, 1822, calling for a new penitentiary to be built in New Orleans, on the east bank of the Mississippi, within three miles of city hall. Livingston's ideas, while generating considerable interest at the time, did not control the direction of penal policy in Louisiana. For one thing, the 1822 penitentiary was never built. Funds were never appropriated to follow through with construction, and the proposal was eventually abandoned, not to resurface for a decade. By the time the idea came up again, in 1832, Livingston had turned his attention to national politics, and his grand notion, that "Louisiana should lead the nation in humanitarian legislation," was forgotten.
During these first two decades after statehood, Louisiana's state prisoners were confined in the old Spanish colonial jail in New Orleans. This jail, which was owned by the city, consisted of 13 cells and could house up to 135 prisoners. When Alexis de Tocqueville, the French traveler and political observer, visited the New Orleans jail in 1831, he commented: "We saw there men thrown in pell-mell with swine, in the midst of excrement and filth. In locking up criminals, no thought is given to making them better but simply to taming their wickedness; they are chained like wild beasts; they are not refined but brutalized."
Later in 1831 and early in 1832, the penitentiary idea was reborn, though this time with a location in the state capital, Baton Rouge. The House Journal of October 1, 1831, carries the following quote: "Experience shows the best prevention of crime is `mild, humane, and justly proportionate scale of punishment, which cannot be carried into complete and satisfactory effect without the aid of a penitentiary.'"
Governor Roman's address to the legislature on January 3, 1832, argued that a House of Correction was needed. The police jail was a house of immorality, he said. The facility was never designed as a prison, it was overcrowded, and offenders were mixed without distinction of age, crime, or even color, murderer, forger, swindler, and vagabond, guilty and not tried. A good portion of his request was devoted to economics, citing the state of Connecticut, which built a penitentiary that produced a profit of $1,824 at the end of the first year. Louisiana should do the same, he recommended, as the state had spent $179,631.88 for state convicts since 1819, when the penitentiary was first suggested.
This time, motivated perhaps as much by economics as by public criticism and overcrowding problems of the New Orleans jail, the legislature was listening. The Louisiana Penitentiary was founded by an act approved on March 16, 1832. The act provided that a board of five commissioners, nominated by the governor, purchase a suitable lot in Baton Rouge and build a penitentiary on the plan of the prison at Wethersfield, Connecticut. The capacity was to be one hundred convicts, and capable of enlargement; the cost was not to exceed $50,000 (which is the approximate construction cost of one medium custody prison bed today).
The House Journal later in the year reported: "The object of the state is not to destroy existence but to turn out honest men." This goal was proving to be more costly than planned. Governor Roman returned to the legislature in January 1833 to ask for additional money to expand the size of the prison and provide living quarters for the keeper and his family. Construction was now estimated to cost $73,000.
Construction of the penitentiary on lots 3 and 6 of the Devall Town section of Baton Rouge began in June 1833. About 100 convicts had been brought over from New Orleans to help build their new home. It was not until 1835 that all the state prisoners were moved into the new penitentiary; even then, the penitentiary was still under construction.
Stout describes the penitentiary in this way:
The penitentiary at Baton Rouge faced St. Anthony Street, between what are now Florida and Laurel Streets. It was a three story brick building, one hundred and fifty-four feet wide, from north to south, and was surrounded by a wall forming a hollow square, and extending at least two hundred forty-four feet from east to west.
Construction on the prison's main complex continued until 1848, eventually costing the state almost half a million dollars. The main facilities consisted of a Lower Cell House of 200 seven by three-and-a-half foot cells, an Upper Cell House of 240 cells of the same dimension, a north wing containing a hospital, provision room, and workshop, and the keeper's quarters, on the southwest corner. The state purchased lots 7 and 10 to expand the length of the prison grounds. This additional land was used as a prison yard, garden, and workshop area.
When the state adopted the Wethersfield prison plan, it also adopted the Auburn prison model the Connecticut prison followed--silent, congregate work and eating, solitary confinement at night, and shop labor in the daytime. Stout reports:
The small-shop system was adopted. By 1840 or shortly afterward every branch of industry, from the picking of damaged cotton to cabinet-making or the manufacture of side-saddles, was in evidence. Besides cloth manufacturing, we find brick-making, the tanning of leather, wheel-right's work, joinery, carpentry, cooperage, forge work, foundry, cabinet making, tailoring, painting, and gun and watch repairing. Convicts were sometimes employed outside the walls. Female convicts did the laundry work.
