The Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary is notable for its reputation as one of the largest and bloodiest prisons in the United States. Smith embarks on a guided tour of the prison in order to observe how the site reckons with its history first as a plantation, then operating under the inhumane convict lease system, and finally as a maximum security prison today. For the tour, Smith is joined by Norris Henderson, who was wrongfully imprisoned in Angola for twenty-seven years. According to his own account, Henderson has been back to Angola over a hundred times since he was released in 2003 due to his current role as a political advocate and spokesperson.

Before recounting his experience at Angola, Smith describes the history of Southern prisons and their relationship to slavery. He explains that after the Confederates were defeated in 1865 and slavery was consequently abolished, there was a major labor shortage throughout the South. However, under federal law, it was still legal to force convicted criminals to work without pay, and quickly a system of “convict leasing” arose, in which prisons would rent their prisoners to plantations. This was a viable source of cheap labor for plantations, but for the current scale of their operations to continue, plantation owners and the prison officials profiting from convict labor both had a joint incentive to increase the prison population. 

It was these circumstances that led to wide legal reforms throughout the South in the wake of the Civil War. Louisiana, as one example, changed the requirement of a unanimous jury decision to only a seventy-five percent jury consensus for a person to be convicted in 1880. Meanwhile Mississippi changed the legal definition of grand larceny in 1876 to “the theft of any property worth ten dollars or more and any livestock worth a dollar or more” in order to give offenders who committed even small crimes longer sentences. These laws are now generally referred to as “pig laws” and almost exclusively targeted Black people and other minority populations.

Thus, the Southern elite were able to replace their previous slave populations with the labor of rented convicts, who were overwhelmingly Black. In some cases, convicts were forced to live in the plantation’s slave quarters while working the land. Smith makes explicit how slavery transformed into systemic legal changes that enabled the convict leasing institution to thrive and how these legal changes and the convict leasing institution have a direct impact on the demographic of prison populations and the treatment of those prison populations today.

In stark contrast to the grim historical reality that shrouds Angola Prison in centuries of institutionalized racism and brutality, Smith describes the museum set up by the penitentiary as a celebration and sensationalization of the prison’s past. He comments on how the museum gift shop offers masses of branded merchandise for visitors to purchase and how each display is carefully curated to demarcate the “criminals” who had been deservedly imprisoned and the brave people who risked their lives to watch over them.

Similarly, Smith portrays the prison’s official tour guide as deliberately ignoring the site’s past as a plantation or the correlation between slavery and convict leasing. In this way, Smith effectively contrasts how America’s legal and penal history in the South is inextricably tied to the current overrepresentation of Black people within the modern prison system with the institutions who distance themselves from that past and refuse to acknowledge its important role in shaping the current landscape of American incarceration.

Analysis

In his essay about Angola Prison, Smith strives to highlight the continuity of Black history, as opposed...