Canary in the Coal Mine

Mass Incarceration in Louisiana

Cody R. Melcher

June 4, 2024

The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930

by John K. Bardes

University of North Carolina Press

2024

Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana

by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

University of North Carolina Press

2023

“I am not a friend to standing Armies in a free country but we are in a country of Slaves.”

John Watkins, Mayor of New Orleans, 1805

For the past year, I have taught incarcerated students in the Louisiana penitentiary system through a prison education program. Every week, I make the roughly two-hour trek from New Orleans to a rural parish just north of Bogalusa—a four-hour round trip that keeps many of the inmates from regularly receiving visitors. I know I’m getting close to the prison when the air becomes putrid from the unmistakable smell of a paper mill, a stark reminder as to why the prison is here in the first place.

Perhaps surprising to most, much of Louisiana has been historically reliant on timber (mostly pine) extraction and processing. Bogalusa’s original saw mill was once the largest in the world. Timber work in the South has always relied on an interracial workforce, making the industry home to some of the first interracial labor unions in the country. The Brotherhood of Timber Workers, one of the largest affiliates of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World, had roughly thirty thousand Black and white members primarily concentrated in Louisiana and Texas. By 1919, the mill workers in Bogalusa joined a nationwide wave of labor militancy by going on strike—a strike that was ultimately broken by a company-sponsored militia and a decades-long resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

By the 1960s, international trends toward automation and outsourcing hit Bogalusa’s majority Black population especially hard. Employment at the mill—essentially the only large employer in the region—declined exponentially, leading to an intense increase in unemployment, poverty, and crime. In 1982 a “savior” emerged: the prison. Today, it is one of, if not the, largest employers in the region. There is unmistakable irony—an irony not lost on the incarcerated themselves—that the prison “saved” many of the residents of Bogalusa from a life of incarceration by offering them relatively stable employment. They know that one’s position on either side of the bars is more luck of the draw than anything else. If only a prison had been built where they once lived!

The self-perpetuating nature of prison labor mirrors this perverse logic of “saving” communities by making them economically dependent on the maintenance (if not the expansion) of mass incarceration. Unlike the sloppy caricatures painted by (probably) well-meaning liberals in mainstream exposés like the Netflix documentary 13th, an overwhelming majority of prison inmates do not perform uncompensated labor for private for-profit corporations.¹ They are, however, expected to perform uncompensated labor. In Louisiana, when convicted of a crime, one is quite literally—and this is the actual verbiage used in convictions—sentenced to “hard labor.” This hard labor, though, is primarily used for the reproduction of the prison itself. The goal is to make mass incarceration cost as little as possible for the taxpayer. If that means virtually enslaving the incarcerated to ensure the prison is maintained as cheaply as possible, so be it.

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If I have learned one thing living in and studying the US South, it is that, contrary to popular and academic stereotypes of backwardness, docility, and a lack of class consciousness, workers in the South are vividly aware and deeply resentful of their place in society. It is precisely because southern workers are so militant that the most oppressive social and political structures are designed to contain and suppress them. Massive insurrectional revolts in colonial Virginia led to the invention of what we now call “white supremacy” to divide and conquer a united force of European indentured servants and African slaves; an economic and political alliance of white and Black sharecroppers throughout the South in the late nineteenth century necessitated the creation of Jim Crow, again, to divide and conquer the southern working class; while the explosion of the southern labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s led to a racialized New Deal and a reinvigoration of white supremacist violence.² It was not random or inevitable that the Klan would flourish in places like Bogalusa; employers needed it to.

All of this is to say that the South has often been on the cutting edge in the suppression of working class militancy. The South is not backwards; if anything, labor relations in the South have predicted and influenced the behavior of northern capitalists for hundreds of years. This is the shared thesis of two new books on mass incarceration in Louisiana: John K. Bardes’ The Carceral City and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs’ Prison Capital.

Both works, while covering dramatically different eras of incarceration, show that the mass expansion of the prison is tied directly to ruling-class fear of working-class rebellion and resistance. Because resistance is most intense in the South, technologies of oppression—like the first professionalized police force, the chain gang, creative solutions to prison overcrowding, if not the prison itself—were first developed in the South, only to be later copied in the North. As national policies continue to mimic the regressive politics once reserved for the “backward” South, it becomes clear that the South is not stuck in some sort of premodern mire, but rather a harbinger of what is to come.

If I have learned one thing living in and studying the US South, it is that, contrary to popular and academic stereotypes of backwardness, docility, and a lack of class consciousness, workers in the South are vividly aware and deeply resentful of their place in society. It is precisely because southern workers are so militant that the most oppressive social and political structures are designed to contain and suppress them.

