Organized Inside and Out: The Angola Special Civics Project and the Crisis of Mass Incarceration

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s the U.S. prison system expanded at an unprecedented rate, with the South emerging as the region with the highest incarceration rate in the nation. This article charts how prisoners at the nation's largest maximum-security prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly referred to as Angola, leveraged this moment of crisis to collectively organize for freedom through the Angola Special Civics Project by using a combination of research, political education, electoral organizing, and coalition building. This article contends that their organizing should be conceptualized as a form of prison abolitionist reforms to be learned from today.