Sugarcoated Slavery: Where Louisiana's Agricultural and Carceral Industries Meet

Zac Jones-Gomez
10 hours ago
6 min read

The American south is a region characterized by sweetness. It’s in the topography with names like Sugarloaf Mountain. It’s in the smile you exchange with your barista. It’s in the language when they ask “What can I get you, sugar?” and it’s certainly in the tea you just ordered from them.

Sugar built itself to that status by building the wealth of states like Louisiana. While not as notorious as cotton, American sugar cane plantations dotted the fertile lands around the Mississippi River until the 20th century. Enslaved Black people and later sharecroppers provided much of the labour needed to get the sweet juice from the stalks. When the country as a whole began pivoting away from an agricultural economy, Louisiana’s land found new value and purpose: storage for incarcerated people.

Louisiana leads not just the United States in rates of incarceration – it leads world democracies. Its rate of over 1,000 inmates per 100,000 citizens means that incarceration is a big business in the state. And for a federal government looking to house recently detained immigrants, such an eager market is impossible to ignore.

“Louisiana Lockup,” while striking the same schoolyard mocking tone as the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana and the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska, is Louisiana State Penitentiary's second nickname. Its first, Angola, is much more likely to strike fear in the hearts of Louisianans. This fearsome reputation is why the maximum-security location was chosen for immigrants in the first place. Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem touted it when she spoke at a press conference regarding the opening of the ICE wing of the facility. “This is a facility that’s notorious,” she said, adding that she hoped the reputation would encourage immigrants to self-deport. Louisiana governor Jeff Landry added that the facility is “bordered by the Mississippi River, swamps filled with alligators and forests filled with bears. Nobody really wants to leave the place.”

Angola took its nickname from the Angola Plantation, whose land it sits on. The plantation was consolidated with neighboring lands and sold to a retired Civil War officer in the 1880’s. He in turn leased prison labour to work the land, which led to a full-scale transformation of the land from a productive farm to reductive incarceration space. Prison officials were unable to ignore the quality of the soil, however, and a portion of the land was kept arable for prisoners to farm. This work detail, the Angola Farm Line, is one of the systems that lead to the prison making a name for itself in the state.

The work is physically punishing and made all the more demanding by inhumane conditions. Amenities like shade, sunscreen, and water have reportedly been withheld from inmates during the brutal Louisiana summers, while production quotas and threats of solitary punishment aim to wear them to the bone. Testimony from Joseph Guillory, a member of the Farm Line, reveals that “[W]hen I have asked about the mildew or the bugs in the water [provided to the Farm Line], the guards threatened to send me to the dungeon. In the triple-digit heat, the prison officials know we’ll drink it no matter what.”

Sugar cane was one of the most reviled crops as the sharp stalks and quick pace of work often lead to injury. At one point in the 1970’s, the Farm Line was considered so abhorrent that inmates engaged in self-mutilation to render themselves physically unable to work. Consumers unwittingly play a role in this system just by going to the grocery store. A two-year long investigation by the Associated Press completed in 2024 found food grown at Angola in chains like Target and Walmart and from brands such as Tyson’s. Multinational corporations incorporate prison labour into their supply chains, sometimes willingly and sometimes unknowingly. As a result, consumers end up financially supporting modern slavery operations like Angola Prison.

The crux of the issue is that slavery and the subjugation of the Black and brown body have never left the American South – they just changed their public face from decade to decade. In Reconstruction-era Louisiana, slavery gave way to sharecropping, which was a punitive farming system that allowed formerly enslaved people to experience freedom in name only. Sharecropping was quickly replaced with Jim Crow laws that sought to incarcerate Black men at high rates. Convicts could then be leased for work, earning the state and private companies cheap labour. By the dawn of the 20th century, the Emancipation Proclamation was but a whisper in a land that had recaptured the dream of maximum output with minimum input.

Because the federal government has repeatedly and knowingly given false information about ICE operations, civil rights activists worry about the potential for abuse of detainees in facilities like “Louisiana Lockup.” The American Civil Liberties Union and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights have already sued the state of Louisiana just a month into the operation of the facility, where those detained allege they contend with dust, mold, and black water coming from showers.

Their suit is on behalf of Oscar Hernandez Amaya, a Honduran man who has already completed his criminal sentence for a previous crime. The human rights organizations contend that Amaya’s indefinite detainment in immigration facilities is being used to further punish him, a violation of the legal precedent against double jeopardy. “The anti-immigrant campaign under the guise of ‘Making America Safe Again’ does not remotely outweigh or justify indefinite detention in ‘America’s Bloodiest Prison’ without any of the rights afforded to criminal defendants,” the ACLU’s lawyers state in a petition filed with the federal court in Baton Rouge.

“What we are seeing is the shift in use of maximum security facilities from criminal detention to civil detention,” says Nora Ahmed, Legal Director of the Louisiana chapter of the ACLU. She contends that the suit is much broader than just one unconstitutional detainment. “This case is about Oscar [Hernandez] Amaya, yes, but it is also about everyone at Angola. It’s about the future of civil detainment in this country. When you have trouble finding immigrants with prior criminal records, who do you fill these for-profit institutions with?”

Her fears are not without substance. Angola Prison is the prime location for the marriage of conservative lawmakers’ dreams for both labour and incarceration. Project 2025, the far-right playbook published by The Heritage Foundation and touted as the conservative roadmap for the country, outlines ways to reduce labour protections for children. Robert Kennedy, Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary, has repeatedly touted the idea of “wellness farms” where individuals dealing with substance abuse and mental health crises will theoretically farm their way to recovery. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested that Medicaid recipients could fill farm labour shortages caused by aggressive immigration enforcement.

It’s precisely this broad targeting of rights that Ahmed hopes will wake more people up to the potential expansion of a system that has been in place for decades. She points out that while the Trump administration is accelerating and publicising their processes, they are working on groundwork laid during the Clinton administration and strengthened under Obama.

“How many of us haven’t spoken up in the past? How many 401k plans invest in CoreCivic or The GEO Group*?” she asks. “We are all responsible, we are all implicated in this system. And so it’s all of our responsibility to stand up and against this move towards civil detention with no process.”

It is a reminder that the sweeping landscapes of the American South aren’t just hiding a fraught history of sweetness, but are continuing a pattern that is hidden in plain sight. The physical labour of society’s least powerful people is seen as an endless renewable resource. Sugar may be sought after the world over, but its history remains a bitter note in the fabric of this region — one that lingers into the present and threatens the future.

*Prison industrial companies

Zac Jones Gómez is a writer based in Washington, DC. His editorial focus on the intersection of food and culture has included bylines with Conde Nast Traveler, Garden & Gun, and Modern Farmer. He is the creator of The Tactical Urbanist, a newsletter that explores topics around built environments and how they impact society.

The Tactical Urbanist | zacjkjones@gmail.com