Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary) is a prison and a central setting in the account of efforts to free people sentenced to spend their lives behind bars for crimes committed as children. Its history as a slave plantation, its dangerous labor conditions, and its disciplinary system make the institution more than a backdrop: the punishments imposed there shaped the records later used to argue against release. The cases of Joshua Carter and Robert Caston bring that contradiction into a courtroom, where decades of confinement were finally heard as a reason to let them go.

A prison shaped by labor and discipline

Angola was described as a notoriously difficult place to serve time, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, when many of the people represented by the Equal Justice Initiative first arrived. The organization undertook representation of all sixty Louisiana prisoners eligible for relief from life-without-parole sentences for non-homicide offenses; most were at Angola. Their histories were shaped by violence, forced work, and a disciplinary system that could add punishment or time to an already severe sentence.

Prisoners were required to perform manual labor in difficult conditions. Refusal could bring solitary confinement or other discipline, while long hours in dangerous work environments sometimes left people seriously injured or without fingers or limbs. For years, incarcerated people were made to pick cotton in fields on the grounds of the former plantation. Those who refused could receive “write-ups” in their files and months in solitary confinement. The plantation’s older function thus persisted in altered form: labor remained compulsory, and resistance could be punished through confinement.

The consequences followed prisoners beyond the work detail or solitary cell. Many had accumulated long disciplinary records after years in harsh conditions and repeated warnings that they would die in prison regardless of their behavior. At resentencing hearings, state lawyers could then cite those records as evidence against a more favorable sentence. The institution’s punishments helped create the very histories later presented as reasons to keep people imprisoned.

Long-term imprisonment and the lives built within it

The account does not reduce the people at Angola to their disciplinary files. Several former juvenile lifers had remarkably few infractions despite serving years without expecting release or believing that their conduct would ever be reviewed. Some became trustees, mentors, or advocates against violence among other prisoners; others worked as law librarians, journalists, and gardeners. Angola developed programs for people who stayed out of trouble, and many took advantage of them. Their roles show how lives and capacities continued to develop inside a place organized around the expectation of permanent confinement.

The contrast matters especially in the cases selected for early resentencing. The legal team prioritized older prisoners who had spent decades at Angola and chose Joshua Carter and Robert Caston as its first two cases. Their histories joined youth, a non-homicide conviction, and an extraordinarily long sentence to the physical consequences of prison life. They were not simply seeking a theoretical chance of release: after decades inside, each needed a new sentence that could make release possible in practice.

Carter had been accused of rape in New Orleans in 1963, when he was sixteen, and quickly sentenced to death. Police beat him brutally to coerce a confession. In 1965, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned his conviction; he was then resentenced to life without parole and sent to Angola. After struggling for years, he became a model prisoner and trustee. In the 1990s he developed glaucoma, did not receive the medical care he needed, and soon lost his sight in both eyes. By the time his case was being argued, he was blind and in his sixties, after nearly fifty years in prison.

Caston had spent forty-five years at Angola. Forced labor in a prison factory had cost him several fingers and left him disabled. His case, like Carter’s, made the duration and bodily cost of imprisonment concrete: the sentence had not only kept him from returning to the community but had also marked his body through the work imposed inside the prison.

From Angola to the courtroom

The effort to secure release required repeated court appearances. At a hearing in New Orleans, the usual arrangement was for prisoners to view proceedings by video from Angola rather than be transported to court. After the lawyers’ arguments, the judge granted the motion to resentence Caston. As she described his conviction at sixteen and his forty-five years at Angola for a non-homicide crime, the normally noisy courtroom fell silent. Lawyers stopped conferring; prosecutors waiting on other cases, family members, and handcuffed prisoners listened.

The judge pronounced a sentence that meant Caston would be released immediately. The courtroom then erupted in applause, including from prosecutors, deputy sheriffs, family members, lawyers, and inmates in handcuffs. Because Caston could not see everything on the video monitor, his lawyer explained by phone what had happened. He was overjoyed. Caston became the first person released as a result of the Supreme Court’s ban on death-in-prison sentences for juvenile lifers.

The legal team then went to Carter’s courtroom and won a new sentence that also meant immediate release. Carter’s family, which had maintained a close relationship with him through the decades, celebrated the decision. A dozen or so relatives had regularly attended hearings, some traveling from as far away as California; his mother, nearly a hundred years old, had promised for decades that she would not die before he came home.

Release and the meaning of Angola

The change in sentence had to be made into a safe journey out. Angola’s release protocol was to let prisoners go at midnight with bus fare to New Orleans or another city in Louisiana. Rather than leave the two men to make that trip alone in the middle of the night, the legal team sent staff the several hours to Angola to meet them when they were released. The practical arrangements underscore how the prison’s distance and routines continued to shape the moment of freedom.

Angola’s place in these cases holds together punishment and possibility. A prison rooted in plantation history imposed dangerous labor and isolation, and the records produced under those conditions could be turned against people seeking a second chance. Yet Carter and Caston also built lives of service and responsibility within it, and a court ultimately recognized the injustice of keeping them there for the rest of their lives. Their release does not erase what Angola did to them; it marks the point at which decades of confinement no longer determined what came next.