The Carceral City is a trope killer. Bardes positions himself against popular accounts of the expansion of mass incarceration, like Michelle Alexander’s extremely influential The New Jim Crow and the previously mentioned 13th.³ These latter works argue that incarceration, especially anything resembling mass incarceration, is a relatively recent invention. Prisons, especially in the South, only began to expand after the abolition of slavery. The loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment—that slavery is unconstitutional, except as punishment of a crime—was used by former slaveowners to regain unremunerated labor and complete control over freed people. So, mass arrests were made on trumped up charges of “vagrancy” in a project of re-enslavement widespread throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mass incarceration, as we know it today, did not come about until the 1970s as a reaction to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the economic displacements of deindustrialization, and the subsequent rightward swing of national politics. As Alexander’s title suggests, mass incarceration is “new”.

Bardes shows, however, that incarceration was not only common throughout the South prior to abolition, but incarceration rates were higher during slavery than at any point since. At first blush, incarceration seems unnecessary during slavery, given that the whole underlying logic of chattel slavery is the complete and violent control over the enslaved.

In the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois and Herbert Aptheker, Bardes convincingly illustrates that mass incarceration was an invention of southern slavery due to both widespread fear of slave rebellion and the reality of pervasive resistance to enslavement.⁴ In other words, slaveowners needed mass incarceration to protect the institution of slavery itself. Incarceration would discipline those slaves who were perpetually resistant to enslavement. The unspoken assumption of the popular and academic literature Bardes disputes is that incarceration was redundant during slavery because slaves were not sufficiently rebellious to warrant a state-based response. Bardes, however, rightfully emphasizes the agency of slaves, and the manner of the state’s response to this agency.

In 1805, New Orleans established a formal police force and a jail specifically for slaves (Geôle de police; anglicized to Police Jail), several decades before the creation of police departments in major northern cities. Louisana needed a police force and jail specifically to deal with the massive influx of former French colonial landowners and their slaves after the Haitian Revolution. Fearing “another Haiti” and attempting to curb a likely related increase in escape and marronage, the elite of Louisiana decided that confinement and forced “hard labor” (the same language used in convictions today) on public works were the only way to curb actual or potential rebellion. Similar police and slave jail arrangements were made throughout the South, in rural and urban areas.

By far the largest proportion of slaves were incarcerated for alleged “mobility crimes”: escapees, maroons, and for violations of curfew or pass regulations. Once captured—typically by municipal police or private slave catchers—slaves would be confined to the Police Jail, beaten and whipped in the presence of all other inmates, and forced to labor on the “négres de chaîne,” the chain gang. It was presumed that forced labor in public was more humiliating than “normal” slave labor, hence their almost exclusive use on public works projects like levees, sewers, and garbage collection.

Slave owners could also commit their slaves to the Police Jail as extra punishment for perceived misdeeds. Slave owners had to pay a per diem for each of their incarcerated slaves, a fee that was adjusted based on the public work needs of the city. The fee was low when the city needed labor and high when it didn’t. The infrastructure of many southern cities was predicated on incarcerated slave labor.

The South’s antebellum iteration of mass incarceration was premised on the assumption that the extreme punishment meted out through the private violence of slaveholders and their agents was insufficient to avoid slave rebellions. Even with the intricate web of prisons, workhouses, and law enforcement that was developed throughout the slave South, rebellions still regularly occurred. Free Black sailors were specifically targeted for incarceration on the grounds that they were fugitive slaves because they were particularly prone to leading slave revolts.

With the abolition of slavery incarceration simply continued (albeit in a modified form). Rather than the epochal shift posited by much of the literature on the “rise” of incarceration, the type and form of incarceration common throughout the antebellum South was consciously mimicked and expanded throughout the country.

...this population—especially those active in late-1960s urban uprisings—was perceived to be especially volatile by the ruling class and, thus, needed to be contained. This literal containment through mass incarceration led to an overcrowding crisis in many state prison systems. Louisiana, initially an outlier in its attempt to solve this problem, eventually became a case to be emulated throughout the country.

Prison Capital begins where The Carceral City ends. One major similarity between incarceration under slavery and incarceration until roughly the 1970s is that, at least relatively, one was not incarcerated for very long. The overwhelming majority of incarcerated slaves spent no more than one year in the Police Jail at a time. Throughout much of the twentieth century, being sentenced to “life in prison” in Louisiana very rarely meant serving anything more than ten years and six months until parole. “Good time” releases were the rule, rather than the exception; blues legend Lead Belly was sentenced to “no less than” six years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary for attempted murder in 1930. Despite previously serving seven years of a thirty-year sentence in Texas for murder, he was out by 1934.

