"Today They Kill With The Chair Instead Of The Tree": Prisoners’ Conceptions of Race and Criminal Justice at Angola

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Crime and Punishment II

Abstract

To explore the workings of the contemporary American criminal justice system is to, at one level or another, either explicitly or implicitly, engage in questions pertaining to race. Yet despite the fact that race “looms large” in today’s prisons, scholars have tended to resist in-depth, qualitative explorations of the role race plays in shaping carceral experiences or the ways imprisonment can make and remake race, favouring instead studies that document incarceration rates and the effects of these policies (Goodman 2008: 763). Undertaking the case study of the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola), this project seeks to contribute to this body of literature primarily by adding prisoners’ voices to the discussion. Using a convenience sample of 95 issues of The Angolite, Angola’s inmate-produced newsmagazine, drawn from the years 1979-2001, I investigate both if and how America’s racial history – the South’s history of slavery and Angola’s past as a plantation, more specifically – continues to permeate prison life in the present. In particular, I analyze the ways in which this history informs prisoners’ conceptions of their imprisonment as well as how prisoners talk about the relationship between race and the criminal justice system more generally.

Author

• Liam Kennedy, University of Toronto