Operations
Angola is still operated as a working farm; Warden Burl Cain once said that the key to running a peaceful maximum security prison was that "you've got to keep the inmates working all day so they're tired at night." In 2009 James Ridgeway of Mother Jones said Angola was "An 18,000-acre complex that still resembles the slave plantation it once was."
Of all American prisons, Angola has the largest number of inmates on life sentences in the United States. As of 2009 Angola had 3,712 inmates on life sentences, making up 74% of the population. Per year, 32 inmates die, while 4 are paroled during the same span of time. Louisiana's tough sentencing laws result in long sentences for the inmate population, which mostly consists of armed robbers, murderers, and rapists. In 1998 Peter Applebome of The New York Times said "It's impossible to visit the place and not feel that a prisoner could disappear off the face of the earth and no one would ever know or care."
Most new prisoners begin working in cotton fields; a prisoner may spend years working his way to a better job.
In Angola parlance a "freeman" is a prison guard. Around 2000, the prison guards were among the lowest-paid in the United States, and few of them had graduated from high school. As of 2009 about half of the prison guards were female.
LSP prisoners perform cleaning and general maintenance services for the West Feliciana Parish School Board and other government agencies and nonprofit groups within the West Feliciana Parish.
Warden Burl Cain maintains an open-door policy with the media, which led to the production of the award winning documentary The Farm. Films such as Dead Man Walking and Monster's Ball were partly filmed in Angola.
The prison hosts a rodeo every April and October, and its inmates produce the award-winning magazine The Angolite, available to the general public and relatively uncensored. There is a museum which features among its exhibits Louisiana's old electric chair, "Gruesome Gertie", last used for the execution of Andrew Lee Jones on 22 July 1991. Angola Prison is also home to the country's only inmate-operated radio station.
Read more about this topic: Louisiana State Penitentiary
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is three or four feet deep, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)