The prison, in short, had become a small factory, producing many goods that were sold on the open market, this despite growing opposition from merchants in the Baton Rouge area, whose prices were usually undercut by prison-made goods.
The prison was proving to be more expensive to operate than originally expected, particularly in regard to staff salaries. While it was not making a profit, it did seem to be accomplishing its humane purposes. A journalist from the New Orleans Daily Picayune who visited the penitentiary in 1844 found it clean, orderly, and silent. The prisoners went to work at daybreak, breakfasted from 7:30 to 8:15, were given one-and-one-half hours for lunch, and then worked until sundown. Their meals consisted of wheat bread an fresh beef or pork; soup and beef or pork for lunch; and mush and molasses for supper. Meals were served on a numbered table. Each prisoner marched in, took his rations, and ate it alone in his cell. The reporter goes on to add:
We said above they had a sufficiency of good and wholesome food. . . . Still there is a desolation in their looks which makes them seem not of the world though on it. That rigid discipline that imposes on them almost perpetual silence, and which forbids them to commune with even their fellows in guilt; their solitary meal, which they are compelled to take in their more solitary cell, no ray of heaven's light entering but what insinuates itself through the grating of its iron door; and the long and cheerless nights, passed within the confines of this narrow prison house (it is seven feet by four), without a sound save the grating of a lock, or the clanking of a fellow prisoner's chain, to break in on the deathful stillness, are well calculated to impart to their appearance that strange hue of living death-animated mortality--which it invariably exhibits. . . . A person would imagine that a practical lesson is here taught them, that it would forever deter them from plunging into vice again. . . . But here, as in many other things, results do not correspond with anticipations; for punishments even such as these have been found inefficient engines in the work of moral reform.
Results not corresponding with anticipations--this seemed to be the theme underlining the penitentiary's first decade of operation. The prison had taken longer to construct than expected, it was costing money every year, rather than making money for the state, and Baton Rouge area merchants strongly opposed the prison's sale of convict-made goods. In 1844 the state legislature passed an act forbidding the sale of convict-manufactured goods that competed directly with goods produced outside the prison. Facing the loss of its main revenues, the legislature "abandoned the idea of reformation" (in the words of Elizabeth Wisner) and on October 2, 1844, leased the penitentiary for five years to a private firm, McHatton, Pratt and Company. The state of Kentucky had done the same thing 20 years earlier, resulting in great cost savings to the state.
Mark T. Carleton, in Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System, calls the terms of the McHatton, Pratt lease "modest indeed:"
The lessees were required to pay nothing for the privilege of working the state's convicts, but were only to relieve Louisiana of the `expensive luxury' which state support of the penitentiary had become. In 1844, therefore, economy replaced rehabilitation as Louisiana's principal objective in penal policy.
Although the state sought to reduce her expense, she was still concerned with rehabilitation and sought no profit. In fact, she advanced large sums to the lessees. But the lessees were not at all committed to rehabilitation. Profit was their sole objective. And if the lessees were to prosper, little time could be devoted to reforming or rehabilitating the convicts, for such distractions would cut deeply into working hours and thus decrease profits. Nor could large numbers of doctors, nurses, clergymen, or other professional people be employed to attend the prisoners; large payrolls also gnawed into profits and were to be avoided. Finally, the convicts themselves would have to de dealt with in a more businesslike manner: leisure time must be minimized, food and clothing cut down to a subsistence level, and discipline administered more thoroughly in order to maintain a profitable level of operation. Not long after the lessees took over, the legislature was informed that the convicts were being treated `like slaves.'
By the time the article on prison conditions cited above appeared in the New Orleans Daily Picayune, the prisoners were no longer the concern of the state; they belonged to a private company which owned the prison system, lock, stock, and barrel, and was completely responsible for the upkeep of the prisoners and the penitentiary itself.
