prison labor contracting

7/20 have not mined 2 main

sparked by LA crit infrastructure legal activist suppression:

LOUISIANA (BAYOU Bridge ETP TX)

2018 Anne White Hat went deep into swamp, two felony counts, 21k$ bail, two counts for unauthorized entry to CI could be five years hard labor and 1k$ fine

BP gulf spill hazardous?

https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestudies/54/casestudy/www/layout/case_id_54_id_547.html

angola State Prison was located on land that was originally an 8,000-acre plantation in West Feliciana Parish, in a remote region of Louisiana. The nearest town was 30 miles away. The plantation was named Angola, after the homeland of its former slaves. It traced its origins as a prison back to 1880, when inmates were housed in the old slave quarters and worked on the plantation. In those years, a private firm ran the state penitentiary. After news reports of brutality against inmates, the state of Louisiana took control of Angola in 1901.

Throughout the ensuing decades, Angola State Prison faced numerous problems thanks to its geography and administration. The penitentiary was bounded on three sides by the Mississippi River. In 1902, 1912, and 1922, floods destroyed the crops—a key source of funding for the penitentiary’s operating costs. During the Great Depression, the prison facilities fell into poor shape after its budget was cut severely. Conditions became so bad that 31 inmates sliced their Achilles tendons to publicize their objections to hard labor and brutality. In the 1950s, a new governor fulfilled his campaign promise to clean up Angola, renovate the old buildings, and add new camps—as the prison buildings were called.

In the 1960s, Angola once more fell on hard times and was christened “the bloodiest prison in the South” because of the high rate of inmate assaults. Again, the penitentiary saw major renovations, improvement in medical care, and other upgrades. By the 1990s, the prison was accredited by the American Correctional Association, a recognition of its adherence to national standards for jails. In 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers began a four-phase project to improve the nearby levees at a cost of $26 million.

By 2008, Angola State Prison had grown to 18,000 acres—the size of Manhattan. It was a maximum-security prison with an inmate population that was almost completely African-American, while the officers who oversaw them were entirely white. The officers were known as “Freemen,” not guards.

Angola had numerous enterprises: corn, cotton, soybean, and wheat crops; a license tag plant; printing services; a mattress factory (including suicide prevention mattresses); and a herd of 1,600 cattle. Since 1965, the prison had held a professional rodeo to entertain its inmates, employees, and the general public. Inmates participated in all but one of the events. A portion of the proceeds went toward the Louisiana State Penitentiary Inmate Welfare Fund, which paid for inmate educational and recreational supplies.

One could call Angola a company town. Anyone who worked at the prison lived in one of the hundreds of homes on prison property. The best behaved inmates—called “house boys” by the wardens—wore white uniforms, performed the landscaping work, and cooked and cleaned the houses, all at no cost to the residents. Other inmates who demonstrated good conduct worked in the fields.

The prison and its employees were part of a tight-knit community, one that Sullivan would find difficult to pry open for leads.

https://heavy.com/news/2019/09/louisiana-state-penitentiary-angola/

no lnx pix twt

Louisiana State Penitentiary ‘Angola’: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

By Alyssa Choiniere

Updated Sep 6, 2019 at 10:00pm

An inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary grasps a fence at the prison.

Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed Angola, is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. The sprawling 28-acre facility houses 6,300 inmates in a series of prisons, called “camps.”

The prison is featured on Dateline NBC in its new series, “Justice for All,” airing at 10/9C Friday September 6, 2019. NBC’s Lester Holt spend two days in the prison, speaking with inmates, sleeping and working alongside them.

The prison was built on a former slave plantation. Inmates assigned to the fields pick fruits and vegetables for the prison. It’s the worst job in the prison, inmate Javonte Sanders said on the show. Read more about Sanders here.

The disturbing revelation of inmates, who are mostly black, working in fields on a former slave plantation isn’t the only surprise behind bars at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The prison also hosts an annual rodeo where inmates have the opportunity to play cowboys every year during the Angola Prison Rodeo.

The prison also hosts its own radio show, KLSP 97.1, and news magazine, The Angolite. It has a history museum and offers tours.

Angola was once called “The Bloodiest Prison in the World.” After decades of reform, it has improved but still has far to go. There are ongoing lawsuits regarding “cruel and unusual punishment” at the prison due to excessive heat and insufficient medical care, the lawsuits allege.

