Appeared in Burk Foster, Wilbert Rideau, and Douglas Dennis, The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana. 3rd ed., Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995, pp. 1-5. Originally appeared in The Angolite, November/ December, 1993, pp. 42-47.
If you wanted to trace the development of corrections in Louisiana, from its origins to the present, there are four possible starting points for your search. You could go back to the New Orleans City Jail of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Accounts of the time describe this jail as a nasty place--a dirty, insect-ridden dumping place for men, women and children, who were mixed together for a variety of criminal and non-criminal offenses. Like other colonial jails, its function was primarily that of detention, until disposition was made or debts paid. Its principal attribute was that most of its occupants did not stay there very long. This was in a time when most sheriffs charged their clients "fees" for daily necessities, and inmates were not released until they or their families paid or worked out all outstanding bills. While this model was important at the parish level, it had little lasting effect on corrections as it would develop at the state level in Louisiana.
In your search you could move forward to the penal reformers who were active in Louisiana after statehood in 1815. Many of them, like Edward Livingston, were familiar with progressive ideas from "up North." They argued for the creation of a penitentiary based on the Auburn model that had recently been built in New York. This penitentiary, Louisiana's first, opened in Baton Rouge in 1835. The prison fit the style that later came to be called "fortress"--made of stone and iron, single-man cells, with high walls around the perimeter, and inmates doing factory and craft work together in silence. It was a real prison, the prison that eventually became the model for most nineteenth century American penitentiaries, but for Louisiana this prison proved to be a temporary side step rather than a lasting model.
The real origin of Louisiana's modern corrections system came later, after the Civil War, and it followed two important changes that took the penitentiary down a different road from what its founders had intended. The first development was the lease system, through which convict labor was leased to private contractors. Convict leasing began in Louisiana in 1844, in direct response to complaints about the cost of operating the Baton Rouge penitentiary.
Dr. Mark T. Carleton, the LSU history professor who wrote Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System, has pointed out that penal reform in Louisiana has often been frustrated by forces of "habit, hostility, fiscal conservatism and official inertia." Such was the case with the dream penitentiary, which was simply too expensive to last.
The second development was the Civil War itself, which turned the prison system upside down. Before the Civil War, the great majority of Louisiana's convicts were white men who labored at the craft and industrial jobs common to other walled prisons. The Civil War freed the slaves and granted them the rights of citizenship, but it also imposed on them one of the liabilities of citizenship: imprisonment at hard labor for convicted felons.
Overnight, in Louisiana and the other Southern prisons, the prison population became predominantly black (in even greater percentages in several states, including Louisiana, than it is today), and the prisons were populated by young men who were mostly accustomed to agricultural labor. Dr. Carleton has suggested this is how agriculture came to be so important to Southern prisons in the post-Civil War years. In Louisiana and in the other states that established large prison farming operations, "convict," "slave," "Negro," and "farm work" became synonymous terms in the public and political mind.
The real origin of modern Louisiana corrections was the purchase of the convict lease by Major Samuel L. James in 1869, followed the next year by the beginnings of the relocation of the great bulk of Louisiana's convicts from Baton Rouge to a large plantation on the Mississippi River in the northwest corner of West Feliciana Parish. The year was 1870, and the plantation was called Angola.
Angola, or Angora, as it was sometimes called in the early days, was established as a plantation in the 1840s. It was part of the property acquired by Isaac Franklin, the Southern slave trader and planter, from Francis Routh in the 1830s. Angola first operated primarily as a woodyard and sawmill. Wendell Holmes Stephenson, in his 1938 biography of Isaac Franklin, writes: "Fronting the Mississippi River opposite the mouth of Red River, it was advantageously situated to profit from wood-burning river craft."
Isaac Franklin died in West Feliciana Parish in 1846. His widow, Adelicia Hayes Franklin, married Colonel Joseph A.S. Acklen in 1849. The well-known "Norman's Chart of the Lower Mississippi River," printed in New Orleans in 1858, shows Col. Acklen as the owner of four plantations--Panola, Belle View, Killarney and Angola--at the present site of Angola.
Col. Acklen died in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. By this time Major Samuel Lawrence James had served briefly in the Confederate Army and resigned to pursue business interests in Louisiana and abroad. Like Captain Rhett Butler, he appears to have found commerce much more to his liking than war: by 1869 he had accumulated enough capital to buy the re-instituted convict lease from John M. Huger and Colonel Charles Jones.
