Louisiana State Penitentiary
The Louisiana State Penitentiary is a maximum-security prison farm in Louisiana operated by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections. It is the largest maximum-security correctional facility in the United States, with 5,000 prisoners and 1,800 staff, including corrections officers, janitors, maintenance workers, social workers, nurses, educators, deputy wardens, and the warden himself. The current warden is Darrel Vannoy, who was appointed to the role in 2024, after having previously served as warden between 2016 and 2021, following long-time warden Burl Cain's resignation.
Located in West Feliciana Parish, the correctional facility is set between oxbow lakes on the east side of a bend of the Mississippi River and thus flanked on three sides by water. It lies less than south of Louisiana's straight east–west border with Mississippi.
The prison is located at the end of Louisiana Highway 66, around northwest of St. Francisville. Death row for men and the state execution chamber for men and women are located on the grounds of the correctional facility.
History
The of land the correctional facility sits on was known before the American Civil War as the Angola Plantations, a slave plantation owned by slave trader Isaac Franklin. It became known as Angola, and nicknamed the "Alcatraz of the South", "The Angola Plantation" and "The Farm."Before 1835, state inmates were held in a jail in New Orleans. The first Louisiana State Penitentiary, located at the intersection of 6th and Laurel streets in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was modeled on a prison in Wethersfield, Connecticut. It was built to house 100 convicts in cells of. In 1844, the state leased operation of the prison and its prisoners to McHatton Pratt and Company, a private company.
During the American Civil War, Union soldiers occupied the prison in Baton Rouge. In 1869, during the Reconstruction era, Samuel Lawrence James, a former Confederate major, received the military lease to the future prison property along the Mississippi River. He tried to produce cotton with the forced labor of African Americans.
The land developed as Angola Penitentiary was purchased in the 1830s from Francis Rout as four contiguous plantations by Isaac Franklin. He was a planter and slave trader, co-owner of the profitable slave trading firm Franklin and Armfield, of Alexandria, Virginia, and Natchez, Mississippi. After he died in 1846, Franklin's widow, by then known as Adelicia Cheatham, joined these plantations: Panola, Belle View, Killarney, and Angola, when she sold them all in 1880 to Samuel Lawrence James, the former CSA officer. The Angola plantation was named after the country on the west coast of Southern Africa, from which many enslaved people had come. It contained a building called the Old Slave Quarters.
Under the convict lease system, Major James ran his vast plantation using convicts leased from the state as his workers. He was responsible for their room and board and had total authority over them. With the incentive to earn money from prisoners, the state passed laws directed at African Americans, requiring payment of minor fees and fines as punishment for infractions. Cash-poor men in the agricultural economy were forced into jail and convict labor. Such convicts were frequently abused, underfed, and subject to unregulated violence. The state exercised little oversight of conditions. Prisoners were often worked to death under harsh conditions. James died in 1894.
20th century operations
The Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections says this facility opened as a state prison in 1901. The state began transferring prison facilities out of the old penitentiary into Angola. The old penitentiary continued to be used as a receiving station, hospital, clothing, and shoe factory, and place for executions until it finally closed in 1917. The history and archaeology of the old penitentiary provides insights into inmates' structures and daily life.In September 1928, prisoners Cleveland Owen, Steven J. Beck, and James Heard took two prison guards hostage and escaped from Camp E armed with.45 Colt automatics. Ten additional prisoners followed them out of the gates. The break was thwarted when the anticipated ferry was not positioned on the river's prison side. A gunfight between guards and prisoners ensued, leaving five prisoners dead. According to contemporary news reports, twenty-six persons were shot. "Trusty" prisoners who assisted the guards later sought pardons from Governor Huey Long.
Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, authors of The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, stated that Angola was "probably as close to slavery as any person could come in 1930." Hardened criminals broke down upon being notified that they were being sent to Angola. White-black racial tensions in the society were expressed at the prison, adding to the violence: each year, one in every ten inmates was stabbed. Wolfe and Lornell stated that the staff, consisting of 90 people, "ran the prison like it was a private fiefdom."