“Louisiana’s made a lot of changes,” Holt said in an interview with Jimmy Fallon. “They confronted the idea that what were doing – locking up more people than any other state – wasn’t working by itself. So they passed different laws to reduce incarceration levels.”

He says the prison got its nickname from Angola, the African nation many enslaved people called home.

Here’s what you need to know:

Some Inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary Work In Fields on a Former Slave Plantation

An unsettling scene unfolds on Dateline NBC as the camera pans to show inmates, who are mostly black, doing hard labor in a field as armed guards on horseback patrol the rows of crops. It’s made more disturbing after learning the field was part of a former slave plantation.

“I certainly can’t escape the optics,” Holt said on a voiceover. “Look around – mostly black men working on a former slave plantation under the watch of armed guards on horseback.”

A prison official acknowledged the optics in an interview with Holt, but said there was a benefit to the job. The food the prisoners pick isn’t outsourced, but goes back into the prison. Holt also noted on an interview with Jimmy Fallon that almost any farmland in Louisiana was a former plantation.

“I can see where someone would have an issue with it,” the prison official said. “At least when they’re working the field growing vegetables it’s something that’s giving back to the prison itself.”

Working the fields is considered the worst job in the prison, Sanders told Holt.

“This is like the bottom of the barrel,” he said. “The field? Nobody wants to be in the field.”

Holt also said working in the field was the prison’s toughest job during his interview with Jimmy Fallon.

“That’s the lowest job at the prison, working in the fields. The weather can be tough, and obviously it’s manual labor.”

2. A Lawsuit Alleging ‘Abysmal’ Conditions at Angola & ‘Grossly Deficient’ Medical Care Is Ongoing

A class-action lawsuit filed in 2015 regarding “abysmal” conditions at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and highlighting “grossly deficient” medical care is in negotiations.

The Advocate reported July 30, 2019, that attorneys for the inmates met with a Baton Rouge federal magistrate, but the two parties could not reach an agreement to settle. The large prison population consists of many elderly inmates, some of whom have chronic diseases. The Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge previously treated inmates with medical emergencies, but that hospital closed in 2013.

A lawsuit is also ongoing over extremely hot conditions in the prison, especially on death row. The Advocate reported on a study which found cases of self-harm spike in the prison during the hottest summer months.

Angola Has its Own Radio Show, With an Inmate Radio Host & an Inmate-Produced News Magazine

The Louisiana State Penitentiary has its own inmate-produced media. KLSP, Hot 91.7 is the only prison radio station in the country.

“You’re tuned into KLSP, Hot 91.7, your incarceration station, the only one in the nation, the station that kicks behind the bricks,” radio host “Big Shaq” said on the radio show.

“Big Shaq” interviewed NBC’s Dan Slepian about the show before Holt began his time between bars.

The prison also has its own news publication, The Angolite. It is produced and edited by inmates in the prison.

Louisiana State Penitentiary Hosts a Controversial Angola Prison Rodeo

Louisiana State Penitentiary Angola

ANGOLA, LA – APRIL 23: Inmates attempt to ride a horse during the “Buddy Pickup” competition at the Angola Prison Rodeo at the Louisiana State Penitentiary April 23, 2006 in Angola, Louisiana. The Angola Prison Rodeo, opened in 1965, is the longest running prison rodeo in the nation. The 10,000 seat arena was built entirely by inmate labor. The prison holds approximately 5,000 male inmates, 68 percent of whom are serving life sentences. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The Louisiana State Penitentiary has an unorthodox event called the Angola Prison Rodeo, where inmates have a chance to play cowboys for a day. Tickets are sold to the public for $20. The rodeo was started more than five decades ago. It is held one weekend in April and every Sunday in October.

The event website calls it “The Wildest Show in the South” at the prison “once known as ‘The Bloodiest Prison in the World.'”

The website says:

Today, rain or shine, the event draws more than 70,000 people annually during events held on the third weekend of April and the traditional every Sunday in October. Spectators from all walks of life from nearly all corners of the globe come to hear great inmate bands, sample authentic Cajun and regional foods such as boudin, crawfish and cracklins, shop affordable, high quality arts and crafts from over 800 inmate artists, and tour the massive 18,000 acre prison farm known for its cotton, wheat and corn fields.