Major James leased Angola, one of several plantations in a group amounting to about 8,500 acres in area, from Col. Acklen's widow and moved the convicts there by steamboat, after which they were relocated to other work sites in the area. According to court records, Adelicia Hayes finally sold Angola to Major James on December 22, 1880, for $100,000, payable in a series of notes.
Until he died in 1894 (the lease survived him, not expiring until 1901), Major James ran what Dr. Carleton has called "the most cynical, profit-oriented and brutal prison regime in Louisiana history." Convicts worked on private property--both Major James's and that of other plantation owners who sub-contracted their labor --for the profit of the lessee, Major James. They worked the land, farming and cutting timber, they performed as household servants, they travelled not only "up the river" but down the river as well, on Major James's steamboat, repairing and building levees in the never-ending struggle to contain the Mississippi and protect the rich farmland.
The convicts lived in camps, which were merely open wooden buildings with bunk beds (much like the Florida road camps of the 1940s depicted in Cool Hand Luke), built along the river and around the plantation. Angola covered about 13 square miles of area, and the convicts shared the land with black share-croppers, several hundred families of free blacks who paid rent for their land and house, bought their supplies at the two plantation stores, and settled up at the end of the year when their crops came in.
Major James's granddaughter, Cecile James Shilstone, who lived on Angola until she turned 13 in 1900, wrote reminiscently of these days in her memoirs, titled "My Plantation Days." By the time Cecile was born, her grandfather was one of the richest men, perhaps the richest, in Louisiana. (Although Cecile insisted that her grandfather was deep in debt and Angola heavily mortgaged at the time of his death.) She described Samuel James as a very popular, internationally-traveled, well-known man, as much at home in Europe or New Orleans as on his plantation. He was President of the Pickwick Club, New Orleans's leading men's club, for years up to his death.
When he died suddenly, at the "Big House" at Angola on July 26, 1894, Cecile described the scene at Angola: "There were a few hundred of our Negro "croppers" in the yard. Some were crying softly, others wailing, "De Co'nel is done gone! Oh, lan' sakes, de Co'nel done gone!"
If Major James's loyal croppers and the business and civic elite of New Orleans were saddened at the news of his death, the convicts whose labor had made him a rich man might have wanted to give a cheer instead. Those who were still in custody soon made a very unpleasant discovery: it didn't matter whether Major James or his descendants owned the lease; convicts' lives were just as worthless with one owner as another. Indeed, the Annual Report of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, from 1901, suggests that the last seven years of the lease, from 1894 to 1900, were likely the most brutal of its entire history: about 732 convicts, averaging over 100 a year, died during this period.
I indicated earlier that there was a fourth possible starting point in your search for the beginning of modern corrections in Louisiana. This would be the expiration of the lease and the resumption of state control over its convicts on January 1, 1901. If the state had set out to do things very differently, to change the location and the very style of imprisonment to get away from the legacy of the James era, 1901 might have marked a new direction, a time for starting over.
But what you see, when you look at the state penal system of the early 1900s, was more of the same. The state resumed control of the convict lease not to abolish its evils but to exploit its financial possibilities. Profit, not reform, was the prime mover in ending the lease. The penal system would no longer be privately-operated; it would be a state-operated business enterprise. Most officials and employees of the James era were retained, and in the most basic decision of all--where the penitentiary was to be located--the state purchased Angola from the James family, removed the remaining free sharecroppers, and over the next two decades purchased surrounding properties to expand the penitentiary to its present area of 18,000 acres. The original Baton Rouge Penitentiary continued in use for several more years, as a receiving station for new convicts and to manufacture shoes and clothing for prisoner use, but the great majority of the working convicts were shipped to Angola to serve their sentences.
Aside from an apparent decline in the death rate (accompanied by an even sharper decline in the profit rate) after the state resumed control, it is doubtful that a Louisiana convict of 1884 or 1894 could have told a whole lot of difference in the Angola of 1904, and even in the Angola of 1914 the only major differences were in sugar cane replacing cotton as the main crop and in the introduction of formal parole as a possibility for early release.
