"The Wildest Show in the South": Tourism and Incarceration at Angola

Every Sunday in October for the past 37 years, a rodeo has taken place inside the gates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the nation's largest maximum-security prisons. The contestants are all inmates, few of whom have even so much as ridden a horse before entering the rodeo ring. Since 1967 the rodeo has been open to the public, and each year seems to set new attendance records, as crowds eagerly claim the rare privilege of attaining access to a place notorious for acts of violence and desperation. ¹

Angola is located, somewhat incongruously, at the end of a beautiful country road that winds quietly through the Tunica Hills north of Baton Rouge, past pecan orchards and white-columned plantation homes set among groves of old oaks. Indeed, Angola itself was once a plantation; its slave quarters have become the site of an inmate dormitory. Today the land is still farmed, and white guards on horseback continue to watch over fields worked mostly by black men. ²

Such scenes stage the history of prisons in the South, as the development of penal institutions is continuous here with the history of the plantation system. Indeed, it could be argued that the prison is a logical next step in the development of the plantation. As Matthew Mancini writes:

[...F]or half a century after the Civil War the southern states had no prisons to speak of and those they did have played a peripheral role in those states' criminal justice systems. Instead, persons convicted of criminal offenses were sent to sugar and cotton plantations, as well as to coalmines, turpentine farms, phosphate beds, brickyards [and] sawmills. (1996:1)

Convict labor became indistinguishable from slave labor as the plantation economy was converted into a prison economy.

Moreover, the particular history of Angola describes a cruelly ingenious form of post-Emancipation slavery. While depriving inmates of social rights and benefits, the government compelled them to support--in fact, turn a profit for--the state. Until 1901, Louisiana exempted itself from responsibility for inmates by leasing them to private companies and individuals, for whom they performed unpaid manual labor. In 1869, a former Confederate officer, Major Samuel James, assumed control of the convict lease. Eleven years later, he brought convicts to work in the fields of his newly acquired 8,000-acre plantation, named Angola for the point of origin of its first slaves. Bordered on three sides by the Mississippi River and on the other by the rough Tunica Hills, the site would prove to be an ideal location for a prison. Public outcry in the 1890s, sparked by accounts of the barbaric treatment of inmates taking place under the convict lease system, eventually caused the state to rescind it. The Corrections Board purchased the plantation in 1901, and resumed control of inmate upkeep. Thus began a fitful series of attempts at reform that would extend far into the 20th century, prompted by bad press and inmate revolt.

In the early 1920s, the state obtained an additional 10,000 acres, bringing Angola to its current size. It now houses just over 5,000 inmates; roughly half live in the main prison complex, the remainder in five fenced "outcamps." The outcamps themselves are self-contained penitentiaries, spread out among acres of flat fields planted with corn and soybeans, okra, cabbage, and watermelon. This huge, isolated place, long known as one of the nation's most brutal prisons (and indeed, it was only in 1999 that a judge finally released Angola from federal scrutiny [Office of the Deputy Warden 1999]), now actively invites visits by the public--albeit under carefully controlled circumstances. A museum with displays that tell the prison's history opened two years ago in a small former bank branch just outside the prison gates--one of the warden's pet projects, intended to educate visitors about Angola's role...