LOUISIANA JUSTICE ISSUES
Louisiana did not stumble accidentally into the title of world’s highest incarcerator, a distinction it has held for more than three decades. Rather from its earliest days as a French colony, the government intentionally built a system of laws—and eventually a system of jails and prisons—that used incarceration as a way of controlling people, predominantly Black people, and using them for forced labor.
Photograph by Keely Merritt, Historic New Orleans Collection
Policing was used as a tool on top of enslavement to separate people by race and to ensure maximum control over enslaved people. The Code Noir de la Louisiane (the Black Code of Louisiana) was a set of French colonial laws that imposed greater penalties on Black people than on others for the same crime, including through severe physical violence and forced labor. These practices continued under Spanish rule in the later 18th century.
After Louisiana was purchased by the United States in 1803, New Orleans became the center of the country’s domestic slave trade, exponentially increasing the number of enslaved people in the city. Incarceration was heavily relied on to control enslaved people and ensure continued white supremacy. The city’s reliance on incarcerated labor grew, as did the city’s network of police jails.
While the Civil War ended legal slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution allowed for forced labor for people convicted of crimes. Louisiana pivoted to the practice of convict leasing to ensure the ongoing control of Black people and a reliable source of cheap labor. To keep labor supplies flowing, Louisiana expanded criminal laws to make it easier to arrest people and enshrined in its constitution non-unanimous jury verdicts, allowing conviction even when not all jurors agreed on guilt.
These changes coincided with the state’s purchase of Angola Plantation in 1901, a consolidated plantation of over 10,000 acres that previously had served as a slave plantation and where later imprisoned people were leased to labor. The practice of convict leasing ended, forced labor was codified and the state consolidated power over its incarcerated population, almost all of which was Black.
Angola, a former slave plantation now known as Louisiana State Penitentiary, is more than 18,000 acres, and even today operates as a working farm run on the labor of over 4,000 convicted people.
From the beginning, conditions at Angola were notoriously brutal. People were subjected not just to backbreaking physical labor, but also to medical neglect, religious and racial discrimination, hazardous facilities and dangerous overcrowding. In 1951, incarcerated people protested by slicing their Achilles tendons, and in the 1970s a series of lawsuits by incarcerated people led to federal oversight of Angola as well as the state’s other prisons and jails.
State officials were under intense pressure to improve conditions, in particular by reducing overcrowding. Rather than release people they built more state facilities and began to pay local sheriffs to house people serving state sentences in their jails. The income allowed sheriffs to build bigger jails and accommodate even more state prisoners.
The growth of prison and jail capacity dovetailed with the “tough on crime” policies of the 70s and 80s during which many laws were passed that increased mandatory minimums, made sentences longer, and created new crimes. It was increasingly easy to fill the beds being built. By the early 2000s, the New Orleans jail population was bigger than that of Angola.
Louisiana made one concerted effort to draw down its incarcerated population in 2017 through a process known as Justice Reinvestment. Based on a statistical analysis of drivers of incarceration, the Legislature passed a bipartisan package of laws that:
Reduced mandatory minimums
Shortened sentencing ranges for non-violent offenses
Increased earned good time
Improved parole access
In 5 years, these measures saved the state over $150 million and reduced recidivism rates.
In 2024, in a brief two-week legislative session dedicated to addressing “crime,” the Legislature rolled back Justice Reinvestment efforts, and went further.
Parole was abolished for almost everyone
Early release policies were gutted
Challenging convictions and sentences became harder
These measures all but ensure another overcrowding crisis and declare a concerted return to Louisiana’s roots as a state committed to incarceration.
MASS INCARCERATION
The racist roots of Louisiana’s incarceration addiction have carried through to today. As of 2025, the state’s incarcerated population hovered over 29,000.
Louisiana’s prisons are more disproportionately Black than any state except Maryland (whose prison population is half the size of Louisiana’s).
Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration (Historic New Orleans collection, 2025) John Bardes
The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024)
Louisiana’s Turn to Mass Incarceration: The Building of a Carceral State, Feb. 1 2018 (American Association of Geographers)
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