McHatton and Pratt faced an immediate dilemma: cutting back on factory production, as mandated by law, what kind of work could the convicts do? Susan Wurtzburg and Thurston H.G. Hahn III, in their 1992 report, Hard Labor: A Cultural Resources Survey of the Old Louisiana State Penitentiary, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, describe the solution:
The most profitable work that could be found for the prisoners, which did not upset area merchants, was levee construction along the Mississippi River and her tributaries and distributaries. While levee construction was, and still is, a necessity in Louisiana, during the nineteenth century it required extremely arduous work involving long hours of labor under extremely unpleasant, if not hazardous, conditions. Levee work was so hard on laborers that many died from overwork and exposure. Because of this, many Louisiana planters did not allow their slaves to engage in levee construction and instead hired immigrant workers. Hence, the availability of cheap laborers for levee construction in the form of prison convicts was welcomed with open arms by Louisiana's populace.
McHatton and Pratt did very well with the leasing of convicts for levee construction, and the practice continued until the twentieth century under a variety of lessees.
About two-thirds of the men inmates confined in the Baton Rouge penitentiary in the antebellum era were white, according to Marianne Fisher-Giorlando's research (see "Women in the Walls: The Imprisonment of Women at the Baton Rouge Penitentiary, 1835-1862," in Burk Foster, Wilbert Rideau, and Douglas Dennis, The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana, 3rd ed., Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995); the other third were free men of color and slaves. What is most interesting about the prisoners' work assignment is their status: they were considered lower than slaves, because they were expendable and replaceable at no cost to the state. What the legislator was complaining about, in Dr. Carleton's citation above, when he said that the convicts were being treated "like slaves," was that white people were occupying the very lowest rung of the social ladder, below even the black slaves.
What we would probably find, if we looked in more detail at the background of the men inmates in this era (as Giorlando has done with the women inmates), is that most of the white male convicts came from the New Orleans area, and most were transients or recent immigrants who would have been hired to do exactly the same work they were set to doing as convicts. They had simply been transformed into "slaves of the states" (as an 1871 Virginia court decision referred to convicts), or, in this case, working for a private firm, more like the indentured servants brought to America in the colonial period, rather than being entrepreneurs engaged in private enterprise with individual bargaining rights. The work was of the same type, but they had lost the right to choose.
Over the next quarter-century, until Major Samuel James bought the convict lease in 1869, the Baton Rouge Penitentiary followed a wandering path, though convicts were generally free of direct state control. When the McHatton, Pratt lease expired in 1849, the state entered into a new agree with McHatton, Ward, and Company, to run until 1855. In the new lease, the state was to be paid 25% of the annual profits, or a minimum of $1,000 a year. Some legislators, envious of the profits the private operators were making, were in favor of terminating the lease and resuming state control of the penitentiary, but most preferred to play it safe: a small, steady income was preferable to the financial risk of state operation. For the next half-century, Dr. Carleton suggests, "the objective of the state would be identical with the motive of the lessees themselves--to make money."
The legislators, some of whom apparently opposed the methods of the private operators, failed to acknowledge that the reason the lease was so profitable was because of the methods that made profit possible. If the state was unwilling to adopts the lessees' methods, Dr. Carleton adds, "it should not expect to make the lessees' profits."
The Baton Rouge Penitentiary remained the hub of the prison system through the Civil War. All the state prisoners, men and women, were confined there, though work crews of male inmates were often sent out to remote locations under guard to do levee and maintenance work. The prison wall was extended to the east to enclose a new building, known as the "Cotton Factory," which housed shops for making rope and fabric and for filling cotton bagging. Prisoners within the walls also worked in the shoe and tailor shops, carpentry shop, cooperage, foundry, brick manufactory, and blacksmith's shop.
When the McHatton, Ward lease expired in 1855, the state resumed control of the penitentiary briefly. Governor Paul Octave Hebert had strong objections to convict leasing. But the prison fared poorly under state management, at least financially, and the state turned the prison over to J.M. Hart and W.S. Pike in late 1856, without a formal lease being signed.
Wurtzburg and Hahn describe the prison's economic condition at the time:
When Hart and Pike took over control of the prison, the state had to take out a loan for $110,000 from Citizens' Bank to pay for food and manufacturing materials for the prison. Soon after Hart and Pike took over, the prison began to make some money from the sale of goods produced in the Cotton Factory. However, an 1856 fire destroyed the facility and a loan had to be secured from the Louisiana State Bank to cover the damages and purchase new machinery for the Cotton Factory. Finally, a $130,000 appropriation had to be made in 1857 to cover the prison's debts.
