http://www.november.org/stayinfo/bre...lantation.html
Guard/employee Village: A small "town" -- built by inmates of course -- house about 200 employees that live and work there with their families. Kids are bused in and out of the prison gates to outside schools. The town sits in the shadow of the Warden's new mansion atop a high hilltop -- built again by inmate labor.
* The Dog Kennels: Angola is very proud of their dog breeding and training
operation, which includes Bloodhounds, German Shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and wolves. They are attempting to breed a more "vicious" attack dog by crossing Shepherds with the metaphoric "black wolf" they have. It is Mengelian really. Dogs are trained to track and attack unruly and escaping inmates. Some are trained to sniff drugs and contraband -- some sold to law enforcement.
* Visit With the Editor of The Angolite: This takes place in the Visitor Center where inmates are bused to meet their guests and where parole hearings and other legal proceedings take place. Since the release of Wilbur Rideau, Kerry Myers has been the editor and the inmate who speaks to tours. He is a white middle-class man who is serving life without parole for the 2nd Degree Murder of his wife. Myers told 2 different versions of his crime when I visited so I looked up his case which is actually infamous -- the subject of a book and TV movie. Unlike most inmates who spend at least 3 months and in many cases 10 years toiling in the fields planting by hand, Myers was offered a 20 cents an hour job at The Angolite just 45 days into his incarceration there. Race and class privilege rule even here.
If allowed to, inmates also offer a critique of The World Famous Angola Rodeo, where inmates participate for cash prizes at great risk. There have been several inmate deaths at the rodeo as well as extreme injuries and on-going chronic conditions. Inmates are allowed to sell crafts at the rodeo but the Warden/prison takes a 20% cut. The rodeo makes approximately $1 million each weekend in October as the new arena (built by inmates in short order under Cain's directive) seats 10,000. This is just one of several money-making endeavors at Angola that depends on neo-slave inmate labor starting at 2 cents per hour -- the minimum wage had been raised to 4 cents per hour but was recently returned to 2 cents, according to the tour guide. The highest available wage for a few rare jobs is 20 cents per hour.
Despite the supposedly benign tour, both students and I were horrified. There is a cavalier attitude, a blasé acceptance of capital punishment, mass incarceration and of course little critique of the class and race dynamics of the inmate population -- 80% of whom are black and nearly all of whom were poor, under-educated and dependent on a public defender at trial. There is passive acceptance and even sometimes celebration of Louisiana's harsh sentences -- it has the highest incarceration rate in the US -- and of the fact that 90% of the inmates will die there and 80% will receive no visitors after 5 years.
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Absolutely. Angola was and is still is very much a plantation. At 18,000 acres, it is the largest prison in the US -- the only prison with its own zip code. Mostly black men are still maintaining the same agricultural activity -- planting, hoeing, picking cotton and other crops by hand -- that slaves did originally. And they are doing so as captives who are compensated for their back-breaking labor with mere pennies per hour. While Warden Cain may not be Simon Legree, he is still a plantation master -- albeit one who uses Christianity as a means of controlling the neo-slave labor under his watch. The very same practices and social control mechanism that existed under slavery persist -- just under a new name.
Slave Codes became Black Codes and criminalized a range of activities if the perpetrator was black. The newly acquired 15th Amendment right to vote was curtailed by tailoring of felony disenfranchisement laws to include crimes that were supposedly more frequently committed by blacks. And, the liberatory promise of the 13th Amendment -- "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States"- contained a dangerous loophole- "except as a punishment for crime". This allowed for the conversion of the old plantations to penitentiaries, and this, with the introduction of the convict lease system, permitted the South to continue to economically benefit from the unpaid labor of blacks.
The patterns established in the old south have proliferated and expanded throughout the US, as African Americans are disproportionately policed, prosecuted, convicted, disenfranchised and imprisoned in the prison industrial complex. There has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, extreme segregation and neo-slave labor via incarceration -- all in the name of "crime control". It is the current manifestation of the legal legacy of the racialized transformations of plantations into prisons, of Slave Codes into Black Codes, of lynching into state-sponsored executions. The "imputation of crime to color" that Frederick Douglass warned of 125 years ago continues to the present.