Contrast that to today, where mandatory minimums, repeat offender enhancements, and the elimination of parole entirely (which, as of August 1, 2024, will be the reality in Louisiana) keep inmates in prison for their entire lives, life sentence or no.⁵ While incarceration was “mass” from slavery until the present, the primary difference today is the amount of time one can expect to remain behind bars.

This contemporary explosion in incarceration length is due primarily to “tough on crime” and broken windows policing and prosecution, itself a ruling class attempt to contain and repress the surplus populations produced by mid-century deindustrialization and neoliberal welfare state contraction. As Pelot-Hobbs shows, this population—especially those active in late-1960s urban uprisings—was perceived to be especially volatile by the ruling class and, thus, needed to be contained. This literal containment through mass incarceration led to an overcrowding crisis in many state prison systems. Louisiana, initially an outlier in its attempt to solve this problem, eventually became a case to be emulated throughout the country.

Until the 1970s, Louisiana had one prison: Angola Plantation, named after the country of origin for many of the plantation’s original enslaved inhabitants. Angola is still an active cotton plantation, though relatively few inmates (usually those new to Angola) actually work its notoriously unprofitable field. Angola’s reputation for violence, degradation, and abuse is unmatched by any other American prison and its conditions have been popularized through music, movies, and documentaries. In 1951, thirty-seven inmates slashed their Achilles tendons in protest of conditions at the prison. By the 1970s, overcrowding at the prison multiplied the already heinous issues inmates faced. In response, four Angola inmates sued the state of Louisiana in 1971. This lawsuit, combined with a increased fears of a prison riot (the Attica Uprising also took place in 1971), led to a series of reforms in the state.

Prison Capital argues that Louisiana state officials interpreted the crisis at Angola as one that could be solved through decentralization. Rather than early release and genuine rehabilitation—as inmates themselves advocated—the state built more and more prisons. The increase in prisons would solve three problems: overcrowding at Angola, the need for employment in particularly depressed areas, and the perceived need to be tough on crime during a nationwide explosion of unemployment and urban unrest. While other states would not be able to expand their prison stock until much later—due to 1970s international stagflation and the OPEC embargo—Louisiana, as a major domestic producer of oil, found itself flush with cash. Essentially, this oil money shielded the state’s coffers from the recession. Over the next two decades, the state would build roughly a dozen new state prisons, effectively decentralizing Angola.

While Louisiana would decentralize its prison system, it would not solve the overcrowding issue through the construction of new prisons. As the state with the highest incarceration rate in the country, Louisiana still found itself in need of more prison beds than the tens of thousands it added.⁶ Louisana met this need by incarcerating state prisoners in local jails. Jails, as opposed to prisons, are built to be short-term places of confinement—typically with no recreational spaces and no rehabilitative or educational programs—making long-term confinement especially monotonous and inhumane.

The state of Louisiana pays parish sheriffs (an elected official in Louisiana) a daily fee to house each state prisoner in their parish jail—one can’t help be reminded of the daily fee slave owners paid to the Police Jail. These fees bolster the funds of local law enforcement agencies, while enabling the sheriff to decrease local taxes and thus ensure their political popularity. Unsurprisingly, local law enforcement has become reliant on maintaining a large state prison population in their jails. This dependence incentivizes more and more arrests, stricter sentencing laws, and the decrease (if not elimination) of pardons and parole.

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Louisiana is currently experiencing a regressive, if not out-right fascist renaissance. The new governor has championed and successfully passed a wide-ranging package of bills that include: a law that makes the possession of abortion-inducing drugs a crime (aimed at both healthcare providers and women generally); a law requiring the Ten Commandants be posted in every public school classroom; and a law that gives motorists immunity if they strike or kill protesters with their car.⁷ The speed—and, dare I say, competence—of state lawmakers belies the trope constantly repeated by Democratic politicians that the quick passage of “polarizing” legislation is impossible. Let us never forget that Democrats and Republicans serve the same master, and it isn’t the working class.

While we often do, the state government has not forgotten the incarcerated. Besides eliminating parole, the state has also recently expanded the accepted forms of execution for those on death row to include nitrogen asphyxiation and the electric chair.⁸ This will almost certainly result in a swift resumption of executions after a fourteen-year de facto suspension.

As it has been, Louisiana is still a canary in the coal mine. What happens to a state when its labor movement has been thoroughly decimated—its white workers, having nothing else, seduced by the wages of whiteness and its non-white working class cudgeled into submission through mass imprisonment? Louisiana happens. The reality of life for working-class Louisianians should give the reader pause, and an even greater impetus to militantly reject the rule of capital.

Canary in the Coal Mine

Mass Incarceration in Louisiana

Cody R. Melcher

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