David Stein: Can you give a brief overview of the narrative of Prison Capital?

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: My book traces Louisiana’s unprecedented expansion of its capacity to police, jail, and imprison from the 1970s to about 2020.

In all but one year between 1998 and 2020, Louisiana held the title of having the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation, and thus the world. It has been commonly stated that Louisiana is the most incarcerated place in the world. New Orleans is the most incarcerated city in the world. Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is the largest state maximum security prison in terms of population. I wanted to understand why and how all this happened. Often people make these pretty simplistic assumptions: that it’s just that the South is racist, or that it’s a simple repetition of racial slavery. There isn’t actually a consideration of what it takes for a state to rework, restructure, and pivot its state capacities toward locking people up en masse.

And I say en masse because in 1970, Louisiana locked up around 4,000 people; by 2012, at the apex of the state’s incarceration, Louisiana locked up over 40,000 people. So we have a tenfold increase over about forty years. So many different actors had to align in different ways in different moments to build up Louisiana’s capacity to cage.

From the beginning of this project, I also had fundamental questions about how people have organized against mass incarceration, against policing and imprisonment from across reformist and abolitionist positions. And then also, how people have organized for a more free Louisiana, or a different world. How do we understand Louisiana as a place that is not just about Louisiana? What does Louisiana have to tell us about the story of mass incarceration writ large?

DS: Can you illuminate the role of unsafe conditions in the 1970s Louisiana prison system? How did imprisoned people organize to bring this problem to the attention of policymakers and judges? And how did courts and judges narrate that problem, which then shaped their response?

LPH: In 1971, four prisoners locked up in Angola—Hayes Williams, Arthur Mitchell, Joseph Lazarus, and Lee Stevenson—decide to put together a lawsuit that takes on the fundamental violence of Angola as they understand it.

Their lawsuit argues that Angola is fundamentally racist, toxic, and unjust. There is constant usage of solitary confinement as a disciplinary tool. There is raw sewage and other toxic conditions at the prison itself. There’s also a failure to meet the religious dietary needs of Muslims. There is ongoing racial segregation and discrimination in prison housing and jobs.

This lawsuit is issued at a time when incarcerated people increasingly view the federal courts as a political front.¹ Across the US, a Reconstruction-era civil rights law has established a precedent for incarcerated people to sue the state for civil rights violations. With this understanding, these four prisoners put together this extensive conditions-of-confinement lawsuit, and the federal courts end up finding for the plaintiffs in 1975 on every point, except for solitary confinement, which is the precipitating issue for the plaintiffs. They don’t even investigate. But they do say, yes, Angola is racist. Yes, it is toxic. Yes, new policies need to be enacted.

But the courts also add that a key issue is overcrowded conditions that are creating violence—that is, there are too many “criminals” packed into Angola, and they are engaging in violence against each other.

In response, liberal reformers are appointed to run the Department of Corrections and their proposal is to decentralize Angola—to shrink or even shutter Angola and replace it with smaller urban prisons across the state. The courts agree with this proposal but give a really short timetable for instituting this plan. And residents across the state protest new prisons in their cities, for a host of reasons across the political spectrum, which slows down the project. This is all unfolding at the same time as the rise of tough-on-crime lawmaking at the municipal and state level—all backed by Nixon’s crime bill, which has led to an infusion of funds for criminalization and carceral capacity. So there’s this dual situation happening, where there’s this demand for liberal reforms at the same time as other state actors are expanding the capacity to criminalize, arrest, and cage.

And in the end, the federal judges say that to address the overcrowding issues, the state needs to both decentralize and expand Angola: to create more bed space there and to build more state prisons.

DS: That brings us to the next part of your story, which is how they’re able to finance and grow the prison and jail system. There is an important wrinkle due to the oil shocks of the 1970s, when most state and local budgets are in crisis during this period of tax revolts and recession. But in contrast to, say, the fiscal crises of New York and Cleveland and elsewhere, Louisiana has a ton of revenue coming in from oil.

LPH: Oil is first found in Louisiana in 1901. Then, beginning in the 1920s under Huey Long, the state really starts to tie its budgetary apparatus to mineral revenues, originally as a populist program of wealth redistribution. By the 1960s, the state has begun to scale back things like income taxes and property taxes, with the idea that mineral revenues will buoy its economy. By the time the oil price hike happens in 1973, upwards of 40 percent of Louisiana’s budget comes from mineral revenues, and Louisiana has more money on hand than ever in its history.

This is important because 1973 is smack dab in the middle of the Angola lawsuit. Edwin Edwards, the governor, allocates this money into all sorts of state building projects: welfare payments, higher education, public works, and so on. Within this context, the liberal reformers say we need more money for Corrections to meet these court mandates, and he agrees, as part of the same state building project. This is very different than other states that are under similar federal court orders in this era but that lack Louisiana’s financial resources, like Florida (or even Texas, which has its own oil economy). While other states are compelled to enact mass early release to meet federal mandates regarding overcrowding, Louisiana is able to build its prisons out. It is so flush that it can build prisons (and jails) through cash on hand, versus through credit, which is basically unheard of before or since. All to say, the infusion of mineral revenues adds a new layer to our story of mass incarceration in the US, and our story of how different states had different timelines for their prison booms.

