Qualla: Louisiana State Penitentiary

Louisiana State Penitentiary: Introduction

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Litherland, CC BY-SA 3.0. In February 1951, thirty-one inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary sliced through their own Achilles tendons. Unable to walk on both feet, they hopped around the yard singing a tune they called 'The Heel-String Boogie.' By May, fifty-five men had joined them. They were protesting conditions at a place Collier's Magazine would soon call 'the worst prison in America' -- a sprawling 18,000-acre complex at the end of a winding Louisiana highway, flanked on three sides by the muddy coils of the Mississippi River, where guards patrolled on horseback and one in every ten prisoners was stabbed each year. The prison is called Angola, after the African country from which many of the enslaved people who once worked this land were taken. It sits on ground that has been used to extract labor from Black bodies under one system or another -- slavery, convict leasing, incarceration -- for nearly two centuries.

Image: Chris Litherland | CC BY-SA 3.0

Louisiana State Penitentiary: From Slave Plantation to Prison Farm

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robinaire, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the 1830s, slave trader Isaac Franklin purchased four contiguous plantations from Francis Rout along a bend in the Mississippi River in West Feliciana Parish. Franklin, co-owner of the profitable firm Franklin and Armfield based in Alexandria, Virginia, and Natchez, Mississipp...

Image: Robinaire | CC BY-SA 3.0

Louisiana State Penitentiary: A Dungeon Crawling with Rats

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lee Honeycutt from Angola, LA, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. The facility officially became a state prison in 1901. By the 1930s, authors Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell wrote that Angola was 'probably as close to slavery as any person could come.' A staff of ninety people 'ran the prison like it was a private fiefdom.' Hardened criminals br...

Image: Lee Honeycutt from Angola, LA, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

Louisiana State Penitentiary: Where the Blues Were Born Again

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SelfieCity, User:Ruhrfisch, Abe.suleiman and Lodewijk Gelauff, CC BY-SA 3.0. Angola's isolation preserved something unexpected: music. In the 1930s, folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan traveled to Southern prison farms believing they would find the purest forms of African American song culture, uncontaminated by popular trends. At Angola, they met Hudd...

Image: SelfieCity, User:Ruhrfisch, Abe.suleiman and Lodewijk Gelauff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Louisiana State Penitentiary: A City Behind the Wire

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lee Honeycutt from Angola, LA, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. Angola is larger than Manhattan. Its 6,300 prisoners and 1,800 staff form a self-contained community with a canning factory, dairy, mail system, ranch, repair shops, and a sugar mill. Inmates cultivate corn, cotton, soybeans, okra, and strawberries -- four million pounds of veget...

Image: Lee Honeycutt from Angola, LA, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

Louisiana State Penitentiary: Seventy-One Percent Will Die Here

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Breaux, Public domain. As of 2010, the racial composition of Angola's inmates was 76 percent Black and 24 percent White. Seventy-one percent were serving life sentences. Only about four prisoners gain parole each year, while roughly thirty-two die inside. Peter Applebome of The New York Times wrote in ...

Image: Tom Breaux | Public domain