A rural Louisiana prison known as Angola,
“the Farm.”• 18,000 acre former slave plantation where, to this day, many prison officials and staff
are directly descended from the families of original plantation owners and overseers
who controlled the land generations before.
• More than three-quarters of the 5,000+ prisoners at Angola are African-American,
and because Louisiana has some of the harshest sentencing practices in the country,
85% will die there.
• In the 1970s Angola was still racially segregated and regarded by the Louisiana State
Department of Corrections in its own official history as the “bloodiest prison in the
south.”
• A gruesome system of sexual slavery, where new prisoners were openly bought and
sold into submission, was sanctioned and facilitated by guards, as Warden Henderson
admits in his own book.
• Favored inmates were given state-issued weapons and ordered to enforce this brutal
sexual slavery and other abusive and corrupt prison practices. From 1972 to 1975 this
armed inmate guard system claimed the lives of 40 prisoners and seriously injured
more than 350.
• Although reforms in the late 1970s reduced the workweek from 96 to 40 hours, and
raised the minimum wage from 2 to 4 cents an hour, today inmates at the prison still
make only 4 to 20 cents an hour harvesting soybeans, cotton, corn and wheat.