Louisiana’s juvenile life-sentencing cases fell overwhelmingly on Black prisoners held at a former plantation

Evidence

At the time that we represented him, Matthew had been imprisoned for more than forty years. He was one of sixty-two Louisiana prisoners serving life in prison for non-homicide offenses committed when they were children; 89 percent of the condemned were Black. Some had been in prison for nearly fifty years. Almost all had been sent to Angola, a penitentiary that at the time was considered one of America’s most violent and abusive. Angola is immense, larger than the island of Manhattan, covering land once occupied by plantations where enslaved Black people were forced to labor. Some of our clients had worked in the fields for years while imprisoned under the supervision of horse-riding, shotgun-toting guards who forced them to pick crops, including cotton. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 839

Categorization

• XREF: Direct geographic continuity between plantation slavery and the prison system — the land itself is the same, amplifying the book’s reframing argument about slavery’s roots in American punishment.