Finally, they enjoy a professionally run, nail biting, gut wrenching rodeo featuring events like Convict Poker (four inmates sit motionless holding a deck of cards at a table while a 2,000 pound bull attempts to intimidate them to throw their hands as he “clears” the table). Guts and Glory features inmate participants on foot attempt to pull a poker chip from between a huge bull’s horns before a three minute timer signals the event is over – and the inmates do get airborne!

There is a waiting list of inmates who want to perform in the rodeo for a chance to win money, according to The Guardian.

In 2017, a 13-year-old girl reported to police she was raped by an inmate. The man was identified as a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, according to the Daily News.

Angola Prison Museum Preserves History of ‘The Bloodiest Prison in the World

The Angola Museum, funded by the Louisiana State Penitentiary Foundation, is a museum preserving the history of the largest state penitentiary in the country. The prison has a blighted past, once known as “the bloodiest prison in the world.” It was nicknamed Angola, taking on the name of the plantation on which it was built. The plantation and the prison got their names from the African nation many enslaved people called home.

“The Angola Museum strives to preserve the past by facilitating the exhibition of factual historical events, honoring all progress made through corrections, rehabilitation, and criminal justice, and educating the future through contributions to our understanding and dialogue on corrections, criminal justice, and its past through innovative and engaging programming,” the website says.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_State_Penitentiary

Louisiana State Penitentiary (known as Angola, and nicknamed the "Alcatraz of the South", "The Angola Plantation" and "The Farm"^[8]) is a maximum-security prison farm in Louisiana operated by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections. It is named "Angola" after the former plantation that occupied this territory. The plantation was named for the African country that was the origin of many slaves brought to Louisiana.^[9]

Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States^[10] with 6,300 prisoners and 1,800 staff, including corrections officers, janitors, maintenance, and wardens. Due to these large numbers, it has been given the nickname "a gated community." Located in West Feliciana Parish, the prison is set between oxbow lakes on the east side of a bend of the Mississippi River, so it is surrounded on three sides by water. It lies less than two miles south of Louisiana's straight east-west border with Mississippi. The 18,000 acres (73 km²) of land the prison sits on was known before the American Civil War as the Angola Plantations and was owned by Isaac Franklin. The prison is located at the end of Louisiana Highway 66, around 22 miles (35 km) northwest of St. Francisville.

Burl Cain served as the warden from 1995 to March 7, 2016.^[11] He was known for making numerous improvements and lowering the rate of violence at the prison, but court challenges to harsh conditions there have continued. Death row for men and the state execution chamber for both sexes are located at the Angola facility.

History

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Picking_cotton,_Angola_State_Farm_%28circa_1900%29.jpg)

Picking cotton at Angola, c. 1900

Riverboat *America* with convicts and supplies on the Mississippi River, circa late 1800s.

Samuel Lawrence James

Quarters C, 1901

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Angola_Prison_--_Leadbelly_in_the_foreground.jpg)

Prison camp, July 1934. In the photo is Lead Belly, a singer who was jailed at Angola when recorded by Alan Lomax.

Old cell block no longer in use

cowboy hat

John Whitley, who served as a warden at Angola

The former Angola execution chamber at the Red Hat Cell Block. The electric chair is a replica of the original "Gruesome Gertie".

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, was modeled on a prison in Wethersfield, Connecticut. 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 free labor of African Americans.^[12]

The land that has been 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 his death 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 for the country in Africa from which many of its slaves had come.^[13] It contained a building called the Old Slave Quarters.^[14]

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 virtually 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.^{[15][16][full} ^citation ^needed] James died in 1894.