The two authors stated that prisoners were viewed as the worst of the lowest order". The state did not appropriate many funds for the operation of Angola and saved money by trying to decrease costs. Much of the remaining money ended up in the operations of other state projects; Wolfe and Lornell stated that the re-appropriation of funds occurred "mysteriously".
In 1935, remains of a Native American individual were taken from Angola and were donated to the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science.
In 1948, governor Earl Kemp Long appointed Rollo C. Lawrence, a former mayor of Pineville, as the first Angola superintendent. Long subsequently established the warden position as one of political patronage. Long appointed distant relatives as wardens of the prison.
In the institution's history, the electric chair, Gruesome Gertie, was stored at Angola. Because West Feliciana Parish did not want to be associated with state executions, for some time, the state transported the chair to the parish of conviction of a condemned prisoner before executing them.
A former Angola prisoner, William Sadler, wrote a series of articles about Angola in the 1940s. Hell on Angola helped bring about prison reform.
In February 1951, 31 inmates, in protest of the prison's conditions, cut their own Achilles tendons. Unable to use both feet, the inmates hopped around and sang "The Heel-String Boogie", and the group was labeled the Heel String Gang. When the protest made headlines, Long convened a committee of 32 judges, law officers and media members to investigate conditions at the prison. By May, the number of inmates who had slashed their Achilles tendons had risen to 55. However, the protest was successful; the committee recommended several reforms, including the abolition of corporal punishment at the prison. In its November 22, 1952 issue, Collier's Magazine referred to Angola as "the worst prison in America". In addition, Margaret Dixon, managing editor of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate for two decades, worked for prison reform, specifically, construction of other facilities to reduce the population at Angola. The new Margaret Dixon Correctional Institution opened in 1976 and was named for her.
On December 5, 1956, five men escaped by digging out of the prison grounds and swimming across the Mississippi River. They were Robert Wallace, 25; Wallace McDonald, 23; Vernon Roy Ingram, 21; Glenn Holiday, 20; and Frank Verbon Gann, 30. The Hope Star newspaper of Arkansas reported that one body was recovered from the river.
McDonald was captured later in Texas, after returning to the United States from Mexico. McDonald said that two of his fellow escapees drowned, but warden Maurice Sigler disputed this. Sigler said that he believed no more than one inmate drowned. His men had found three clear sets of tracks climbing up the river bank.
Gann's family wrote to Sigler on multiple occasions, requesting that he declare the escaped prisoner dead to free up benefits for his children. Although the family never heard again from Gann, Sigler refused to declare him dead, saying that he was likely in Mexico. Gann had been imprisoned in Angola after escaping from the Opelousas Parish Jail on April 29, 1956, where he was serving a relatively minor charge for car theft.
In 1961, female inmates were moved from Angola to the newly opened Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women.
In 1971, the American Bar Association criticized the conditions at Angola. Linda Ashton of the Associated Press stated that the bar association described Angola as "medieval, squalid and horrifying". In 1972, Elayne Hunt, a reforming director of corrections, was appointed by Governor Edwin Edwards. The U.S. courts in Gates v. Collier ordered Louisiana to clean up Angola once and for all, ordering the end of the Trustee-Officer and Trusty systems.
Efforts to reform and improve conditions at Angola have continued. In 1975, U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, declared conditions at Angola to be in a state of emergency. The state installed Ross Maggio as the warden. Prisoners nicknamed Maggio "the gangster" because he strictly adhered to rules. Ashton said that, by most accounts, Maggio had improved conditions. Maggio retired in 1984.
In the 1980s, Kirksey Nix perpetrated the "Angola Lonely Hearts" scam from within the prison.
On June 21, 1989, US District Judge Polozola declared a new state of emergency at Angola.
In 1993 Angola officers fatally shot 29-year-old escapee Tyrone Brown.
Burl Cain served as the warden from 1995 to March 7, 2016. He was known for numerous improvements, lowering the prison violence rate, and numerous criminal allegations.
In 1999, six inmates who were serving life sentences for murder took three officers hostage in Camp D. The hostage takers bludgeoned and fatally stabbed 49-year-old Captain David Knapps. Armed officers ended the rebellion by shooting the inmates, killing 26-year-old Joel Durham, and seriously wounding another.