Angola Prison’s Black Ecologies

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This article fuses ethnography, spatial analysis, interviews, and archival research to explore the ways that people incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP) experience the uneven impacts of anthropogenic climate change. LSP, more commonly known as Angola Prison, is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. The prison population is majority Black, and most of the people incarcerated at Angola will spend the majority of their lives imprisoned there. Angola was established post-Civil War with the consolidation of four plantations in northern Louisiana into a prison farm, built and maintained by the same regimes of forced labor, torture, sexual violence, and authoritarianism as the plantations which preceded it. Angola has always been a lucrative site of agricultural production due to its proximity to the floodplain at a bend in the Mississippi, the product of its rich soils routinely replenished by the river’s deluging of the land. However, anthropogenic climate change has increased the level of inundation in the lower Mississippi Delta, leading to an increase in catastrophic flooding in the region. The prison has been evacuated several times over the past 20 years due to flooding, leading to the deaths of several elderly inmates and intensified regimes of forced labor as inmates are forced to work harder every year to maintain a failing levee system. This essay utilizes a Black Ecologies framework to explore not only the lived experiences of people enduring the effects of these climate disasters while incarcerated but also the important political and intellectual contributions made by Angola’s prisoners since the mid-19th century. A Black Ecologies framework elucidates how, despite unlivable conditions, inmates at Angola have provided crucial critiques of the prison industrial complex that crystallize an emergent form of authoritarianism that articulates itself at the convergence of anthropogenic climate change, racial capitalism, and incarceration. Angola’s carceral ecologies have key implications for environmental justice scholarship, and this article argues that the lived experiences and political critiques of incarcerated people must become integrated into contemporary environmental justice struggles.