20th century operations

The Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections says that this facility opened as a state prison in 1901.^[17]

Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, authors of The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, said 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 received stab wounds. Wolfe and Lornell said that the staff, consisting of 90 people, "ran the prison like it was a private fiefdom."^[18]

The two authors said that prisoners were viewed as "'niggers' of the lowest order."^[19] 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 said that the re-appropriation of funds occurred "mysteriously."^[18]

In 1935, remains of a Native American individual were taken from Angola and were donated to the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science.^[20]

In 1948, Governor Earl Kemp Long appointed Rollo C. Lawrence, a former mayor of Pineville, as the first Angola superintendent. Long subsequently established the position of warden as one of political patronage. Long appointed distant relatives as wardens of the prison.^[21]

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 him or her.^[22]

A former Angola prisoner, William Sadler (also called "Wooden Ear" because of hearing loss he suffered after a prison attack), wrote a series of articles about Angola in the 1940s. Hell on Angola helped bring about prison reform.^[23]

In 1952, 31 inmates, in protest of the prison's conditions, cut their Achilles tendons (they were referred to as the Heel String Gang.) This caused national news agencies to write exposé stories about conditions at Angola.^[24] In its November 22, 1952 issue, Collier's Magazine referred to Angola as "the worst prison in America."^[24][25] 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 (believed to be Wallace) was recovered from the river.^[26]

McDonald was captured later in Texas, after returning to the United States from Mexico. McDonald said that two of his fellow escapees drowned, but this was disputed by warden Maurice Sigler. 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.^[27]

In 1971 the American Bar Association criticized the state of Angola. Linda Ashton of the Associated Press said that the bar association described Angola's conditions as "medieval, squalid and horrifying."^[28] 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.^[29]

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 improved conditions.^[28] Maggio retired in 1984.^[28]

In the 1980s Kirksey Nix perpetrated the "Angola Lonely Hearts" scam from within the prison.^[30]

On June 21, 1989, US District Judge Polozola declared a new state of emergency at Angola.^[31]

In 1993 Angola officers fatally shot 29-year-old escapee Tyrone Brown.^[32]

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.^[33]

In 2004 Paul Harris of The Guardian said "Unsurprisingly, Angola has always been famed for brutality, riots, escape and murder."^[34]

On August 31, 2008, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin stated in a press conference that anyone arrested for looting during the evacuation of the city due to Hurricane Gustav would not be housed in the city/parish jail, but instead sent directly to Angola to await trial.^[35]

As evidence that the prison had retained its notoriety, Nagin warned:

Anybody who is caught looting in the city of New Orleans will go directly to Angola. Directly to Angola. You will not have a temporary stay in the city. You go directly to the big house, in general population. All right? So, I want to make sure that every looter, potential looter, understands that. You will go directly to Angola Prison. And God bless you when you go there.^[36]

In 2009, the prison reduced its budget by $12 million by "double bunking" (installing bunk beds to increase the capacity of dormitories), reducing overtime, and replacing officers with security cameras.^[37]

In 2012, 1,000 prisoners were transferred to Angola from C. Paul Phelps Correctional Center, which had closed. The state government did not increase the prison's budget, nor did it hire additional employees.^[38]

On March 11, 2014 Glenn Ford, a convicted murderer and Louisiana's longest-serving death row prisoner, walked free after a court overturned his conviction a day earlier when petitioned by prosecutors. Ford had spent nearly three decades at the prison, with 26 years in solitary confinement on death row.^[39] The state's policy was to house death row prisoners in solitary confinement, but lengthy appeals have created new harsh conditions of extended solitary. Convicts and their defense counsels have challenged such lengthy stays in solitary confinement, which has been shown to be deleterious to both mental and physical health, and has been considered to be "cruel and unusual punishment" under the US Constitution.^[40]

In March 2019, seven members of staff at the facility were arrested for rape, smuggling items to inmates and maintaining personal relationships with prisoners.^[41]

Management

Angola was designed to be as self-sufficient as possible; it functioned as a miniature community with a canning factory, a dairy, a mail system, a small ranch, repair shops, and a sugar mill. Prisoners raised food staples and cash crops. The self-sufficiency was enacted so taxpayers would spend less money and so politicians such as Governor of Louisiana Huey P. Long would have an improved public image. In the 1930s prisoners worked from dawn until dusk.[19

https://time.com/5405158/the-true-history-of-americas-private-prison-industry/

The True History of America's Private Prison Industry

Inmates at Louisiana State Prison in Angola, La., march down a dusty trail on May 30, 1977, en route to working in the fields. cop/cowboy on horse]

BY SHANE BAUER SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

Before founding the Corrections Corporation of America, a $1.8 billion private prison corporation now known as CoreCivic, Terrell Don Hutto ran a cotton plantation the size of Manhattan. There, mostly black convicts were forced to pick cotton from dawn to dusk for no pay. It was 1967 and the Beatles’ “All you need is love” was a hit, but the men in the fields sang songs with lyrics like “Old Master don’t you whip me, I’ll give you half a dollar.” Hutto’s family lived on the plantation and even had a “house boy,” an unpaid convict who served them.

