Louisiana State Penitentiary

Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, is presented as a prison where the history of plantation labor persists in the conditions of confinement, and where long-imprisoned people confront both dangerous discipline and the possibility of change. Nearly all of the sixty Louisiana prisoners serving life without parole for non-homicide offenses who became eligible for relief were held there. For the Equal Justice Initiative, Angola was therefore not only the place from which clients had to be brought to court; its labor regime, disciplinary records, and distance from ordinary life also shaped the struggle to win and carry out their release.

History and setting

Before the end of the Civil War, the site was a slave plantation. In later decades the prison continued to make incarcerated people work in its fields, including picking cotton. The book places that continuity in the background of contemporary resentencing cases: the plantation’s labor did not disappear from the institution’s story when slavery ended, but was carried forward through compulsory work and punishment for refusing it.

Angola was especially difficult for prisoners during the 1970s and 1980s, when many of the Louisiana clients had first arrived. The prison’s physical and institutional isolation mattered beyond its walls. People serving long sentences could be held far from the communities and relatives to which they hoped to return, while the work and disciplinary systems of the institution determined what would be recorded in their files and later argued about in court.

Labor, discipline, and institutional records

Prisoners were required to perform manual labor in difficult environments. Those who refused could face solitary confinement or other disciplinary action; years of cotton picking were among the work demands imposed at the prison. Refusal could also produce a write-up in a prisoner’s file and months in solitary. In dangerous work settings, long hours sometimes left incarcerated people seriously injured, including the loss of fingers or limbs.

Violence and conflict with other prisoners or staff could also lead to disciplinary charges, or disciplinaries, that added punishment or time to a sentence. The accumulation of such records was not simply a measure of individual conduct. The prison’s coercive work conditions and the expectation that many prisoners would never be released helped produce the very histories that state lawyers later cited against them at resentencing hearings. The book thus shows institutional punishment extending beyond the cell or work detail: a disciplinary record could follow a person into court and become an argument against a second chance.

Change, programs, and prisoners’ lives

The account also records change within the institution. Over time, Angola developed programs for incarcerated people who stayed out of trouble, and some former juvenile lifers made use of them despite having no expectation that their institutional histories would ever be reviewed. Some became trustees, mentors, or advocates against violence among prisoners; others worked as law librarians, journalists, and gardeners. Their roles complicate a prison narrative in which people sentenced as children are treated as incapable of growth. They built useful lives and relationships inside a place that had told them they would die there.

That achievement existed alongside the threat of isolation and the demands of forced labor, not instead of them. A small number of disciplinaries could mark an unusually strong institutional record, while a long list could reflect years spent under harsh conditions and persistent punishment. The distinction mattered because resentencing lawyers were preparing to contest the State’s use of those records, not merely to present them as transparent measures of character.

Joshua Carter and Robert Caston

Joshua Carter arrived at Angola after a sequence of reversals. In 1963, when he was sixteen, he was accused of rape in New Orleans and sentenced to death. Police beat him to coerce a confession; in 1965, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned his conviction. Carter was then resentenced to life without parole and sent to Angola. After years of struggle, he became a model prisoner and trustee. In the 1990s he developed glaucoma, did not receive the medical care he needed, and lost his sight in both eyes. By the time the Equal Justice Initiative sought his release, he was blind and in his sixties, after nearly fifty years in prison.

Robert Caston had been incarcerated at Angola for forty-five years. He lost several fingers while working in a prison factory and was disabled as a result of the forced labor. His case made the institution’s costs concrete: the work imposed inside the prison had left lasting physical damage, while his decades-long sentence had kept him there for a non-homicide crime committed when he was sixteen.

Resentencing and release

Louisiana’s resentencing effort focused first on the old-timers, including Carter and Caston. Their cases required repeated trips to the Orleans Parish courthouse, where hearings were difficult to schedule and crowded courtrooms were full of people waiting to be heard. The prison’s ordinary procedure was to keep people at Angola and let them watch hearings by video rather than bring them to New Orleans. At Caston’s hearing, after the judge granted the motion, she recited the facts of his conviction and forty-five years at Angola before imposing a sentence that required his immediate release. The courtroom fell silent, then erupted in applause from lawyers, prosecutors, family members, deputy sheriffs, and handcuffed prisoners. Because Caston could not see everything on the video monitor, his lawyer explained the ruling to him by phone; he was overjoyed and became the first person released as a result of the Supreme Court’s ban on death-in-prison sentences for juvenile lifers.

Carter’s resentencing followed in another courtroom down the hall, and his new sentence also meant immediate release. The releases still had to be made practical. Angola’s protocol was to release prisoners at midnight and provide bus fare to New Orleans or another city in Louisiana. Rather than leave the newly released men to make that journey alone in the middle of the night, staff were sent to Angola to meet them. The contrast captures the institution’s place in the book: Angola had held Carter and Caston for decades, but the court’s decision, family and legal advocacy, and arrangements for re-entry opened a route out.