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Angola has always been hellish, especially in the 1970s when it wreaked of corruption and abuse. It was segregated with horrific rampant rage, frequent murders, and sexual bondage - inmates sold to each other as sex slaves or in exchange for favors. No wonder it was called America's worst prison, a distinction as true today, including chain of command encouragement of widespread, systematic violence, including guard beatings, sexual assaults, other abuses amounting to torture, and use of solitary confinement as punishment for activism or any other reason arbitrarily.
Today, Angola prisoners are 75% black under a compulsory 40 hour or longer workweeks (eight hours or longer a day, five days a week) plus weekends for bad disciplinary reports, often fabricated for more labor.
They till fields for 4 cents an hour, under constant watch as virtual slaves. In the 1970s, it was 96 hours (16 hours a day, six days a week) for 2 cents an hour at what was called the "Bloodiest Prison in the South" because of endemic guard-inflicted and prisoner-on-prisoner violence.
The Angola 3 fought conditions with nonviolent hunger and work strikes. Prison authorities retaliated by framing them for murders they didn't commit, Woodfox and Wallace for Miller's death, King for another prisoner.
Today Angola's mission statement says:
"The philosophy of Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP) is to provide services in a professional manner so as to protect the safety of the public, staff, and inmate population. Consistent with this, it is LSP's responsibility to provide meaningful opportunities to enhance, through a variety of education, work, social service and medical programs, the individual's desire to become a productive member of society, while providing a safe, stable work environment for employees."
Inmates see it otherwise, calling reforms "cosmetic." Former prisoner and now Executive Secretary of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana calls Angola a "sophisticated plantation (where) cotton is king" and inmates near slaves - "given enough food, clothing and shelter to be a financial asset to the owner," but little else.
Louisiana's entire prison system is no different, Angola the preeminent example, a de facto slave plantation, preventing its inmates from ever "becom(ing) a productive member of society" because long sentences without parole deny it - the idea being once incarcerated, free them only for burial on Angola's expansive acreage after extracting a lifetime of forced labor.
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