At the time, most prisons in the South were plantations. In some states, certain inmates were given guns and even whips, and empowered to torture those who didn’t meet labor quotas. Hutto did such a good job in Texas that Arkansas would hire him to run their entire prison system–made entirely of plantations–which he would run at a profit to the state. His ability to run a prison that put money into state coffers would later attract the attention of two businessmen with a new idea: to found a corporation that would run prisons and sell shares on the stock market.

Prisons had been privatized before. Louisiana first privatized its penitentiary in 1844, just nine years after it opened. The company, McHatton, Pratt, and Ward ran it as a factory, using inmates to produce cheap clothes for enslaved people. One prisoner wrote in his memoir that, as soon as the prison was privatized, his jailers “laid aside all objects of reformation and re-instated the most cruel tyranny, to eke out the dollar and cents of human misery.” Much like CoreCivic’s shareholder reports today, Louisiana’s annual penitentiary reports from the time give no information about prison violence, rehabilitation efforts, or anything about security. Instead, they deal almost exclusively with the profitability of the prison.

Like private prisons today, profit rather than rehabilitation was the guiding principle of early penitentiaries throughout the South. “If a profit of several thousand dollars can be made on the labor of twenty slaves,” posited the Telegraph and Texas Register in the mid-19th century, “why may not a similar profit be made on the labor of twenty convicts?”The head of a Texas jail suggested the state open a penitentiary as an instrument of Southern industrialization, allowing the state to push against the “over-grown monopolies” of the North. Five years after Texas opened its first penitentiary, it was the state’s largest factory. It quickly became the main Southern supplier of textiles west of the Mississippi.

Prison privatization accelerated after the Civil War.The reason for turning penitentiaries over to companies was similar to states’ justifications for using private prisons today: prison populations were soaring, and they couldn’t afford to run their penitentiaries themselves. The 13th amendment had abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime” so, until the early 20th century, Southern prisoners were kept on private plantations and on company-run labor camps where they laid railroad tracks, built levees, and mined coal.

Former slaveholders built empires that were bigger than those of most slave owners before the war. Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, controlled all convicts in Mississippi for a period. US Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar company, forced thousands of prisoners to slave in its coal mines. Lessees went to extreme lengths to extract profits. In 1871, Tennessee lessee Thomas O’Conner forced convicts to work in mines and went as far as collecting their urine to sell to local tanneries. When they died from exhaustion or disease, he sold their bodies to the Medical School at Nashville for students to practice on.

Companies liked using convicts in part because, unlike free workers, they could be driven by torture. One common form of punishment was “watering” in which a prisoner was strapped down, a funnel forced into his mouth, and water poured in so as to distend the stomach to such a degree that it put pressure on the heart, making the prisoner feel that he was going to die. Another punishment was “stringing up” in which a cord was wrapped around the men’s thumbs, flung over a tree limb, and tightened until the men hung suspended, sometimes for hours. Whipping was common. An Alabama government inspection showed that in a two-week period in 1889, 165 prisoners were flogged. Arkansas didn’t ban the lash until 1967.

Lessees gave a cut of the profits to the states, ensuring that the system would endure. Between 1880 and 1904, Alabama’s profits from leasing state convicts made up 10 percent of the state’s budget. By 1886 the US commissioner of labor reported that, where leasing was practiced, the average revenues were nearly four times the cost of running prisons. Writer George Washington Cable, in an 1885 analysis of convict leasing, wrote the system “springs primarily from the idea that the possession of a convict’s person is an opportunity for the State to make money; that the amount to be made is whatever can be wrung from him…and that, without regard to moral or mortal consequences, the penitentiary whose annual report shows the largest case balance paid into the State’s treasury is the best penitentiary.”

This maniacal drive for profits managed to create a system that was more deadly than slavery. Between 1870 and 1901, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under the lease of a man named Samuel Lawrence James. Before the Civil War, only a handful of planters owned more than a thousand convicts, and there is no record of anyone allowing three thousand valuable human chattel to die.Throughout the South, annual convict death rates ranged from 16 percent to 25 percent, a mortality rate that would rival the Soviet gulags to come. There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. In 1883, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: “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…But these convicts: we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.”

