It is named "Angola" after the former slave plantation that occupied this territory. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, [ 10 ] with 6, prisoners and 1, staff, including corrections officers , janitors, maintenance workers, and wardens.
Located in West Feliciana Parish , the prison is set between oxbow lakes on the east side of a bend of the Mississippi River and thus flanked on three sides by water. It lies less than two miles three kilometers south of Louisiana's straight eastโwest border with Mississippi.
The 28 square miles 73 square kilometers of land the prison sits on was known before the American Civil War as the Angola Plantations, a slave plantation owned by slave trader Isaac Franklin. The prison is located at the end of Louisiana Highway 66 , around 22 miles 35 km northwest of St. Death row for men and the state execution chamber for women and men are located at the Angola facility. Before , state inmates were held in a jail in New Orleans.
The first Louisiana State Penitentiary, located at the intersection of 6th and Laurel streets in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was modeled on a prison in Wethersfield , Connecticut. In , during the Reconstruction era , Samuel Lawrence James, a former Confederate major, received the military lease to the future prison property along the Mississippi River.
He tried to produce cotton with the forced labor of African Americans. The land developed as Angola Penitentiary was purchased in the s from Francis Rout as four contiguous plantations by Isaac Franklin. He was a planter and slave trader , co-owner of the profitable slave trading firm Franklin and Armfield , of Alexandria, Virginia, and Natchez, Mississippi. The Angola plantation was named after the country on the west coast of Southern Africa , from which many enslaved people were from.
