Film project works to end plantation prison system

6th February 2023   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

Terrence Winn spent more than 30 years as a prisoner in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, located in West Feliciana Parish. Winn, who was 16 at the time he was first incarcerated after being tried as an adult, was released in July 2020, but as he walked out of the prison gates as a free man, his experiences while being behind bars remained burned in his mind. As they still do today.

Of particular recall are the three decades of forced – and, for the most, unpaid – labor performing back-breaking work like cutting trees, picking fruits and vegetables, and cutting grass with a hoe.

The difficulty of the years and years of free labor was often exacerbated, Winn said, by weather extremes – over 100 degrees in summers, low 30s in the winters. Performed daily for eight hours a day, the work took a toll on prisoners’ bodies.

“It’s extremely hard working in 107 degree temps during the summer and 33 degree temperatures in the winter from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m.,” Winn said. “Some days it’s so hot [that] guys are actually passing out. … Your body shuts down.”

Winters were likewise treacherous.

“While it’s freezing,” he said, “you don’t want to do nothing but work to warm up, but sometimes it’s so cold [that] the tool slips out of your hand or you have…an emergency medical [situation] because you’re freezing.”

Perhaps even worse than the weather conditions was that all of this work – by hundreds and hundreds of prisoners simultaneously each day – didn’t feel a whole lot different than human bondage.

“It’s not fair…just because it’s still based on the system of slavery,” Winn said. “No one is getting enough money to buy a honeybun, while some are doing [the equivalent] of 60- to- 70-thousand-dollar jobs.”

Winn isn’t the only ex-prisoner with those types of memories of such persistent, ages-old, forced labor practices, and their words and testimonies are now being told by a new documentary from the End Plantation Prisons Project (EPPP), an organization dedicated to documenting, showing and ending the practice of forced, virtually unpaid labor in Angola and other prisons.

“The End Plantation Prisons Project aims to shed a light onto the system of hard labor,” said Sara Gozalo, the new film’s director. “As we continue to learn more about the practice, we hope to lead popular education efforts all around Louisiana. We want to have an open and educated conversation about hard labor in our state and to get people involved.”

The film was made and is currently being screened across the state as part of the Promise of Justice Initiative, an effort that presses for positive change in the criminal penal system. In addition to the new documentary on plantation prisons, Promise of Justice addresses issues like ending the death penalty, challenging inhumane confinement practices, rooting out prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, and ending racism in the legal system.

The initiative engages in pro bono criminal defense, initiating advocacy litigation, and generating and organizing community support through education and policy advocacy.

As part of that effort, the new EPPP documentary was screened last month at the John Thompson Legacy Center in the Marigny. More information on EPPP can be found online at www.promise-of-justice.webflow.io.

The film features interviews with Winn and 13 other Angola prisoners, men and women, who relate their experiences performing work the EPPP likens to the antebellum, plantation-slavery system on which Louisiana and other Southern states were built and ruled.

“We wanted to build a tool that people could use to learn about hard labor in Louisiana and our proximity to it,” Gozalo said. “It was important to us to shed a light onto the origins of hard labor in our state and to elevate the voices of people who had been directly impacted by it.

“As always, we are led by people who are directly impacted and wish to support their vision of what a fair system could look like,” she added.

The history of the massive, maximum-security Angola prison itself traces its roots directly to institutional slavery and bondage of people of color. The prison, which is currently operated by the La. Department of Public Safety and Corrections, was built on the former site of a slave plantation, leading to the prison earning the nicknames “Angola Plantation” and “The Farm.” The prison’s informal moniker is derived from the African country of Angola, from which many slaves were kidnapped and taken on the Middle Passage.

Gozalo noted that immediately after the Civil War, although the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, it remained allowed to essentially establish a facsimile of slavery through the convict leasing system, under which first private owners and then the State, could extract free labor from imprisoned people. The penitentiary system that replaced convict leasing retained that loophole.

“I think it is important that people first become aware of the fact that hard labor is all around us,” Gozalo said. “It is important that we learn its origins. Hard labor in our state is a vestige of slavery. It wasn’t that long ago that people were forced to pick cotton at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the old plantation known then and today as Angola.”

Gozalo said the documentary project began with an effort to investigate the practice of hard labor in Louisiana and eventually encompassed a year of research consisting of filing public records requests, combing through documents and interviewing people who had served hard labor sentences.

“People sentenced to hard labor may have to spend their days hand-picking okra under intolerable conditions of heat and humidity, for two cents an hour or no pay at all,” Gozalo said. “Or they may be forced to weld or sand blast or clean ovens without proper safety equipment and supplies.

“We learned through our investigation that these people are rarely provided with adequate training or supplies. This work is not rehabilitative and it’s rarely educational or vocational. Most of the time, it’s purely to break their spirits and their backs.”

She added that the current hard-labor system doesn’t protect society but only “perpetuates cycles of poverty. Our communities do not benefit but are punished by the practice of hard labor.”

“Prisons do not make us safe, incarcerating people does not make us safe. Investing in schools, housing [and] health care makes us safe. If prisons made us safe, Louisiana would be the safest state in the country. It is not,” she said.

Several state officials and departments who were contacted by The Louisiana Weekly were unable to comment on the plantation prisons documentary by the time this article went to press. Representatives from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections did not offer comments.

However, state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat from New Orleans, told The Louisiana Weekly that the message of the film and the EPPP – that the current hard labor system at Angola amounts to de facto slavery – is very appropriate.

“I think that the analogy of the current prison labor systems as a modern-day antebellum plantation is fair,” Duplessis said. “I would argue that these practices are hardly ‘modern’ – you can look at Angola and see inmates making a few cents an hour to work in the same fields, picking cotton, corn and more from the same land slaves were forced to work 200 years ago.

“The parallels between these systems are undeniable,” he added. “The only form of slavery that was abolished with the 13th Amendment was chattel slavery. These systems were designed to continue after the abolishment of slavery and they have quite successfully through mass incarceration and hard labor.”

Winn hopes a more just penal labor system will be established in Angola and other prisons so current and future convicts can have the ability to support loved ones and to fulfill repayment and restitution requirements of their sentences.

“I think a fair system would be where women and men are working for a reasonable salary so that they can still provide for their families and if called for paying the victim or victims families,” Winn said.

“Payment is the biggest incentive for prisoners,” he added.

Gozalo said public reception to the documentary has been positive overall. “People care, they are curious, and they want to learn more,” she said. “I think we need to hear more from people who are directly impacted because we have so much to learn.”

She added that “[t]he narratives we have been fed tend to strip people who are or were incarcerated of their humanity. What the videos attempt to do is to bring back [ex-convicts’] humanity and show people as whole individuals as opposed to just the crime they once may have committed.”

Gozalo said the EPPP and the Promise of Justice Initiative will continue to screen the filmed interviews and engage communities around the state. Project researchers and advocates will hear from others who have been impacted by hard labor, which will hopefully gain the attention of elected officials and other state policymakers.

Duplessis said the subject of hard labor in prisons needs to be brought out to the public and addressed by voters, citizens and elected officials.

“The issue absolutely needs to be discussed,” he said. “I believe there is a lot of cognitive dissonance around the topic of prison labor, especially within public opinion … as if being tried for a crime justifies the conditions. Prison labor is not an extension of justice, and to allow it to be [an extension] opens up [the] justice [system] to corruption, and in this process inmates are denied both their personhood and their basic human rights.

“There needs to be substantial change. I hope Louisiana can follow suit with the rest of the country in successfully amending the 13th Amendment in the near future. There should be no legal loopholes for slavery and involuntary servitude.”

This article originally published in the February 6, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.