States became jealous of the profits private companies were making, so in the early 20th century, they bought plantations of their own and eventually stopped leasing to private companies. Ten years after abolishing convict leasing, Mississippi was making $600,000 ($14.7 million in 2018 dollars) from prison labor. It was in this world that a man named Terrell Don Hutto would learn how to run a prison as a business.

CoreCivic prisons aren’t nearly as brutal labor camps under convict leasing or the early 20th century state-run plantations, but they still go to grotesque lengths to make a dollar. I saw this first hand when, in2014, I went undercover as a prison guard in a CoreCivic prison in Louisiana. There, I met a man who lost his legs to gangrene after begging for months for medical care. CoreCivic was often resistant to sending prisoners to the hospital: their contract required that outside medical visits be funded by the company. Educational programs were axed to save money.

To keep costs low, guards were paid $9 an hour and oftentimes there were no more than 24 on duty, armed with nothing but radios, to run a prison of more than 1,500 inmates. The prison was incredibly violent as a result. In a four-month period in 2015, the company reported finding some 200 weapons, 23 times more than the state’s maximum security prison. I knew one inmate who committed suicide after repeatedly going on hunger strike to demand mental health services in a prison with only one part-time psychologist. When he died, he weighed 71 pounds.

Private prisons, according to a 2016 Department of Justice Study, are consistently more violent that their already-dismal public counterparts. Yet while we went through training to become guards, we were taught that, if we saw inmates stab each other, we were not to intervene. “We are not going to pay you that much,” our instructor told us. Our job was simply to shout the words “stop fighting,” thus protecting the company’s liability and avoiding any potentially costly harm to ourselves. Our job, after all, was to “deliver value to our shareholders.” “If them fools want to cut each other,” the instructor said, “well, happy cutting.”

In May 2017, I bought a single share in the company in order to attend their annual shareholder meeting. As I sat and watched Terrell Don Hutto and other corporate executives discuss how their company’s objective was to “serve the public good,” I wondered how many times such meetings had been held throughout American history. How many times had men, be they private prison executives or convict lessees, gotten together to perform this ritual? They sit in company headquarters or legislative offices, far from their prisons or labor camps, and craft stories that soothe their consciences. They convince themselves, with remarkable ease, that they are in the business of punishment because it makes the world better, not because it makes them rich.

Adapted from AMERICAN PRISON: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer.

https://www.scalawagmagazine.org/2020/03/powerlines-prison-labor-oil/

no lnx pix

ow Louisiana’s oil and gas industry uses prison labor

CARLY BERLIN

March 24, 2020

Southern Politics

Economy & Class

Incarceration & Prisons

Powerlines

Race & Place

Workers Rights

This story was published in partnership with Southerly for our Powerlines series, which looks at climate change, justice, and infrastructure in the American South. The series is supported by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and is part of their POWER project.

When Rob Martin* was enrolled at the Lafourche Parish Work Release facility while he was incarcerated in southeast Louisiana, his days began at 4 a.m. Each morning, he was ushered into a van and taken to work a 12 to 16-hour shift at a job placement chosen for him by the facility operators.

For a while, it was maintenance work for an equipment leasing company that rents pumps and power tools to companies working in the Gulf of Mexico. His first week there, Martin said he worked 50 hours and came back to the facility with just $43. After about a year, he was hired as a maintenance supervisor of dockside operations for a company that recycled and produced drilling fluid for oil and gas companies, Martin said. Oil and gas industry work can be dangerous. Around the time that Martin was in work release, a contract worker was killed while performing routine maintenance on a gas pipeline in Louisiana waters. Martin remembered once using his body to divert a stream of drilling fluid from a ruptured line.

“I have no idea how many chemicals got into my body with that,” he said.

At the end of the workday, the van picked him up and took him back to the facility. Martin was at Lafourche for the last two years of a 12-year sentence for a murder conviction. He worked every day of the week, and said he didn’t take a single day off until he was released.