The penitentiary always seemed to be experiencing a run of bad luck. Just when conditions seemed to be stabilizing, some disaster, man-made or natural, would strike, usually costing public money to remedy. When was the last time you remember a tornado hitting Baton Rouge? The penitentiary was reportedly struck by tornadoes twice, in 1879 and again in 1891, both of them doing heavy damage and the latter killing twelve inmates also. Similar experiences, in the forms of floods, droughts, insect infestations, crop failures, and mechanical problems, would plague the prison farm at Angola in the first half-century after the end of leasing. The story was always, "Well, we could have made a profit, but . . . ."
The Civil War brought an end not only to the convict lease but also temporarily to the use of the Baton Rouge Penitentiary itself. On April 1, 1862, Hart and Pike turned the prison facility and its inmates over to the state, submitting a report titled, Inventory and Appraisement of Materials and Provisions on Hand at the Louisiana Penitentiary, April 1, 1862.
The state convicts were moved back to the old New Orleans Parish Prison. Much of the penitentiary's machinery was shipped to Clinton, Louisiana, for safe storage. Many of its weaving looms were dispersed into private hands, with a record kept so the looms could be retrieved later.
In May 1862, the 7th Vermont Regiment occupied the penitentiary, and other Union military units camped out nearby. In the next three years, occasional military battles and regular abuse by Union troops reduced the penitentiary to a burned-out, looted shell. It was to this institution that the state convicts would be returned after the war was over, but a convict population very different from the one moved out at the beginning of the war.
"The most decisive event in the history of southern penology was the Civil War," Dr. Carleton wrote in Politics and Punishment. He did not mean that the ideas of penology changed, only that the prison population was turned upside down, from a heavily white majority to a heavily black majority, within a matter of a few years.
On June 14, 1868, 297 prisoners were confined in the Baton Rouge penitentiary--203 black males, 85 white males, and nine black females. The great majority of the prisoners were there for theft and other property crimes; most were serving short sentences, four months to a year. Most were listed in the admissions log as "laborers." What the prison had done, essentially, was to recruit, through the legal system, a work force of young black males to rebuild the penitentiary.
The state had already signed a lease, on March 18, 1868, returning control of the penitentiary to private lessees, John M. Huger and Colonel Charles Jones. The state's Board of Control, which had been created to insure that the private lessees treated the prisoners humanely in the pre-Civil War days, had been managing the penitentiary since the end of the war, but the state was anxious to get out of the prison business as quickly as possible. Costs were mounting again, over $60,000 for penitentiary operations in 1867 alone.
The Huger and Jones lease was approved by Act 55 of the legislature on March 5, 1869; the original version of the bill had been vetoed in January by Governor Henry Clay Warmoth, who said:
There is too much power given to the lessees over the institution, and the Board of Control is ignored. The health, comfort, food, religious training and discipline of the prisoners should be under the charge of disinterested officers of the Government. . . . Where the lessees have absolute power over the prisoners the tendency is to work them too much and feed them too little and give no attention to their comforts and instruction.
The final version of the bill gave the Board of Control "the direction and control of the health and religious regulations of the convicts;" it also called for the equal division of profits between the state and the lessees. The state committed to selling $500,000 worth of state bonds to be used to purchase new manufacturing machinery for the prison. The Cotton Factory had already been rebuilt, and plans were made to equip the prison with sufficient machinery to operate a textile mill that would employ 550 convict laborers (even though only 350 prisoners were in custody at the time). It appeared that the Baton Rouge Penitentiary would soon be operating a large prison factory, similar to those found in the prisons of the industrial states of the North.
But someone else had a very different idea for the future of the state penitentiary. In 1869, shortly after their lease was made legal, Huger and Jones had sold the lease to Major Samuel L. James, C.B. Buckner, and T. Bynum. Major James and his partners immediately began working the convicts on levee construction, making an estimated $100,000 to $150,000 before the end of the year.
The profits they made from this labor, and the funds they obtained from the state bonds that were to have been used to purchase new machinery (according to Dr. Carleton) were put to three purposes, the first being paying off the lease they had purchased from Huger and Jones. The second was to buy political favor with the Louisiana General Assembly, which in January and February 1870 debated selling the lease to James and Company. Major James's persuasiveness and generosity were rewarded with Act 56 of 1870, which passed the General Assembly on February 24, 1870. This bill provided that the prison and the convicts would be leased to Major James for 21 years, with an annual rental starting at $5,000 and increasing by $1,000 each year. No reference was made to the Board of Control, which had apparently by this time lost all influence.
