Weekday mornings at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola typically begin with whistles sounding before sunrise. “Work call!” the officers yell, as incarcerated men line up with hoes and shovels.
Basic elements of that decades-long routine could soon change, if a ruling on a class-action lawsuit swings in favor of Farm Line workers.
U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson is expected to rule soon in the lawsuit challenging forced labor on Angola’s Farm Line, a decision that could shift work assignments at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
Jackson has already ordered the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections to provide more meaningful water and shade to those working the Farm Line. But to date, he has stopped short of ending it altogether.
The memories of those who work it – and have worked it – are vivid. “Just walking in all heat,” said Terrance Winn, one of thousands of men who have spent time on Angola’s Farm Line, the work assignment that’s almost an inevitability for most men when they first arrive at the prison. Winn described the labor as “torture.”
After hours of labor under the sun, men return from the fields drenched in sweat. Often, they’re thirsty, since the water supply to Farm Line crews has been inadequate. And because workers aren’t given adequate sun protection, some men wrap towels around their heads and necks and wear long sleeves to protect themselves from at least some of the extreme heat.
Others become dizzy or fall out in the fields, because of heat sensitivities, mental-health concerns or medications that respond badly to extreme heat.
Incarcerated men at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola are forced to work in dangerous heat and harsh conditions in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Rehabilitation Act, according to a lawsuit, Voices of the Experienced (VOTE) et al v. James LeBlanc, filed in 2023 against the Louisiana DOC.
Forced labor should have been eliminated across the nation through the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. But the Thirteenth Amendment also includes a “criminal-exception loophole” that allows involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. More than a dozen states, including Louisiana, also included similar loopholes in state constitutions.
In 2018, Colorado became the first state to remove that loophole from its constitution. Several other states, including Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, Alabama, and Tennessee, have also abolished forced labor and involuntary servitude.
The VOTE v. LeBlanc lawsuit is narrower than that. Because Judge Jackson indicated in earlier rulings that he didn’t think he had the authority to shut down the Farm Line, the plaintiffs are asking the court to fundamentally change how the Farm Line operates but not end it entirely, said Samanatha Pourciau, a senior attorney with the Promise of Justice Initiative, which is representing the Farm Line along with Rights Behind Bars.
For example, PJI attorneys have asked the court to stop using the Farm Line as a disciplinary job assignment. Currently, even a minor infraction can send someone back in the fields. “It’s kind of a threat always hanging over people, that they could always be sent back to the Farm Line,” Pourciau said.
‘The slavery aspect of it’
A ruling reshaping the Farm Line could represent overdue recognition of dangerous labor conditions that also strike workers as degrading, because of Angola’s history as a former plantation.
“A lot of men tried to get out of the field,” Winn said. “Because of the slavery aspect of it.”
Though Angola runs modern farm operations within its grounds, the Farm Line exists in the past, without machinery. Winn remembers being given a five-gallon bucket of water and a small cup and being instructed to water rows of seedlings by hand.
For many men, the work is not just physically demanding but emotionally heavy as well. To them, the labor can feel deeply connected to Angola’s past.
So every day, in the fields, it can seem like history, replayed.
“It’s impossible to ignore the fact that historically they’ve been denied access to water in many of the same ways that people who farmed that land hundreds of years ago were similarly denied the same things,” said Andrea Armstrong, a Loyola University law professor and a leading national expert on prison and jail conditions. In 2024, Armstrong and Winn traveled to Washington, D.C. in 2024, to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about prison labor.
Major changes to the Farm Line could change the face of activity within Angola, where many men are sentenced to hard labor in state custody.
Work assignments help organize much of the prison.
Hundreds of incarcerated workers are assigned to field work, while smaller crews work many other jobs devoted to keep the prison running, in warehouses, kitchens, laundries and prison hospitals. Some do maintenance, clean dormitories, haul ice, haul trash, landscape the grounds, stock warehouses or work in vegetable-processing areas connected to Angola’s farming operation.
Despite the amount of work found on Angola’s grounds, it can be tough for men on the Farm Line to obtain jobs outside the field.
Farm Line workers can periodically request reassignment through prison job boards, where officials review disciplinary records and job openings before approving transfers. If their request is denied, men must generally wait 90 days before submitting another request.
Jobs plentiful on “the compound”
It’s unclear how prison officials would adjust if large numbers of incarcerated workers were reassigned from the fields. A DOC spokesman said that the department could not speculate on how that would work, due to the ongoing litigation.
Any shift, if it happens, wouldn’t change much within the prison, Winn believes. “I think Angola has been gearing up for them to take the Farm Line away for so long that the prison is gonna continue to thrive,” he said. “The men would probably have to go work on the compound.”
The compound is a hub of work assignments inside Angola’s main prison, where incarcerated workers perform industrial work for Prison Enterprises, the DOC’s for-profit arm, which sells goods to municipal agencies across the state. Within various buildings on Angola’s compound, incarcerated carpenters and metal-fabricators build office furniture, create prison mattresses and bed linens, sew clothing and silk-screen signs, mix janitorial soaps, and create Louisiana state license plates, which are made exclusively by Prison Enterprises within the Tag Plant at Angola.
Other state prisons have created similar arrangements, which altogether produce more than $2 billion a year in goods and $9 billion in services, according to a 2022 ACLU report, Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers.
In response to major changes to the Farm Line, prison officials could opt not to create more prison-workplaces but to instead expand educational or vocational programs, Winn said.
PJI attorneys are also asking the court to require vocational and rehabilitative components within the Farm Line.
That is the hope of other observers as well. “To continue as is, with no changes, would be a very disappointing outcome, after all the evidence and testimony about how this labor actually cost us money and people,” Armstrong said.
“We ask them specifically for three things – not having it be the first job, not having it be a punitive job assignment, and having it be a vocational rehabilitative training program,” Pourciau said. “If those three things were implemented, it would in effect end the Farm Line as we know it.”
What would come next?
Still, the possibility of major changes to the Farm Line raises questions about what prison labor at Angola would look like going forward.
Another future shift is long overdue, though it won’t be addressed in the upcoming ruling, Winn said. In seven Southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas – almost all work remains unpaid, according to a 2025 report by the Economic Policy Institute, which also documented that incarcerated workers in Louisiana are paid, but next to nothing – between two and four cents an hour.
Prison workers should be able to earn at least $7.25 an hour, Louisiana minimum wage, Winn believes, so that they can pay for things like phone calls and canteen supplies, items which family members often are burdened with. “That way you help society,” Winn said, “you relieve taxpayers, you’re helping victims and victims’ families as well as your family.”