Major Samuel James owned Louisiana's convicts for three decades, and it was his ideas about convicts and imprisonment that have guided Louisiana corrections in the century since the end of the lease. If Major James had returned for a walk around Angola in 1969, a hundred years after he bought the lease, he would have found that conditions had not changed greatly since his time. He would have observed these enduring traditional features of Angola-- the plantation and the prison:
1. agricultural work. Angola was first and foremost a farm, and its convicts have always done farm work.
2. isolation. The location of the prison, in a remote part of the state away from urban areas, made it hard to visit and easy to keep out those who might have been critical of prison practices. Outsiders were never welcome at the old Angola.
3. plantation mentality. By this I mean a "master/servant" relationship which was more than strong discipline. Convicts were subservient to their keepers, who exercised absolute authority, either directly or through armed inmate guards, over them.
4. mostly black inmates. The population of Angola has been 75% or more black for over a hundred years.
5. worthlessness of convicts. The value of a convict's life was nil. If a convict died, no one was held accountable, and you just got another one to replace him.
6. neglect of rehabilitation. As forces to get work done, convicts were not educated, trained, counseled or otherwise improved. They worked, they did their time, they went home: prison administration at its simplest.
7. emphasis on economy. The best prison was the cheapest prison. Many of the political decisions that have had the most negative impact on Angola were rooted in the desire to save every dollar possible in maintaining convicts at a subsistence level.
8. the "Angola attitude." Until the 1950s, every adult felon sentenced to hard labor went to Angola to serve time. Its capacity to confine inmates was limited only by its ability to hire employees to guard and care for them. Thus the nature of prison administration at Angola tended to define the entire corrections philosophy of the state of Louisiana. Most other states at least had alternative places of confinement; in Louisiana everything was centralized at Angola until the adult reformatory opened at DeQuincy in 1957.
Take these principal features, and nurture them within the environment described by Dr. Mark T. Carleton in the conclusion of Politics and Punishment in 1971 (Dr. Carleton's expanded remarks are included as Appendix I):
1. lack of public interest in corrections.
2. the absence of modern corrections practices and policies and professional corrections staff.
3. a penal system whose policies were based entirely on the mutually-beneficial relationship of a few key prison officials and a few key politicians.
The result was a prison system that was always in the running for the dubious honor of being called the "worst prison in the United States." Not until Judge Gordon West's federal court order of 1975 would the state prison system seriously and continuously seek to follow a course different from that set by Major Samuel James in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Major James stands today as the one person who did the most to shape the idea of the prison, the convict and the nature of punishment in the minds of the people of Louisiana. The modern Louisiana corrections system is the lasting legacy of this enterprising, manipulative businessman who acted, before anyone else could beat him to it, to corner the market on convicts. Angola survives as a lasting memorial to his achievements.
Only within the last twenty years has Louisiana's penal system begun to evolve into a genuine correctional apparatus, administered by professional penologists with rehabilitation of convicts its actual, as well as its professed, objective. Prior to 1952 the system was essentially a business enterprise, administered either by politicians or by lessees, with both forms of management seeking to extract as much money as possible from the labor of thousands of semi-skilled "state slaves." And if the study of history seeks, among other goals, to explain the tension between the forces of continuity and the forces of change, the history of Louisiana's penal system must lean overwhelmingly toward continuity, for even by 1968 the transition noted above had not been completely effected.
Underlying and sustaining the deficiencies of Louisiana's system have been three interrelated and historically pervasive factors:
(1) public opinion, the ultimate arbiter of policy formation in a democracy, has in Louisiana generally ignored the penal system and has been disinclined to bestow upon it the kind of support readily bestowed upon other state agencies;
(2) political control of the penal system has easily occupied the near-vacuum caused by public apathy, with the result that penal policy on all levels in Louisiana has been formulated exclusively by politicians, who have been able until recently to subordinate completely penological objectives to political considerations of cost, race, and patronage;
(3) modern penology, with its necessarily higher costs, professional personnel, and popularly exaggerated overtones of convict-coddling, has had a difficult time supplanting the old ways in Louisiana, where public officials have preferred to utilize the penal system as a patronage mill, where public opinion has been satisfied when it could be assured that convicts were being punished, and where both officials and public opinion have long agreed that the least expensive penal system is the most desirable one.
Mark T. Carleton. Politics and Punishment: A History of the Louisiana State Penal System. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1971, pp. 193-194.