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DS: That takes us through to the part of your story where individual parishes, and thus sheriffs, become critical policymakers. Why is this so important in the story of Louisiana’s carceral growth?

LPH: As a geographer, I’m really interested in thinking through the different scales of the carceral state. We often talk about the state as if it’s a monolith, instead of as a multi-scalar and contradictory assemblage of institutions.

Focusing on Louisiana helps to bring into relief these different aspects of carceral state formation. When the overcrowding crisis happens in the 1970s, the federal courts put a population limit on Angola and prohibit more people from being sent there. But it’s not as if the police stop arresting people, or the district attorney’s office stops prosecuting people, or judges stop sentencing people. So as people across the state are going through those different parts of the criminal legal process that leads one to a prison, the sheriffs are being told that they have to keep state prisoners in their jails.

In response, the jails become overcrowded and the sheriffs get frustrated. Infamously, New Orleans Sheriff Charles Foti takes a van full of prisoners and leaves them in a prison parking lot. He doesn’t want them in his jail.

To appease the sheriffs, the 1976 state legislature creates a per diem system, which requires the Department of Corrections to pay each sheriff’s department a nominal amount of dollars for every night that the sheriff is incarcerating a state prisoner. Over time, sheriffs begin to see this revenue as a real benefit to their jails and their power. More than a third of Louisiana parishes end up allocating 50 percent of their bed-space for state prisoners by the 1990s! And around the same time, a parallel phenomenon is happening at the level of immigration detention, where sheriffs are increasingly incarcerating INS and then later ICE detainees through an even more lucrative federal per diem system.

In the case of Sheriff Foti, he massively expands his staff, which in turn extends the number of people dependent on the jail for their jobs, and this helps to solidify his political power. By the late 1990s, the New Orleans city jail, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), is over seven thousand beds, or two thousand beds larger than Angola. It’s the largest correctional facility in the state.

DS: Let’s jump forward a little bit to Hurricane Katrina. What happened to the Orleans Parish Prison during Katrina?

LPH: For those who don’t have the date stamped in their memory, Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans on August 29th, 2005. Hurricane Katrina was a category 5 storm when it hit the Gulf Coast in Alabama and Mississippi. But it quickly weakened by the time that it hit New Orleans, turning into a strong Category 2; and the City of New Orleans only flooded because of decades of disinvestments in federal flood protections including the levee system.

Countless people are left in harm’s way because of the state’s refusal to make evacuation plans. The hurricane ends up coming through weaker than expected—but then the levees break. Within hours, 80 percent of the city is underwater. President George W. Bush is malignantly slow in his response. Thousands of people are stranded, chopping through roofs to escape the floodwaters. People begin rescuing each other on canoes.

Of course this is all totally unconscionable in general. But the crisis is even more acute and abhorrent for those locked up at OPP. Again, at the time of Hurricane Katrina, OPP has over seven thousand beds. In the days leading up to the storm, state and city leaders decide that jailed people are explicitly outside the mandatory evacuation order, even as there were prisons and jails elsewhere in the state that could have taken people in.

When the flooding starts the sheriff’s deputies abandon their posts, heading to the highest floors of the jail with hoarded food and supplies. People are left in their cells, and as the waters rise they realize that no one is going to save them but themselves. People swim to higher floors, helping those who are in wheelchairs and the kids who had been transferred to OPP from the juvenile prisoners. People break windows, make signs, light fires, they do everything you can imagine to say, “we are trying to live.”

In response, the state creates a narrative that prisoners were rioting. This mirrors the broader narratives that Black New Orleanians were a threat prior to and during Hurricane Katrina. The state’s response is twofold: intensified criminalization of Black Katrina survivors alongside the generalized organized abandonment of New Orleans.

DS: In the aftermath of Katrina, we see a huge wave of organizing, and some really significant abolitionist reforms. Can you describe those movement struggles?

LPH: Black Leftists from the city immediately identify this as a pivotal political moment. I was living and participating in movement spaces in New Orleans during that time, and I cannot emphasize enough that it’s impossible to understand post-Katrina New Orleans without the story of grassroots organizing.

New Orleans organizers were networked with various national movements when the levees broke. For instance, a few years before Katrina, New Orleans activists hosted the Critical Resistance South Conference, which brought people to the city from across the region and the nation. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence had hosted their most recent conference in New Orleans the spring before Katrina. New Orleans anti-prison and anti-policing organizers are both rooted in the local context and part of national movement conversations.

In the first months after Hurricane Katrina, a number of long-term New Orleans advocates and activists came together to found an organization called Safe Streets/Strong Communities with the goal of remaking the New Orleans criminal legal system. Their organization is focused on base-building among people who have experienced violence at the hands of the police or in the jail, as well as their loved ones. They organize around three campaigns. First, they decide that public defense needs a complete overhaul. There were no full-time public defenders at the time of Katrina—it was a part-time position, and deeply tied up with the police union. Often these attorneys would convince their clients to hire them as private lawyers to supposedly give them better representation.