Louisiana’s Department of Safety and Corrections (DPS&C) bills work release as a way of assisting incarcerated people in the transition from prison back into the workforce during the last six months to four years of a sentence, reducing recidivism in the process. Martin said he was grateful to have spent his days outside a jail cell, acquiring work experience that would be valuable in the post-release world. But he also sees the many ways work release is designed to benefit its operators—parish sheriffs and private contractors, as well as local companies, some of which service the state’s lucrative oil and gas sector—over its participants.

In these programs, incarcerated people are sometimes assigned to work in the industries that fuel climate change in places most vulnerable to its effects, like the Gulf Coast and the Deep South, cleaning up oil spills or working in the offshore drilling industry. As natural disasters become more common and intense, prison labor is increasingly being used to help with preparation and recovery.

The South has a long history of using incarcerated labor to exploit natural resources. Matthew Mancini, author of One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928, said that after the emancipation of enslaved people, many Southern state governments leased out their prison populations to private corporations and businessmen. “The system, of course, was brutal,” he said. “And it was mainly—not entirely, but mainly—a system of controlling Black labor.”

Whether it was coal mining in Alabama, turpentine extraction in Florida, or timber harvesting in Georgia, convict leasing was often used as a way to extract valuable natural resources. The idea that both prisoners and the land are disposable state resources persists today, Mancini said. Louisiana currently has the highest incarceration rate in the country, with a hugely overrepresented Black population.The state penitentiary at Angola was once a plantation, and incarcerated people there still till the cotton fields.

Martin sees the connections. Work release, he said, is today’s “version of indentured servitude in America.”

Louisiana has a long history of using captive labor for private profit.

The Lafourche facility where Martin was enrolled has been operating for about two decades. Public documents obtained by Scalawag and Southerly show that Lafourche Parish Work Release has made a practice of allowing the oil and gas industry to hire incarcerated workers. Records reveal that Lafourche assigned work release participants to employment at 39 local companies in October 2019, half of which service the oil and gas sector in some way.

Some companies, like Coral Marine, provide oil spill response; others, such as Berry Brothers, offer pipeline construction. Provisions Energy provides meal services on rig sites, and Gator Rigging makes equipment for offshore rigs. Other employers without apparent ties to oil and gas production are two sugar production companies, a shrimp supplier, and an alligator farm called Utopia.

The DPS&C did not respond to Southerly and Scalawag’s request for updated records about its work release program. According to a Louisiana Legislative Audit of the Transitional Work Program (TWP) from fiscal year 2015, nearly a quarter of incarcerated people in the state participated in the program. Though they only constituted about 3 percent of prisoner job placements that year, offshore jobs are generally among the most lucrative for work release operators, who get to keep a large portion of prisoners’ wages. In 2015, the “Offshore-Deckhand” position had the highest wage of any of the top ten most common work release jobs; while every other positions’ hourly wages ranged between $7.38 and $8.98,offshore deckhands made, on average, $11.12 an hour.

“Everybody who was making good money at the [Lafourche] center was working offshore,” Martin said.

Work release job placements are chosen by facility operators, which are either parish sheriff’s offices or private third-party contractors. A 2013 DPS&C report shows that prisoners are compensated directly by their employers, and are required to be paid no less than 50 cents above the federal minimum wage, although the DPS&C can grant exceptions. But facility operators —in Lafourche’s case, the parish sheriff’s office—pocket 64 percent of a prisoner’s gross wages, which are used to pay for their room and board. In 2015, operators across all work release programs in Louisiana made $35.5 million from prisoner wages, in addition to per diem payments the state gave for each state prisoner and millions from commissary sales to their captive clientele.

In the October 2019 monthly report from Lafourche, “Offender Morale” was described as “low.” “Offenders are unhappy with strip searches, food, and room and board payments (64 percent is too high),” the report stated.

Even if they were unhappy, declining a job could mean returning to a cell. Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre told Scalawag and Southerly that the work release program aims to “bend over backwards” to match prisoners with specific skills to appropriate work placements, and denied that the facility would place an individual in a dangerous work environment. But, he said, “if an inmate shows up and decides that they are not going to accept a job that’s available, then we would not keep them at the center. We would rather have someone who’s motivated to work. We can ship them back to the [DPS&C].”

[F]acility operators… pocket 64 percent of a prisoner’s gross wages

Martin said that the way it’s often spun is “take it or go back to prison.”