The third use of Major James's capital was in many ways the most consequential for the state in the long run: he leased (and purchased in 1880) an 8,500 acre plantation on the Mississippi River in the northwest corner of West Feliciana Parish. The name of the plantation was Angola. (See "Plantation Days at Angola: Major James and the Origins of Modern Corrections in Louisiana," in Burk Foster, Wilbert Rideau, and Douglas Dennis, The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana, 3rd ed., Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995.)
Over the next few years, Major James changed the direction of corrections in Louisiana by virtually abandoning the Baton Rouge Penitentiary in favor of the plantation prison farm at Angola; from cell-life and industrial labor within a high-walled urban prison, inmates were translated into life in remote, isolated wooden camps, where they did agricultural and construction labor under the most primitive conditions.
Like many entrepreneurs who make a lot of money doing something that later seems very obvious, Major James latched on to a simple idea: he would take the recently freed slaves, who were coming into the prison system after the Civil War in increasing numbers, and put them back to doing the same kind of labor they had been doing before the war. Certainly they could have been trained to do industrial labor within the penitentiary compound, but why bother? They were perfectly suited to farm labor and levee work.
The state would help him succeed, in two important ways. First, the legislature would give him carte blanche to work the convicts as he saw fit. Even when he violated the terms of the lease, by working convicts at proscribed labor (such as a period from 1875 to 1877, when they were put to work on the construction of the New Orleans and Pacific Railroad), he was never called to account. When he was late with his annual payments, he was given extra time to pay. At one time, in 1877, when the convicts were employed at greater profit elsewhere, Major James actually leased the prison machinery to a private businessman, who hired free laborers to come and operate the machinery within prison walls.
Second, as the traditional institutions of political and social order in the South gradually reasserted themselves, during and especially after Reconstruction, the legal system fed Major James a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh labor. The prison population during the lease period from 1870 to 1901, including the ten-year extension granted in 1891, was about 80 to 85% black, a figure even higher than today's. The typical convict was a young to middle-aged black man, a former slave, or later the child of a former slave, a displaced farm laborer who served a short prison term at hard labor as one of the rites of passage into manhood in Louisiana.
The prison system ate these men up and spit them out. Living and working conditions were hard, and mortality rates averaged about three to five percent per year, increasing to nearly ten percent the last decade of the lease. Major James's attitude about the value of the black convicts is summed up in a remark frequently attributed to him but actually made by a speaker at the National Conference of Charities in 1883: "Before the war we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick, get a doctor. He might even get gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don't own 'em. One dies, get another." He meant, of course, that the convicts cost nothing, and were therefore worth nothing. If they died, no financial loss was incurred, and they were immediately replaceable. Boatloads of able-bodied convicts were brought up the river from Baton Rouge regularly, replenishing the stock of prisoners who died, escaped, or were commuted or discharged in large numbers, in these days of short prison terms and high turnover. The only thing the convicts had going for them, in fact, was the short duration of their terms. If they stayed longer than five years, the odds were about even that they would be dead, from overwork, disease, malnutrition, brutality, or misadventure, before release. The New Orleans Daily Picayune reported on prison conditions in 1884:
The remorseless cruelty of the present management has been more fatal to the lives of the convicts than the percentage of losses of the two armies during the late civil war. This is a startling statement, but we have reliable authority for making it. The average convict life is six years. If would, therefore, be more humane to punish with death all prisoners sentenced to a longer period than six years.
In Major James's administration of Angola as a private prison farm in the late 1800s can be found the origins of modern corrections in Louisiana, as I have already written elsewhere. His guiding principles included the isolation of inmates from public and political view, the emphasis on economy and cheapness in prison operations, agricultural labor, the perpetuation of the pre-Civil War racist mentality (which meant after the war that both white and black convicts were treated like slaves, though evidence shows that whites, who often had more status and better education, usually got the better prison jobs), and the virtually complete neglect of rehabilitation.
Under Major James's lease, the Baton Rouge Penitentiary declined in importance, as more convicts were transferred out to Angola and the other remote prison camps of the late 1800s. When the lease expired in 1901, only 128 inmates--123 males and five females--remained in the Baton Rouge prison, out of a total prisoner population of 1,014. The state had committed to the purchase of the Angola and Hope plantations from the James family, which meant that the prison farming operation would continue as the dominant model in state penology.
