“Ain’t Nothing Easy ‘Bout Being in Angola”: Farm Labor and Punishment at the Louisiana State Penitentiary

Abstract

Existing literature on penal farm labor is dominated by the prison-industrial complex (PIC), which argues that private companies profit from penal labor and incarceration more broadly. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison, incarcerated men perform fieldwork. In this thesis, I ask: how does penal farm labor shape the material, corporeal, and emotional conditions of men who are serving time at Angola? What was the utility of penal farm labor for the state of Louisiana from the 1980s until the 2010s? I conducted interviews with 26 formerly incarcerated men who described their violent experiences with fieldwork at Angola. I argue that fieldwork is a disciplinary mechanism that helped the state of Louisiana manage its political economic crisis beginning in the 1980s. The PIC fails to explain Angola’s farm economy because the food produced at Angola stays within the state prison system. My proposed framework of carceral reproduction fills in the gap left by the PIC. Carceral reproduction captures how Angola’s closed, circular farm economy reduced the Louisiana state prison system’s operating costs. In doing so, penal farm labor at Angola offered a solution to the political conundrum of how to run a prison system when the state lacked the money to do so.