Abstract
Antiprison activists have often turned the federal court system to reduce the violence of the carceral state. However, such reform attempts have too often had the unintended consequence of fortifying the penal system. In this article, I interrogate one such intervention—a federal court order that encompassed the Louisiana Department of Corrections from 1975 to 1998. I argue that while the lawsuit was declared a success in reforming Angola, the federal court’s intervention buttressed and legitimated the growth of the Louisiana penal system. This paradox was produced through the limits of liberal reform ideology that failed to recognize the structural violence of incarceration. Rather, the federal courts located violence with prisoners instead of the punitive power of the state and racial capitalism. This framework not only led to an increase in punitive practices within Angola, it came to underpin penal expansion as the primary solution to cyclical overcrowding.
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Notes
While the official name of the new New Orleans jail complex is the Orleans Justice Center, it is still overwhelmingly referred to by the name it had for over a century, Orleans Parish Prison, by New Orleans residents and city officials alike. For this reason, I will primarily refer to the jail facility as Orleans Parish Prison or OPP in this article.
Mathiesen has similarly described these different types of reforms as positive (reformist) reforms and negative (non-reformist/abolitionist) reforms (1974).
The focus on security was also underpinned by a simultaneous suit on the issue of prison security filed in response to the killing of a guard that prison officials pinned on prisoners affiliated with the Black Panther Party, who would become known as the Angola 3. Munson, R. (1972, June 3). Kilbourne, West Feliciana Jury Agree on Pen Security Probe. Morning Advocate.
Although the state defendants of the case shifted over time as new governors were elected and new DOC officials appointed, the case’s name remained Hayes Williams v. McKeithan, et al. for the governor who was in office at the time of its filing for consistency.
All aforementioned court documents are in the author’s personal possession.
This is not to imply that sexual violence between prisoners did not occur. As incarcerated journalist Wilbert Rideau discusses at length, rape was a real issues within Angola that was often embedded in the institution’s punitive power. However, as I discuss below, how the issue of sexual violence got taken up by the courts was less about ensuring incarcerated people’s safety and more about intensifying Angola’s disciplinary regime (Rideau 1992).
This is not to ignore the fact that violence amongst prisoners was a real concern, and one explicitly brought by Mitchell, Hayes, Stevenson, and Joseph.
Notably Dixon was not located in any of the urban areas the DOC originally set their sights on but in a primarily rural parish not far from Angola.
Within a few years, juvenile detention centers were also incorporated into Williams v. McKeithan, et al.
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Pelot-Hobbs, L. Scaling Up or Scaling Back? The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Leveraging Federal Interventions for Abolition. Crit Crim 26, 423–441 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-9401-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-9401-3