Angola, located on 18,000 acres, has been called the bloodiest prison in America, according to The Daily Beast. There are more than 6,000 inmates at the sprawling prison, with 65% of them serving life sentences. Those men will never leave. Even after death, their bodies will be interred in the cemetery on the prison’s grounds, per the Center for Land Use Interpretation. In many cases it’s not the inmates, but rather the guards to blame for the violence. In July 2020, a federal court sentenced three former Angola correction officers to prison and a fourth to probation for beating a shackled inmate resulting in a dislocated shoulder, broken ribs, and a collapsed lung, and then trying to cover it up, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
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When prisoners aren’t being brutalized by prison guards, they’re suffering in the infamously humid Louisiana weather as they work in the fields. While in the farm fields, they have “limited access to water, minimal rest, and no restroom facilities,” according to the ACLU Louisiana. Inmates have passed out from heat exhaustion and have been put in solitary confinement for not working fast enough.
