Hell on Angola

Dead Man Walking largely takes place at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where Joseph De Rocher awaits his execution on death row. Known commonly as Angola, it is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, incarcerating approximately 5,000 people on 18,000 acres of land—a property larger than the island of Manhattan.

The name “Angola” derives from the site’s connection to slavery. In the 19th century, the property now spanned by the facility was once occupied by seven neighboring slave plantations: Angola, Bellevue, Lake Killarney, Lochlomand, Loango, Panola, and Monrovia. Most of this property, which originated from Spanish land grants awarded in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was used for the cultivation of cotton.

In 1834, the majority of Angola was acquired by Francis Routh, who established a commercial partnership with Tennessee slave trader Isaac Franklin. When Routh’s finances collapsed in 1837, Franklin took possession of the Angola plantations. Franklin died shortly thereafter, and the property was inherited by his wife Adelicia Hayes, who married businessman Joseph Alexander Smith Acklen in 1849. Hayes and Acklen split their time between Nashville and Angola, where in 1852 a newspaper reported that 700 slaves were cultivating cotton. In 1859, after Acklen had expanded his real estate portfolio by purchasing additional plantations, his and his wife’s properties produced 3,149 bales of cotton—the third most in Louisiana.

With the Civil War looming, Acklen pledged loyalty to the Confederacy, to which he donated $30,000, and the Angola properties—adjacent to the Mississippi River—served as the main river crossing for Confederate troops and provisions. In 1880, Acklen’s widow Adelicia and her third husband William Archer Cheatham sold their properties totaling over 10,000 acres to Louis Trager and Samuel L. James. A civil engineer, James had been awarded an exclusive contract with the Louisiana State Penitentiary under a system of “convict leasing” in 1870. This practice allowed states to lease their prisoners to private enterprises like plantations, mines, and railways. States would thus earn revenue from these contracts while businesses took advantage of cheap, coerced penal labor to further their commercial interests.

News spread widely of deleterious conditions at Angola, which became known as the “James Prison Camp.” The Prison Reform Association was founded in New Orleans in 1886, and the state of Louisiana bought back James’s property in 1900. After devastation caused by floods in 1902, 1912, and 1922, Angola was expanded to include additional neighboring plantations, bringing the total acreage to 18,000. Though federal management of the penitentiary aimed to improve working conditions for prisoners, the facility’s reputation for brutality persisted throughout the 20th century. In 1943, former prisoner William Sadler published “Hell on Angola,” a series of articles in The Angolite—the prison’s inmate-operated newspaper—exposing abuses at the institution. Just a decade later, a group of 31 inmates known as the “Heel String Gang” cut their own Achilles tendons to protest conditions at Angola. In the 1960s, the prison was dubbed the “bloodiest prison in the South.” Women were permanently removed from the premises in 1961. And in 1971, prisoners brought a lawsuit against the state of Louisiana, alleging that the level of medical care provided at Angola violated the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Eighth Amendment, in addition to the rights of disabled inmates covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.

Today, Angola maintains several enterprises. Prisoners cultivate 38 types of vegetables, including corn, cotton, soybean, and wheat crops; herd 3,000 cattle (the prison has an annual rodeo); manufacture license plates (all Louisiana and Puerto Rico plates are made there); and operate a metal shop, silkscreen shop, and a factory that produces mattresses, brooms, and mops. As of 2021, Louisiana sentences prisoners to life without parole more frequently than any other state in the U.S. And as of 2022, 73% of all inmates serving life sentences at Angola are Black—more than twice their proportion of the state population. As of May 2023, the U.S. incarcerates 531 people for every 100,000 residents, while Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the nation. Dead Man Walking is thus set in one of the most carceral places in the world.