A Win In Louisiana Against Cruel And Life-Threatening Prison Conditions

Norris Henderson and I knew of each other long before we actually met in New York 20 years ago. I’d written widely about the conditions, harms and failures of the American prison system, and Norris, the founder and executive director of the criminal justice policy shop Voice of the Experienced (V.O.T.E.) headquartered in New Orleans, had been wrongfully incarcerated for 27 years at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly and infamously known as Angola Prison.

This is to say that Norris was writing and otherwise documenting and organizing against the harms and failures while still held captive by them.

And just as Norris worked diligently in prison–as a jailhouse lawyer, as the co-founder of the Angola Special Civics Project, a trailblazing undertaking that sought to free other wrongfully convicted people prior to the inception of the Innocence Project, as the founder of a hospice program for prisoners and as the person who drafted the successful parole reform law for Lifers, so too did he work diligently post-incarceration from the very moment a judge, at long last, ordered his release.

Knowing the breadth, depth and brutality of Angola Prison, which today, spread across some 18,000 acres, is the size of New York City’s Manhattan, is the very land upon which enslaved people, including pregnant women and children once worked beneath the unforgiving South Louisiana sun from can’t see in the morning til can’t see at night, Norris founded V.O.T.E. in 2003. It is likely the most respected and successful criminal justice reform policy shop in the state–and a organization that has been a North Star for others in states far and wide where the mass incarceration of Black people can be linked directly to slavery and in the modern age, the determination to disrupt the gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the 1950s through the early 1970s.

By Any Other Name

Indeed, the laws that bound Black people to slavery for centuries, and which were supposed to be eviscerated by the 13th Amendment to the American Constitution, ratified in 1865. It actually just shifted the practice to a new class of people: prisoners.

Unpacked masterfully in director, screenwriter and producer, Ava DuVernay’s, 2016 film, 13th, the amendment reads:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, Except As A Punishment For Crime Whereof The Party Shall Have Been Duly Convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Of course “crime” and “duly convicted” are profoundly troubling when the arbiters of both are primarily and most certainly not Black. For more than 30 years the conditions at Angola had been documented by prisoners and generally ignored by lawmakers. Nearly 20 years ago–owing to the prisoners’ own advocacy–a team at Columbia University’s School of Journalism found that nearly all of the men and boys who were incarcerated at Angola were Black, “…while the officers who oversaw them were entirely [emphasis add] white. The officers were known as ‘Freemen,’ not guards.”

A decade on, in 2018, the nonpartisan research and policy organization, the Vera Institute disseminated a painstakingly evidenced and detailed report, An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System.

Top Line Takeaways From the Research

1. Discriminatory criminal justice policies and practices have historically and unjustifiably targeted [B]lack people since the Reconstruction Era, including Black Codes, vagrancy laws, and convict leasing, all of which were used to continue post-slavery control over newly-freed people.
2. This discrimination continues today in often less overt ways, including through disparity in the enforcement of seemingly race-neutral laws.
3. Bias by decision makers at all stages of the justice process disadvantages black people. Studies have found that they are more likely to be stopped by the police, detained pretrial, charged with more serious crimes, and sentenced more harshly than white people.

All of these had been long documented and reported out by mostly incarcerated Black people for decades and decades, but were ignored for decades and decades by those on both sides of the aisles who, for whatever other differences, never seemed far apart on the question of what to do with Black people’s bodies, minds and spirits.

A Promise Fulfilled

In September, V.O.T.E. joined  a class-action lawsuit filed by the attorneys of the Promise of Justice Initiative. It called for an end to the slave labor of Farm Line workers in Angola, the men held there who are forced to work beneath a sun hotter than the one their ancestors knew but like their ancestors, without adequate water, bathroom facilities, shade or any other protection from that hard sun. Temperatures soar into the 90s and sometimes higher given the recent spate of heatwaves. Under that hard sun, it feels hotter than even that and people regularly fell ill to heat stroke or other heat-related illnesses. Particularly vulnerable were those who had pre-existing conditions.

“When I was first taken to Angola,” Norris explained, “everyone had to start out working the Farm Line. You had to do that for free for 90 days. The premise was that it covered the cost of the prison clothes we were made to wear.

“After you did your time on the line, you were allowed to get a prison job that paid you.”

“What was the pay,” I asked.

“Was and still is between 4 and 7 cents an hour,” Norris shared, along with this update: “Today, prisoners are forced to work the Farm Line for three years. But finally the judge sided with us on the conditions part.”

And even that bear register of payment is a ruse. Like sharecroppers, prisoners must use the funds they earn to buy basic living essentials from the commissary. But forced labor in prisons, in coordination with corporations like Target, account for more than $2 billion dollars in profit for companies annually.

Figures on how much they cost working people outside the prison walls, likely cannot be quantified. More, because they are forced to maintain the prison undertaking work that is often dangerous and for which they are untrained, accounts for $9 billion in income and saving for the institutions.

From the AP

“…The judge wrote that many of the prisoners’ grievances had merit, noting that an independent expert found some were taking medications affecting their bodies’ ability to regulate temperature. And a review of sick calls by the court confirmed that some men sent to the fields without restrictions had serious health conditions.

The judge also questioned the validity of some claims made by Angola staff, including that workers could “rest whenever they like” and that shutting down the farm line would result in losses of more than $8 million annually — a figure Jackson challenged. He said that number likely referred to the overall agricultural operations, not just food picked by a small group of prisoners on the farm line.

“The Court does not doubt that inmates sent to the Farm Line work diligently,” he wrote, “but this would be a feat of Herculean proportions.”

 

Norris paused and added, “The crazy thing is that they have machinery that can do all the work that prisoners are forced to do.” It makes no sense it would seem to force the unpaid brutal work on prisoners, until you remember that there were always slave plantations specifically designed to break people. 

Those plantations, under different names, are alive and well across the nation.

“We’ve been able to secure many victories over the last 20 years,” says Norris. I can think of just a few quickly: the changes to the vulgar misuse of life sentences which often meant that some could be incarcerated forever if they were “a habitual offender” even if the offense was smoking weed or stealing a bike. VOTE overturned the final Jim Crow law in the state that allowed non-unanimous juries to sentence people to death. Formerly incarcerated people can now petition to restore their voting rights. And their steady push on draconian laws has reduced the incidence of those serving life almost unbelievably.

“When I was in Angola, of the 5,000 men held there, likely 3,500 were never going home. Now, I don’t think there are even 3,500 men held there anymore and certainly many of the worst laws that allowed for life sentences are now off the books.”

The “last battle” as Norris calls it, “is to change the terrible conditions forced upon people.”  Those conditions, including the disallowance of cooling systems inside the tiers where temperatures regularly soar above 100 degrees, are being knocked down, one by one.  There are cooling systems now in the tiers, for example. And of course there are the modifications just handed down for the farmline workers.

Of course, there’s so much more to do.

But also of course, Norris Henderson and the team at V.O.T.E. will continue to ensure that the work remaining gets done.

See More:

DOJ Deems 3 Mississippi Prisons Unconstitutional For ‘Violent And Unsafe Conditions’

Op-Ed: With Prison Reform, A Second Chance Should Be Our First Choice

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