The oil and gas industry operates on a boom and bust cycle. In 2016, the work release facility in Terrebonne Parish, which is near Lafourche, closed during an oil bust. The facility was run by Louisiana Workforce LLC, a private third-party contractor; the company's owner, Paul Perkins, is a former long-standing DPS&C employee and regular donor to local sheriff’s campaigns. Perkins said that Workforce’s program is “nothing but good.” He closed the facility in Terrebonne Parish when oil prices dropped because the facility was no longer financially viable.

The work release facility in Terrebonne Parish has not reopened, and Terrebonne Parish Sheriff attorney William Dodd said that the parish no longer has a Transitional Work Program site. Instead, incarcerated people pick up trash along the highways and have begun work reinforcing local levees in work crews. He made clear that this work is unpaid. (Perkins and Dodd did not respond to requests for follow up questions.)

The use of work release programs is common across the South. A recent investigation by Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project revealed thatin Mississippi, some incarcerated people must work low-wage jobs at fast food restaurants in order to pay off fines and court-ordered debts while also paying rent to state restitution centers. Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that judges in Alabama have made a practice of ordering pre-trial defendants to work release in lieu of posting bonds.

Some of these jobs are dangerous or hazardous. Across the country, incarcerated people labor on industrial farms, facing health risks from extreme temperatures and pesticide exposure. A decade ago, work release participants in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes worked long hours cleaning oil and toxic dispersant from beaches following the BP Oil Spill.

Incarcerated people are also being put to work preparing for and cleaning up after natural disasters made more frequent and intense by human-caused climate change. Distinct from work release programs, the prisoners dispatched before and after storms are generally part of jail-run work crews and are not paid for their labor. In 2017, ahead of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, hundreds of prisoners were required to fill sandbags the state would use to block coming floodwaters, and then were not evacuated from their facilities until three days after the storm made landfall. In Florida, prisoner work crews were dispatched to clean up debris following Hurricane Irma in 2017 though during the storm, 4,500 prisoners in Miami-Dade county—in an evacuation zone—were not relocated. Beyond the South, incarcerated people who fought backfires on work crews in Californiafaced barriers to employment as fire-fighters post-release because of their criminal records.

Advocates in the region are beginning to address the connection between incarcerated labor and climate and environmental issues. The Gulf South for a Green New Deal Platform, anchored by the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy (GCCLP), states that “Convict leasing and prison labor cannot play a role in an equitable economy and must be banned.”

“We want to call to attention that the exploitation of Black, brown, and indigenous bodies in the Gulf South equals the exploitation of land, equals the contamination of water, equals the erasure of tribal presence in our region,” said Matthew Kennedy, a regional organizer for GCCLP. “All of our solutions towards each of those things has to come from a place that addresses extractive economy in the South and answers the need for Southern liberation.”

Back in his home of New Orleans, Martin is now looking for work and may need to find a job in the oil and gas industry. He said he often encounters other formerly incarcerated people who seek jobs in the industry because they know it’s well-paying and will often accept employees with criminal records. He envisions a future with a broader range of well-paying jobs open to formerly incarcerated people. Martin said he hopes “the whole prison experience” will change to focus on “actually helping people become productive citizens.”

Martin said that the way it’s often spun is “take it or go back to prison.”

Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), a criminal justice reform organization run by and for formerly incarcerated people in Louisiana, echoed that vision.VOTE helped kill a 2017 Louisiana legislative effort that would have allowed work release operators to place electronic ankle monitors on prison workers, requiring the workers to pay for these monitors out of their wages. Work release could be a step in between a conviction and life post-release that helps an incarcerated person get their footing, Reilly said. When he was in prison in Rhode Island, Reilly said he was so happy to be shoveling snow in the middle of the night because he hadn’t been out under the night sky in over a decade. “Exploiting someone’s labor and having an opportunity to get out are not mutually exclusive,” Reilly said.

Transitioning to a more just, sustainable economy is possible—it just takes imagination, Kennedy said. “It’s about a reorganization of the Southern economy,” he said, “and its particular legacy of enslavement and exploitation.”

*Rob Martin’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

Carly Berlin is a freelance writer and educator based out of New Orleans. You can find more of her work on her website, carlyberlin.com.

Southern PoliticsEconomy & Class Incarceration & Prisons Powerlines Race & PlaceWorkers Rights