page_title: Louisiana State Penitentiary
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Louisiana State Penitentiary / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Picking cotton at Angola State Farm.
context_page_description: The Louisiana State Penitentiary 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.
  Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States 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 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 northwest of St. Francisville.
  Burl Cain served as the warden from 1995 to March 7, 2016.
context_section_description: 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.
  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. 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 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. James died in 1894.
caption: Picking cotton at Angola, c. 1900
exif: {}