From Verite News: Lawsuit over farm line work assignments at Angola goes to trial
Terrance Winn, a 52-year-old Shreveport resident said his experience doing forced agriculture labor at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola haunts him to this day.
“Everyone who has done that much time, that went through the things that we went through, and saw the things that we went through now, we need, we need professional help. It’s no joke,” Winn said. He runs and participates in a support group that he says helps formerly incarcerated individuals cope with the trauma of their prison experiences.
His friend Ronald Reynolds, a 52-year old Alexandria resident who was also imprisoned at Angola and forced to do agricultural work feels similarly. According to Reynolds, subconscious echoes of what’s known as the “farm line,” agricultural work done in groups in the fields at the prison, come rushing back to him when he’s performing basic outdoor landscaping work at his house.
“My wife came and I was sweating,” he said. “I’m talking about sweat just pouring off me. My wife came out. She’s like, ‘Babe, don’t you have a weed eater that can do that?’” Reynolds said. Instead of using a tool, a weed eater, that he believes could do the job more effectively, Reynolds said he automatically grabbed a tool he would have used at Angola. “I haven’t seen a psychologist or psychiatrist to get to the bottom of, you know, all of my psychological illnesses, I’m sure there are some,” he said.
Both men, along with prison reform advocates throughout Louisiana, liken the forced agricultural labor at Angola to modern-day slavery. They say its forced work, often used as punishment, carried out on the fields of a former plantation, monitored by armed guards and supervised by prison staff that oversee the work called “pushers.” The work runs year-round, meaning many people are subjected to harsh environmental conditions, especially during Louisiana’s long, hot summers.
But a lawsuit, which went to trial this week in a federal court in Baton Rouge, is trying to end the practice.
A litigation team that includes attorneys from the New Orleans based decarceration organization, the Promise of Justice Initiative, and a legal advocacy organization, Rights Behind Bars, is arguing on behalf of Voice of the Experienced (VOTE) members in front of Judge Brian Jackson at the U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge in a bench trial that began on Tuesday (Feb. 3). VOTE v. LeBlanc is a class action lawsuit that has two classes — a class representing people housed at Angola or who may be housed there in the future and one representing people housed at Angola who have limiting disabilities who are or may be assigned to the farm line. If the plaintiffs are successful in arguing that “farm line” work violates the prisoners’ rights under the Eighth Amendment, which protects in part against “cruel and unusual punishment,” and that it violates part of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, the case could have significant consequences for farm line work at Louisiana’s largest maximum security prison.
Farm line work is a practice wherein prison staff takes groups of incarcerated people into Angola’s agricultural fields to perform a range of forced agricultural activities under the gaze of armed guards and supervised by prison staff for no to very little compensation, roughly 2 cents per hour, according to court records. Those who work the line describe it as brutal, dehumanizing work performed under the threat of punishment, while those defending it call it meaningful work, whose current conditions exceed constitutional requirements.
During opening arguments of the case, Andrew Blanchfield who is the lead attorney representing the defendants, which include the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections and Angola, highlighted the benefits of the work. Blanchfield said that working on the farm line is a form of meaningful work that provides fresh food to the prison population.
But the problem, plaintiffs and some witnesses argued this week, is that the work, especially in the extreme heat, can pose a serious risk to the health of the people who are forced to work for extended periods. Picking crops by hand with armed men watching and a supervisor ensuring efficiency on the site of former plantations also reenacts a demeaning and humiliating simulation of chattel slavery that can cause psychological harm. People working the farm line also make little to no money for the work, which renders people doing that work regularly unable to purchase basic necessities, although the defense has highlighted that it is not actually legally bound to pay people housed there anything. And both current and former people housed at Angola have described this work as designed to punish and break a person, and some who have made it out say the psychological harm lasts long after being released from prison.
Angola’s heat problem
Exposure to extreme heat has long been an issue at Angola. In 2013, Judge Jackson ordered that Angola install air conditioning to cool cells in the new death row facility, after plaintiffs argued that enduring the heat during the summer months with no way to stay cool violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In 2023, exposure to the heat at Angola’s former death row facility also played a role in a case to remove dozens of children incarcerated there from the prison. And people advocating to change or abolish farm line work are concerned that tough labor coupled with long exposure to heat can lead to major heat-related medical issues such as heat exhaustion and heat stroke, which can be deadly or cause permanent disabilities.
As examinations and cross examinations played out on the trial’s opening day, a hefty portion of the discussion surrounded examining whether or not the Department of Public Safety and Corrections has taken steps to mitigate prisoner exposure to extreme heat.
According to the defense, mitigating steps include ensuring unlimited ice and water and providing those working in the field with regular breaks when the heat index exceeds 88 degrees. They also explained that they erected shade canopies and shade pavilions on the field, ensuring that when the heat index reaches 88 degrees and the prison declares a heat alert, people working in the field would have access to shade and people who are particularly sensitive to the heat can be removed from outdoor work. Since the onset of the lawsuit, Angola has claimed to do some form of mitigating efforts such as offering water and giving breaks when the temperature is too hot, but after a July 2024 ruling ordered the prison to improve its policies and practices, the prison claims to have upped its efforts. The shade canopies and pavilions are new. They now offer sunscreen to men working in the field.
Also, on Thursday (Feb. 5) the defense called Dr. Randy Lavespere, the chief medical officer at the state’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections. He explained how creating a medical exclusion list, a list of medical diagnoses that would automatically preclude someone from partaking in the farm line and identifying people on certain medications that would make them vulnerable to heat were also new measures the state has taken.
