Louisiana passes raft of bills to increase mass incarceration of adults and juveniles
A quick history lesson
Louisiana’s prison system, like that of many southern states, traces its modern origins to the abolition of slavery. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, banned slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime,” opening the door for states to use the criminal justice system as a legal way to oppress African Americans and extract value from forced labor.
An array of laws designed to criminalize Black people, called Black Codes, were enacted throughout the South in the wake of emancipation. A central element of these laws charged unemployed or unhoused Black people with “vagrancy,” a crime punishable by a term of labor if a fine was not paid. Thomas W. Conway, the Freedmen's Bureau commissioner for Louisiana, described how this system, known as convict leasing, was abused in Louisiana:
“In the city of New Orleans last summer, under the orders of the acting mayor of the city, Hugh Kennedy, the police of that city conducted themselves towards the freedmen, in respect to violence and ill usage, in every way equal to the old days of slavery; arresting them on the streets as vagrants, without any form of law whatever, and simply because they did not have in their pockets certificates of employment from their former owners or other white citizens.
”I have gone to the jails and released large numbers of them, men who were industrious and who had regular employment; yet because they had not the certificates of white men in their pockets they were locked up in jail to be sent out to plantations…”
One of these plantations later became a prison under state control: the infamous “Angola” Louisiana State Penitentiary. To this day, prisoners at Angola are forced to perform grueling agricultural labor, supervised by armed guards on horseback.
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