Safe Streets/Strong Communities identifies that system as part of why so many people were being locked up pretrial. So there’s this big push to create a real public defender’s office. Various legal advocates join this campaign, and it’s won relatively quickly. By 2006 or 2007, New Orleans gets a real public defender’s office for the first time in its entire history.

Another prong of their work around the jail ends up being funneled into the work of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC). OPPRC existed pre-Katrina, but is re-animated after the storm through the grassroots organizing of groups like Safe Streets, Critical Resistance, and the Congress of Day Laborers, as well as more reform-minded advocates. While pre-Katrina OPPRC was really focused on conditions of confinement, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina it becomes clear that the jail is fundamentally violent and its violence is tied to its size, to its capacity to cage.

The jail had been partially destroyed from the floods. Again, 80 percent of the city had been under water, so it’s not surprising that part of the jail had been demolished. But by the time the jail reopens in late 2005, it’s shrunk from seven thousand beds to about three thousand.

Sheriff Marlin Gusman pushes to use FEMA funding to expand the jail up to five thousand beds. He sees this as a first step to getting OPP back up to its pre-Katrina size (and perhaps even larger). OPPRC organizes not only to stop this expansion, but to push back and say: the jail should be even smaller.

After internal debates, they end up calling for a cap of 850 beds. So they push, and they organize, they do political education and media work, and they end up getting neighborhood associations, religious groups, advocates of all stripes, to sign onto the demand that the jail should be rebuilt smaller and not larger.

Through this people-powered campaign, the city agrees that the jail needs to shrink. And while the council doesn’t meet their 850-bed demand, they place the jail’s cap at 1,468 beds. The important takeaway here is that through this struggle, OPP ended up 80 percent smaller than it was when Katrina hit. Instead of this being an opportunity for the city to lock more and more people up, it becomes an opportunity for the city to lock up fewer people than it had in decades.

DS: In the book, you write that “if we recognize that abolition is not only about dismantling carceral systems, but also about building up institutions and practices that extend collective life, we must also see abolitionist infrastructures as encompassing new kinds of caring structures.” What types of forms of the state and struggles over the state inspire this analysis? How do we see it expressed?

LPH: There’s sometimes an erroneous idea that all abolitionists are anarchists, but of course abolitionists have all kinds of positions on the state. I often think, in the US context, we normalize “the state” as the US state. But being internationalist pushes us to think about what states have meant to different people in different parts of the world. This is not to ignore that the US is a state built on settler colonialism, slavery, an empire that has caused so much pain and suffering. But I also take seriously Du Bois’s conceptualization of abolition democracy, in Black Reconstruction, that the Reconstruction state was an attempt to make a different state that exceeds or transforms what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

For myself, I’m trying to think about the state as contradictory across scales. That the state at once does great harm, through things like prisons, and also mitigates suffering, through things like clean drinking water.

A lot of this is informed by my experience living in South Louisiana, a frontline of climate change. I spend a lot of time thinking about the scale of climate change mitigations necessary for people here as well as for people across the globe. And I believe it is an abolitionist project to think about how to build state capacities to mitigate the harms of climate change, from everyday coastal erosion to extreme disasters. I am quite moved by mutual aid and think it can do much good, but my experience in mutual aid projects in the years after Hurricane Katrina also revealed to me its woeful limitations. For instance, when a region’s entire electricity grid goes down or we need to build out better flood infrastructures, I see us needing to work at a scale that mutual aid unfortunately can’t reach. And even at smaller scales, I worry about political projects that can at times fall into the trap of fetishizing the concept of “community”—often reinforcing quite narrow and patriarchal ideas of taking care of “one’s own.” Our political project needs to demand care for all, even those we might not like.

So then, how do we actually build out the kinds of institutions that are needed to meet people’s needs? Or in other words, how do we create a non-violent state or an anti-violent state?

While they might not always use these terms, I think the stories of activism in my book are stories of people struggling with the contradictions of the state. For instance, the post-Katrina organization Safe Streets/Strong Communities did surveys around police violence in New Orleans while the National Guard was still patrolling the city, at an exorbitant cost to the city and the state. In these surveys people were asked what else this public money might go toward. The answers illuminated a different kind of state: people said that the money could be for housing, or levee rebuilding, or bringing displaced people home. That’s a completely different orientation to safety and security.

If abolition and freedom are about presence and not absence, as Ruthie Gilmore tells us, then the question is, presence of what? On what scale? These kind of stories—from people who have some of the most intimate experiences of state violence, and some of the most visionary ideas of what else we need—help us get away from abstract notions of the state. They help us think, instead, about what’s really required for freedom.

1. Charlotte Rosen’s essay in n+1 Issue 43 exposes the federal court system as a key player in the expansion of American incarceration and the miscarriage of justice in prisoner litigation cases. ↩

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