, a singer who was jailed at Angola when recorded by
Alan Lomax.|alt= , who served as a warden at Angola . The
electric chair is a replica of the original "
Gruesome Gertie". The of land the correctional facility sits on what was known before the
American Civil War as the Angola Plantations, a
slave plantation owned by
slave trader Isaac Franklin. It became known as
Angola, and nicknamed the "
Alcatraz of the South", "
The Angola Plantation" and "
The Farm." 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, Louisiana, was modeled on a prison in
Wethersfield, Connecticut. It was built to house 100 convicts in cells of . 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 the forced labor of African Americans. The land 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 he died 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 after
the country on the west coast of Southern Africa, from which many enslaved people 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 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.
20th century operations The
Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections says this facility opened as a state prison in 1901. The state began transferring prison facilities out of the old penitentiary into Angola. The old penitentiary continued to be used as a receiving station, hospital, clothing, and shoe factory, and place for executions until it finally closed in 1917. The history and archaeology of the old penitentiary provides insights into inmates' structures and daily life. "Trusty" prisoners who assisted the guards later sought pardons from
Governor Huey Long. Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, authors of
The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, stated 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 was stabbed. Wolfe and Lornell stated that the staff, consisting of 90 people, "ran the prison like it was a private fiefdom." The two authors stated that prisoners were viewed as the worst of the lowest order". 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 stated that the re-appropriation of funds occurred "mysteriously". In 1948, governor
Earl Kemp Long appointed
Rollo C. Lawrence, a former mayor of
Pineville, as the first Angola superintendent. Long subsequently established the warden position as one of
political patronage. Long appointed distant relatives as wardens of the prison. 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 them. 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. In February 1951, 31 inmates, in protest of the prison's conditions, cut their own
Achilles tendons. Unable to use both feet, the inmates hopped around and sang "The Heel-String Boogie", and the group was labeled the Heel String Gang. When the protest made headlines, Long convened a committee of 32 judges, law officers and media members to investigate conditions at the prison. By May, the number of inmates who had slashed their Achilles tendons had risen to 55. However, the protest was successful; the committee recommended several reforms, including the abolition of corporal punishment at the prison. In its November 22, 1952 issue, ''
Collier's Magazine referred to Angola as "the worst prison in America". 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. McDonald was captured later in Texas, after returning to the United States from Mexico. McDonald said that two of his fellow escapees drowned, but warden Maurice Sigler disputed this. 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. In 1971, the
American Bar Association criticized the conditions at Angola. Linda Ashton of the
Associated Press stated that the bar association described Angola as "medieval, squalid and horrifying". 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. 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 had improved conditions. On June 21, 1989, US District Judge Polozola declared a new state of emergency at Angola. In 1993 Angola officers fatally shot 29-year-old escapee Tyrone Brown.
Burl Cain served as the warden from 1995 to March 7, 2016. He was known for numerous improvements, lowering the prison violence rate, and numerous criminal allegations. 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.
21st century In 2004, Paul Harris of
The Guardian wrote, "Unsurprisingly, Angola has always been famed for brutality, riots, escape and murder." 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. As evidence that the prison had retained its notoriety, Nagin warned: 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. 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 or hire additional employees. On March 11, 2014, Glenn Ford, a man wrongfully convicted of murder 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. 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 is harmful to both mental and physical health and has been considered to be "cruel and unusual punishment" under the US Constitution. In March 2019, seven members of staff at the facility were arrested for rape, smuggling items to inmates, and maintaining personal relationships with prisoners. In 2020, regarding the
COVID-19 pandemic in Louisiana,
ProPublica wrote that prisoners alleged that deliberately low testing rates masked an epidemic in the prison. Prison officials denied the prisoner's allegations. Legal advocates like the
American Civil Liberties Union and the
Southern Poverty Law Center were involved in advocating for the juvenile detainees, mostly black boys, to be removed from Angola, citing concerns about their mental health, access to education, and the excessive heat in the former death row unit the boys were being held in. In 2025, DHS in partnership with Louisiana opened a
immigrant detention site dubbed
Camp 57 or
Louisiana Lockup which will hold up to 416 beds and "was made possible by the
One Big Beautiful Bill". ==Management==