From The Advocate: Advocacy groups press to abolish Angola prison’s Farm Line in Baton Rouge federal court

The first week of trial testimony has wrapped up in a class-action federal lawsuit that aims to dismantle Angola prison’s so-called Farm Line.

Prison reform advocates lined up on the steps outside the U.S. Middle District Courthouse of Louisiana after the third day of the civil trial on Thursday and spurned the “degrading” legacy of forced labor on the 18,000-acre prison grounds, situated on a former slave plantation.

Samantha Kennedy, executive director of the Promise of Justice Initiative, called the proceedings one of the most critical trials of this era.

“The question before the court is whether Louisiana is going to continue resurrecting slavery to harm incarcerated people,” she said. “The state of Louisiana controls the bodies of human beings locked up inside its prisons and systematizes humiliation and the stripping of their dignity. In Louisiana, incarcerated men are forced to work in the fields on what is known as the Farm Line at great risk to their lives, to their health. And they’re forced to do so at the threat of violence, being put in a dungeon, degraded and humiliated.”

Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans-based civil rights advocacy organization, filed suit in federal court in September 2023, alleging the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment restrictions on cruel and unusual punishment for prisoners by operating the Farm Line at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

Incarcerated individuals assigned to work the line are required to put in intensive hours of labor on the prison’s sprawling fields as they plant and cultivate produce for the prison population. Many of the prison’s new incarcerated laborers are forced to work without pay, while other Farm Line workers are paid a few cents per hour.

Samantha Pourciau, a Promise of Justice senior staff attorney, is highlighting Angola’s sordid history as a former slave plantation and the punitive nature of the current-day Farm Line to bolster her case.

“It is not a secret. Everyone knows Angola’s history. So we are confident there’s deliberate indifference here,” she said. “Our prayer for relief will be for the judge to find that as the Farm Line currently operates, it violates the constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment because of the assault and affront to human dignity.”

Testimony in the federal bench trial began last Tuesday through Thursday. It is expected to reconvene this week, when the plaintiffs will finish presenting their evidence. State officials are expected to wrap up their defense to the prisoners’ claims by Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson, who is presiding over the case, will render his ruling on the matter at some point after both sides make their arguments.

In addition to the Eighth Amendment violations they allege, plaintiffs claim the Farm Line endangers the American Disabilities Act.

They used expert witnesses and first-hand testimony from a slate of current and former Angola prisoners who have worked the Farm Line. One prisoner testified that guards often called him a “boy” and forced him to use his bare hands to dig potatoes while on his knees. Attorneys said another prisoner described tour buses passing by work sites and it “making him feel like he was in a zoo, waiting for someone to throw him a peanut.”

Dr. Joshua Sbicca, a sociology professor at Colorado State University, took the stand and described Angola’s Farm Line system as a punitive outlier unlike any farming operation he’s studied at any other prisons in the nation.

“None of this is acceptable,” Pourciau said. “Not in the times of slavery and not in 2026. Every person has inherent dignity, both morally as a member of our human community and legally under our constitution. That dignity does not disappear at the prison gate.”

Donald Arbuthnot, a deputy director for advocacy group Voice of The Experienced said the line established a “servant-master” dynamic for men incarcerated at Angola. He stressed that the operation does nothing to boost public safety and has no redeeming rehabilitative qualities to reform prisoners.