The old state penitentiary continued to be used as a receiving station, hospital, clothing and shoe factory, and place for executions until it was finally closed in 1917. The facility was dismantled building by building, and the prison grounds gradually cleared of existing structures. The state maintained control of the property until January 18, 1918, when it was turned over to the City of Baton Rouge, which had purchased the main prison compound in 1916. The compound and the prison yard, which had been sold separately earlier, were used for many other purposes during the duration of the century. The Community Club Hall, the American Legion Hall, the U.S. Post Office and Government Building, housing the federal court, the Public Library, a public high school, Victory Park (referring to the American victory in World War I), and the East Baton Rouge Parish Recreation and Park Commission, better known as the BREC building, were all located on what had once been penitentiary grounds.
Most of this area is today occupied by the new Federal Building and United States Courthouse. One of the ironic historic twists of Louisiana's correctional history is that is that the federal court order of June 10, 1975, directed at Angola as a result of the lawsuit of Williams v. McKeithen, was issued from the old federal court, which rested on the exact site of the Lower and Upper Cell Houses of the old Baton Rouge Penitentiary. It was, in a sense, a kind of historic justice.
By the time of the 1975 court order, not only the physical structure but also the ideals of the Baton Rouge Penitentiary had been so completely abandoned that the institution was virtually irrelevant to Louisiana history and public policy. From its origins in ideas of humane reformation, the penitentiary soon ran head on into forces of "habit, hostility, fiscal conservatism, and official inertia" (to use Dr. Carleton's words). Add in the complicating factors of race, public unconcern, political manipulation, and exploitation of prison labor, and the result is a prison system almost certain to seek its place at the bottom of the barrel. How many times was Louisiana's prison system called the worst in the country?
After the James lease expired in 1901 and the state resumed control of the penitentiary, the Daily Picayune did a walk through and reported on the conditions it found. Not everything was bad; the reporter found that sewing machines were back in use making clothing and the shoe shop was at work turning out new shoes for inmates. But the reporter also observed, on the first floor of the Yarn Mill, machinery from the third floor that had been piled up awaiting removal. He referred to is as:
. . . a pile of old junk, which will one day be sold for perhaps a hundred dollars, and that is ALL THAT REMAINS TO SHOW FOR THE EXPENDITURE of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Looms, spindles, carding machines, bolts, rods, bars, pieces of shafting, belting, and various pieces of machinery are piled on the damp floor in a heterogenous mass, unfit for any use except to melt the metal over again and manufacture modern machinery out of it.
So it was, in large measure, with the ideals of the Baton Rouge Penitentiary: they became, within a short time, a pile of old junk. For half a century, from the time of the first political discussions of the need for a state penitentiary until after the Civil War, the future of the Louisiana prison system was open to debate. It can be termed an argument between reform, on the one hand, and slavery, on the other. With the signing of the James lease in 1869 and its ratification by the state legislature the next year, the outcome had been decided: slavery won.
Carleton, Mark T. Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.
Foster, Burk, Wilbert Rideau and Douglas Dennis. The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana, 3rd ed. Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995.
Fisher-Giorlando, Marianne. "Women in the Walls: The Imprisonment of Women at the Baton Rouge Penitentiary, 1835-1862." In Burk Foster, Wilbert Rideau and Douglas Dennis, The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana, 3rd ed. Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995.
Hahn, Thurston H.G. III and Susan Wurtzburg. Hard Labor: History and Archaeology at the Old Louisiana State Penitentiary, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Courthouse Joint Venture, 1994.
Mouledous, Joseph Clarence. Sociological Perspectives on a Prison Social System. Unpublished master's thesis. Louisiana State University, 1962.
"The State Penitentiary." New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 30, 1884.
Stout, Leon. Origin and Early History of the Louisiana Penitentiary. Unpublished master's thesis. Louisiana State University, 1934.
Wisner, Elizabeth. Public Welfare Administration in Louisiana. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930.
Wurtzburg, Susan and Thurston H.G. Hahn III. "Hard Labor: A Cultural Resources Survey of the Old Louisiana State Penitentiary, Baton Rouge, Louisiana." Report prepared for The Courthouse Joint Venture, 1992.