Teens Are Being Sent to Louisiana’s Angola Prison and Held on Its Former Death Row

One day last summer, 17-year-old Alex learned, while watching the news, that kids detained at the juvenile facility where he was living were slated to be transferred to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. Alex was overcome by fear and couldn’t sleep. While waiting to be taken to the notoriously violent adult, maximum-security prison, he started pulling out his hair. 

In October, Louisiana acted on its decision and transferred the first group of children to Angola — without providing advance notice to them, their parents, guardians, or lawyers. The ACLU, where I work, represents Alex (who is using a pseudonym because he is underage) and several other young people in a lawsuit against the state of Louisiana, challenging this inhumane transfer of children to Angola. 

Alex has yet to be transferred, but at least eight other children have been, and he fears he could be next….

Angola: a place of despair, punishment, and brutality

Angola prison is notorious for modern-day human rights abuses and it serves as a monument to this country’s legacy of slavery. Before Angola became the nation’s largest prison, it was a site of torture and enslavement for Black people, including children, who were forced to labor in the fields. After the Civil War, Angola was converted to a prison camp where slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing. Under the convict leasing system, municipalities and states arrested Black people primarily, including the recently emancipated, and “leased” them to labor without pay on farms, construction projects, in mines, factories, and as domestic workers. 

In 1901, Louisiana took control of Angola and built its state penitentiary on the land. To this day, armed prison guards on horseback surveil the thousands of incarcerated men, mostly Black, who are forced to labor in the very same fields where their ancestors were made to toil over 200 years ago. 

For decades, Angola has been the subject of lawsuits and criminal investigations alleging and documenting systemic abuse of the incarcerated, including physical beatings, failure to provide adequate health care, and torture through placement in solitary confinement. It is in this place of despair — this site of racial oppression, punishment, and brutality — that Louisiana is now detaining children, most of whom are Black. To make matters worse, the state’s leaders are forcing these children to live on Angola’s former death row. 

Children are sent to Angola as punishment

The children who are being moved to Angola have not been convicted of a crime, but adjudicated as “delinquent” in a civil proceeding. No other state in the nation has placed children who have not been charged with or convicted of a crime in a maximum-security, adult prison.

Placing children in prison settings is not only immoral, it is unconstitutional. Children in the juvenile justice system have a legal right to rehabilitation, not punishment. Rehabilitation means that kids should live in an environment that still feels like a home or in a dorm where they have access to school, counseling, therapy, recreation, and other services, and in-person visits with their families.