By Mike Ludwig
This article was originally published by Truthout
The judge’s ruling rejected a request to end the prison’s use of grueling farm labor as a disciplinary measure.
In a ruling that is notably silent on Louisiana’s history of slavery and white supremacy, a federal judge sided with the Louisiana State Penitentiary on May 26, rejecting a request to end the prison’s notorious practice of forcing groups of predominately Black prisoners to perform grueling farm labor on the grounds of a former slave plantation.
Commonly known as Angola, named after a plantation which itself was named after the homeland of the enslaved people who labored there in the 19th century, the prison and its farm are infamous for their brutal conditions. The prison has long forced incarcerated people to spend long hours picking vegetables by hand as a disciplinary measure that civil rights groups argue is cruel. With its “farm line” of predominately Black men laboring under the hot sun and white gaze of gun-toting guards on horseback, the Angola prison farm has long served as a potent symbol of slavery living on in modern prison systems.
Ever since current and former prisoners filed a lawsuit against the prison farm in 2023, the court has issued multiple orders requiring that prison officials take steps to protect incarcerated laborers from dehydration and injury from picking crops in temperatures that regularly exceed 100 degrees. Medical emergencies in the fields of Angola are common during summer, with incarcerated workers suffering from heat stroke and other serious harms, according to the plaintiffs.
However, District Court Judge Brian A. Jackson wrote in his 60-page ruling that he was constrained from forcing the Louisiana State Penitentiary to make lasting changes to its infamous farm due to a recent decision by a higher court in a separate case over alleged medical neglect at the prison.
Donald Arbuthnot, an organizer who was formerly incarcerated at Angola, said his time on the so-called farm line gave him a glimpse of what Black people experienced before emancipation from chattel slavery.
“I saw the images on the TV during the civil rights movement, but I experienced what my grandparents and great grandparents went through when I entered the farm line at Angola,” Arbuthnot told reporters on Wednesday. “To this day, I don’t understand how we were able to deal with what we dealt with. I guess it’s the resilience of people like us, after all we have gone through … to get to where we are today.”
Formerly a volunteer teacher and pre-release tutor for fellow prisoners, Arbuthnot is now a member of Voice of the Experienced, a group of formerly incarcerated organizers that joined current prisoners in filing the lawsuit against the state prison system and the farm line in 2023. As the case wound through the courts, prisoners and civil rights groups argued the Angola farm violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment by recreating antebellum slavery on land that historically hosted a violent plantation-turned prison camp named Angola.
“They still don’t want to let go of it,” said Terrance Winn, an advocate and former prisoner at Angola, in an interview with Truthout. “They are holding on to this slavery replica, because that really all it is — it’s just a model of slavery they are holding on to.”
“They don’t teach these guys to do farm work, they just say go pick vegetables,” said Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel, an attorney at the Promise of Justice Initiative, an organization that represented the plaintiffs, in an interview. “It’s a means of punishment by racial terror.”
Judge Jackson issued his first order to the Louisiana state prison system in 2024 after the plaintiffs filed for an emergency injunction to protect incarcerated farm workers from record summer heat. Jackson directed officials to “correct the glaring deficiencies in their heat-related policies,” including a policy that allowed work to continue in the fields to continue under temperatures exceeding 103 degrees, a threshold that presents a known danger to human health.
In a subsequent 2025 order, Jackson told prison officials that the men on the farm line “must be treated with human decency.” As a result of Jackson’s temporary orders — all which expire after 90 days — the prison installed shade structures and agreed to give workers water to drink at all times. Before the order, Arbuthnot said workers did not receive enough water and were forced to drink from shared cans. Workers also now get a 15-minute break for every hour of labor in the fields.
However, Kappel warned that these improvements could be rolled back at any time, and the plaintiffs only recourse would be to file another lawsuit.
In his most recent ruling, Jackson noted that prison officials failed to change policy to lower the heat threshold for stopping work in the fields down from a whopping 113 degrees, demonstrating “deliberate indifference” to the health of the prisoners and a likely violation of the Constitution. However, Jackson wrote that he is constrained by a recent ruling by the right-leaning Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in a separate case, Parker vs. Hooper, which involves allegations of medical abuse and neglect filed by prisoners at Angola.
“Before Parker, the Court would have found Defendants liable under the Eighth Amendment for acting with deliberate indifference to the health and safety of incarcerated persons” on the Farm Line, Jackson wrote. “Under the Parker ruling, however, the Court is constrained to find that Defendants’ implementation of remedial measures negates a finding of subjective deliberate indifference, even though these remedial measures are inadequate to cure the constitutional violation.”
In other words, the new legal standard set by the Fifth Circuit shields prison officials from liability as long as they take steps toward improving conditions for incarcerated people, even if those measures do not go far enough.
Jackson’s ruling this week does not address the plaintiffs’ main claim: that the prison farm itself is an affront to human dignity that should be considered an unconstitutional form of cruel and unusual punishment.
“It’s bizarre that the court would not even mention the word ‘plantation’ in this decision,” Kappel said.
Former prisoner Chadarius Morehead told the court that working on the farm line made him feel like he was letting his ancestors down by participating in slavery, the same system they fought so hard to abolish.
Kappel said prisoners testified about having nightmares of slavery and lynchings after working in the fields at Angola.
“To force people to reenact slavery, especially on a prison that sits on former plantation, and is named after the plantation, and in fact is named after the people who were enslaved there, and using that as punishment and using that as a mean of ‘breaking in’ new prisoners … that violates the Eighth Amendment,” Kappel said.
Winn said he is deeply disappointed but not surprised by the ruling.
“I understand white supremacy, and I understand they aren’t going against each other,” he said. “The system isn’t really going to go against the system, so they see that you got injured or harmed, but knowing one of their own did it, they overlook it.”
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