But the changes in policy only apply from May 1- Oct. 31, when temperatures are typically highest in the state. Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case argue, though, that prisoners could potentially be exposed to high heat indexes outside of those months. While examining Darrel Vannoy, the warden of Angola, attorneys for the plaintiffs pointed out several days outside of the heat season where the heat index, a measurement of the temperature to the relative humidity in the shade, exceeded 88 degrees. The heat policy at the prison could always be changed, Vannoy said.
The attorneys representing VOTE have previously pointed out that it’s not just the policy that’s the problem, but it’s also the inability of Angola to successfully adhere to policies that demonstrates disregard for the potential serious possible harm of the farm line work. On the opening day of the trial, they drew attention to the documented slow responses of the prison staff to heat alerts. Attorneys for the plaintiffs pulled up daily line counts, documents filled out by the pushers that detail, in part, when there’s a heat alert and how many heat sensitive people are on the line when it is declared. There, they showed how people who were supposed to be removed from the farm line because of the heat were repeatedly kept in the fields for far longer than they should have been.
Angola’s history problem
Even if individuals particularly vulnerable to the heat are able to escape the elements when a heat alert is declared during the season, attorneys for the plaintiffs called on experts who argued that farm line work at Angola has an inescapable history problem.
The connections between the prison, its past as a plantation and the way prisoners work on the farm line, is something both current and former prisoners say cause them lasting psychological wounds. Chadarius Morehead of Monroe, who is currently housed at Angola after being sentenced for second degree murder, testified in court on Thursday that his grandfather told him stories of his ancestors experiences with slavery in the state. He testified that he worked on the farm line and that he was confused and shocked by the work assignment because he was under the impression that slavery had ended in the U.S. Both current and formerly incarcerated people who worked on the farm line and who testified at the case this week or spoke in personal interviews likened the work to slavery.
“Even if you was to ride past on a day when the guys were going out on a farm line, and you had the guards on the horse with the guns, when you see it, it will bring you back hundreds of years,” Reynolds said to Verite News over the phone.
John Bardes, a historian at Louisiana State University who has researched slavery and prison systems in Louisiana before and after the Civil War, was not at the trial but spoke with Verite News about Angola’s farm line. He said that leading penologists in the early 1900s believed Black people were beyond reform and uniquely suitable to perform outdoor agriculture work. According to Bardes, during the Jim Crow era, as states across the South began purchasing former slave plantations and converting them into prisons, they intentionally sought to create a system that replicates plantation labor as the best way to deal with Black convicts.
“They would often cite Angola as the perfect southern prison for the Black convict, expressly because Angola had mastered the art of designing a penal system that replicated slavery, and then that was the ideal system for for drilling submission, submissiveness, into an incarcerated Black person,” Bardes said.
And on the opening day of the case Harvard University historian Evelynn Hammonds, who had reviewed a range of case documents, connected the origins of the farm line model from slavery to current practice that “appears designed to punish, degrade and demean by simulating a traumatic history well known as one of the most abhorrent and inhumane legacies of the United States.” Joshua Sbicca, a Colorado State University sociologist and another of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, said that the tropes of slavery persist in Angola’s current prison culture.
The physical harm of prolonged heat exposure coupled with the psychological traumatization sits at the heart of the prosecution’s Eighth Amendment argument — that farm line work poses a substantial risk of serious harm. Prosecutors appear to be arguing that disregard for that physical and psychological harm demonstrates the deliberate indifference to this harm. Samantha Pourciau, senior staff attorney with the Promise of Justice Initiative and lead counsel representing VOTE on the case said that she’s confident in the case they’re bringing.
“We’ve put on experts and incarcerated individuals who explain the harm that they are experiencing, the dignitary harm that they are experiencing out in the farmline,” Pourciau told Verite News after a press conference on Thursday.
Pourciau said that the experts they’ve called to testify have shown that the farming operation is not designed to be an efficient agricultural operation but a punishment and that Angola stands out as an outlier being more punitive than other farm line operations in the country. She also said that the testimonies of the Angola officials themselves show that they’re all aware that Angola used to be a plantation, which makes her confident that there’s deliberate indifference in this case.
Spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, Tiffany Dickerson, said that it’s not the practice of the organization to comment on ongoing litigation.
Attorneys for the defense did not respond to requests for comment.
Prayers to get rid of ‘horrible conditions’
Winn drove down from Shreveport on Thursday this week to show his support for the plaintiffs and others who’d worked on the farm line. On the third day of the trial, several former farm line workers, their friends and family and prison reform advocates went to the court house in a show of force. They packed the court room, so much so that Judge Jackson created overflow space on the ground floor of the court for several people who could not fit into the courtroom. Reynolds would have loved to have been there, but due to work responsibilities could not make it.
Winn, who said his support group “Outstanding Kings and Queens” is part of the work he does with his Shreveport nonprofit, Priorities Intentions and Practical Exchanges, told Verite News that besides the physical pain in his back that he said originated from working the farm line, that he’s also processing psychological scars from the work. He said that he believes that everyone who has gone through the experience at Angola needs professional medical or mental health help, and that his support group at least provides a space for people who have shared a similar experience to talk with one another. Last week, he said, he woke from a nightmare drenched in cold sweat after dreaming he was being locked back up.
“It was like a movie, a scary movie. I had never done that. Sweat was just dripping off my body because I was so, so terrified of going back to prison,” Winn said. Winn and Reynolds stay in touch with others who were incarcerated at Angola, and they all share a similar refrain when it comes to the farm line.
“It is my prayer that they do away with the farm line,” Reynolds told Verite News.
“I hope that they really make it to where guys don’t have to go in the field in these horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible conditions,” Winn said.