At the height of summer, prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary (colloquially known as Angola) are confined with neither air-conditioning nor reprieve from temperatures topping 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
Angola’s prisoners have detailed futile attempts to subvert the architecture’s deleterious effects on their bodies. One person who spent 32 summers there told of efforts to cool the dormitory by spraying its walls and roof with a hose from the adjacent yard. Prisoners in cell blocks similarly splash water from their lavatories onto the concrete floor, which they proceed to sleep on. Another, who recently returned home, described the unforgettable sensation of “going to sleep wet and waking up wet,” drenched in sweat during the region’s ever more regular heat waves. Soaring temperatures are neither confined to one area of the prison nor to those imprisoned there: Guards and staff occupy the same environment, for a time. But with dismal healthcare, aging prisoners with comorbidities, or who are prescribed medications that cause heat sensitivity (like SSRIs), are especially impacted.
Since a wave of midcentury reforms to prisons, the number of people subjected to their brutal conditions has risen alongside global temperatures. When Angola was reformed in 1955, its population was around 2,500; it now pushes 4,000 after peaking at 6,300 in 2015. In February of this year, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed tough-on-crime laws that threaten a resurgence of Angola’s population. Experts believe that bills like HB 9, which will eliminate parole for all convictions after August 1, and HB 10, which limits “good behavior” sentence reductions, will double the state’s prison population within the next six years.
The Louisiana Department of Corrections (LDOC) has reportedly requested state funding to condition two other prisons next year. However, LDOC has vehemently fought lawsuits that seek to implement air-conditioning at Angola. Back in 2014, a federal judge agreed with plaintiffs on Angola’s death row that a 195-degree heat index qualified as “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment. But four years later, an appellate court overturned the ruling on a technicality. The three-judge panel sided with LDOC and then–attorney general Jeff Landry, ruling that increased access to cool showers and drinking water would suffice in lieu of facility-wide air-conditioning. “The Constitution does not require prisons to be comfortable; it requires them to be humane,” said Landry, drawing a distinction significant to Angola’s formation.
A New Kind of Prison
Confined within a sweeping arc of the Mississippi River, the Louisiana State Penitentiary was built on the site of seven antebellum plantations, including Angola—named after the Portuguese colony from which many of its enslaved were abducted. Angola opened as a state prison in 1901, after the land had been worked for decades under the racist convict leasing system following Emancipation. Curtis and Davis Architects and Engineers, a New Orleans–based office that notably designed the Superdome, was selected to modernize the prison in the early 1950s. Today, all of Angola’s able-bodied prisoners, more than two thirds of whom are Black, are required to work for pennies (two pennies per hour, to be exact) in agricultural fields managed by Prison Enterprises, the profit-generating arm of LDOC. A plantation logic persists in this expanse—almost 4,000 acres larger than Manhattan—where corn and cotton are still harvested by shackled hands beneath the eyes of armed guards.
Despite its detestable history, Angola’s modern design was recognized by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) with a First Honor Award in 1956. Curtis and Davis was lauded for reforming one of the nation’s most notorious institutions. A feature in the December 1956 issue of Architectural Forum, titled “A New Kind of Prison,” argued that barbaric facilities could be redesigned to ameliorate the oppressive conditions inherently imposed on the bodies contained within.
Prior to reform, Angola’s structures were dilapidated, crowded, and vermin-infested. Prisoners revolted in 1951, slashing their Achilles tendons to protest the oppressive conditions. Under pressure from the public to build something “more humane,” state administrators directed that Angola be reimagined by preeminent design talent with modern forms and materials—so modern that the scheme was criticized as a “Miami Beach type of architecture” in fear that prisoners would be coddled there. But 70 years after the “New Angola” was constructed, record-setting temperatures each summer reveal how the prison’s design remains connected to the site’s history of brutality.
The architects’ approach was paradoxically couched in environmental principles, like raising the floors above the river’s floodplain and introducing deep overhangs to reduce dampness and heat gain. But design strategies intended to comfort take on a different timbre when applied to spaces intended to punish. The exposed concrete structure acts as an unwanted thermal mass in Louisiana’s hot, humid climate, radiating stored heat into adjacent spaces. Rather than remedy the inhumane conditions endemic to the carceral system, Curtis and Davis perpetuated them.
The impact of this rural prison’s design on the architecture of mass incarceration is surprisingly far-reaching. In his autobiography, partner Nathaniel C. Curtis, Jr. contended that corrections officials contemplating new prisons in other states visited Angola for at least a decade following its completion. The bureaucrats took its blueprints, and often its architects, back to their respective municipalities to reproduce the results nationwide. In total, Curtis and Davis had a direct involvement in at least 90 carceral projects across 30 states.
We Built This World
Prison reformer James V. Bennett, who consulted on Angola’s design, argued in a 1959 Architectural Record article that the “replacement [of existing facilities] would contribute more to the advancement of American penology than any other single factor.” He explained that “many times [the $100 million federal budget needed] should be expended in new state facilities for increasing prisoner populations,” confirming a reliance on design professionals to implement the framework of mass incarceration. As architects, acknowledgment of the profession’s historic responsibility for enabling these institutions should be intertwined with pursuing alternatives and parallel struggles—like education, healthcare, and housing for all—which have been shown to be more effective for community safety than prisons.
While Angola is in dire need of climate controls, the fear for prison abolitionists is that architectural interventions that extend the useful life of the building might also extend the operations of the unjust institution that occupies it—as Curtis and Davis demonstrated. After speaking to lawyers with clients facing summers at Angola for the foreseeable future, I am nevertheless convinced that mitigatory action to preserve their minds and bodies beyond prison ultimately constitutes a decarceral vision for the future. Abolitionist artist jackie sumell concurred when I interviewed her last October: “Having your basic needs met is a principal value system for how we can dismantle prisons from the inside and the outside. On the days where my basic needs are met, I am way less prone to cause harm.” A multipronged strategy of modifying existing structures while steadily reducing the number of people kept within them is a viable path toward closing a plantation that has been operating for almost 200 years.
Prison abolition will require an overhaul of many juridical systems beyond our professional control, but it is past time for architects to recognize that prisons are the physical manifestation of the deprivation present in those systems. Attempts to destigmatize this work in the interest of capitalizing on it recycle the same complicity that midcentury architects have in the current crisis. Any engagement with this typology should not be a misdirected effort in making it more effective, but instead unnecessary. Angola’s prisoners have had this architectural awareness since 1954, writing in inmate-edited-and-published newspaper The Angolite that “it must be apparent that a pink-silk boudoir can become no less a prison if the occupant is held against his will.” Considering that AIA once awarded a project where solitary confinement was and is still practiced, its 2020 Code of Ethics barring work on similar facilities is simply not enough. Architects must withhold their labor from all new carceral facilities and take a stand for the closure of existing ones. To paraphrase anthropologist David Graeber and artist Roger Peet: We built this world—we can build another.
This article contains excerpts from the forthcoming book Super Max by Page Comeaux to be published by Antenna Press.
Page Comeaux is an organizer and architect.
