Harsh conditions in Angola prison

Angola Prison’s harsh conditions were not incidental hardships but a system of coercive confinement: people sentenced as children faced dangerous labor, punishment for refusing it, and disciplinary records later used to resist their release. The account traces this regime from the prison’s history as a slave plantation to the long sentences and institutional hearings that made its effects endure.

Labor, Punishment, and Angola’s History

Angola Prison was a former slave plantation, and that history continued to shape the work imposed on prisoners. For years, people incarcerated there were made to pick cotton in the fields. Those who refused could receive disciplinary write-ups in their files and spend months in solitary confinement. Refusal did not simply end the labor assignment; it could bring a further punishment that deepened the isolation of an already confined person.

The work was also physically dangerous. In the decades when many of the clients first arrived, especially the 1970s and 1980s, prisoners faced difficult manual labor and harsh working environments. Long hours could leave people seriously injured, including the loss of fingers or limbs. Prisoners who encountered conflicts with other incarcerated people or staff could receive additional punishments or time added to their sentences, while resisting work could lead to solitary confinement or other discipline. These conditions made punishment part of the ordinary structure of prison life, not an exceptional response to a single act.

Disciplinary Records and the Prospect of Release

The violence and severity of confinement had consequences beyond the immediate punishment. Many prisoners accumulated long disciplinary records after years in an environment where it was difficult to avoid write-ups arising from conflicts, dangerous work, or refusal to labor. At resentencing hearings, state lawyers relied on those records to argue against more favorable sentences. A history produced under harsh conditions could thus follow a prisoner into a proceeding meant to reconsider a sentence imposed when he was a child.

The record was not uniform. Several former juvenile lifers developed strong institutional histories with few disciplinary infractions, despite serving for years without hope of release or reason to expect their conduct would ever be reviewed. Some became trustees, mentors, or advocates against violence among prisoners; others worked as law librarians, journalists, and gardeners. Angola Prison developed programs for incarcerated people who stayed out of trouble, and many of these men made use of them. Their achievements stand in sharp contrast to the conditions that surrounded them: they established roles of service and skill inside an institution that had long given them reason to believe they would die there.

Lasting Bodily Costs and Reentry

The damage of Angola’s labor regime remained visible after the work itself ended. Robert Caston had spent forty-five years at Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary); work in a prison factory cost him several fingers and left him disabled. His injuries show how confinement could shape a person’s life not only through sentence length and disciplinary records, but through lasting physical harm.

For clients released after decades in prison, the consequences also extended into the difficult work of rebuilding a life outside. EJI created a reentry program for people incarcerated as children, offering housing, job training, life-skills support, counseling, and other services. The organization told judges and parole boards it would help meet clients’ needs, recognizing that release from a place like Angola did not by itself undo the effects of years of confinement.

The Long Sentence at Angola

Joshua Carter’s history shows how Angola’s conditions became entangled with sentences imposed on children and the later effort to secure their release. Accused of rape in New Orleans at sixteen, he was quickly sentenced to death; police beat him while trying to force a confession, and the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1965. He was then resentenced to life without parole and sent to Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary). After struggling for years, he became a model prisoner and trustee, but in the 1990s he developed glaucoma and, without the medical care he needed, lost his sight in both eyes. By the time advocates urged prosecutors to release him, he was blind, in his sixties, and had spent nearly fifty years in prison.

Resentencing and the Courtroom Aftermath

EJI prioritized resentencing cases in Louisiana for the “old-timers,” juvenile lifers who had spent decades in prison, and chose Joshua Carter and Robert Caston as its first two cases. Their histories carried different bodily consequences of incarceration: Carter, after nearly fifty years in prison, was blind from glaucoma that had gone untreated; Caston had lost several fingers in a prison factory and was disabled by the forced labor. The effort to obtain new sentences therefore brought the physical costs of Angola into proceedings where those costs had to be made visible to prosecutors and courts.

Those proceedings unfolded in the Orleans Parish courthouse, a vast building whose grand marble floors and high ceilings contrasted with the disorder of its daily calendar. Hearing dates and times were unreliable; lawyers, clients, and families waited among stacks of cases in overcrowded courtrooms, while judges tried to manage proceedings through bench meetings. Dozens of young men, most of them Black, sat handcuffed in orange jail jumpsuits at the front. Resentencing offered a route toward reconsideration, but reaching that route meant navigating a crowded court system in which even a scheduled hearing might not be heard when expected.