Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)
01:05:57 Share

Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Every day, thousands of Comcast engineers and technologists like Kunle put people at the heart of everything they create. In the average household, there are dozens of connected devices. Here in the Comcast family, we're building an integrated in-home Wi-Fi solution for millions of families like my own.

It brings people together in meaningful ways. Kuhnle and his team are building a Wi-Fi experience that connects one billion devices every year. Learn more about how Comcast is redefining the future of connectivity at comcastcorporation.com slash Wi-Fi. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Lydia Palo-Hobbs about her book titled Prison Capital, Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2023. This book is important because it turns out from the period...

Relatively recently, in fact, quite recently, from 1998 to 2020, every year in that period with only one exception, Louisiana has had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the entire United States.

That's a lot. How did that happen? It turns out there was a really significant turn towards mass incarceration in the state, starting from about the 1970s onwards. And obviously, understanding that history requires us to go back further in time as well. But it's very clearly quite an important topic. So, Lydia, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about it. Thank you, Miranda. It's such a pleasure to be here.

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Yes. So, again, my name is Lydia Palo-Hobbs. I'm currently an assistant professor of geography and African-American Africana Studies at

at the University of Kentucky. I've also lived full or part-time in New Orleans, Louisiana for about 19 years now. And this project really initially came out of the grassroots organizing I was involved in against policing and imprisonment and heightened criminalization in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which happened in 2005, so really in the kind of years between 2006 and 2010.

And during that time, it was really frequently stated that Louisiana had the highest rate of incarceration in the United States. It was just repeated kind of as almost as a mantra in organizing spaces as kind of a kind of call to arms to do something different as a reason why our organizing around criminalization was so critical, particularly in that kind of key political moment.

So I wanted to figure out why that had been the case. And so I went looking for a book that would hopefully explain to me why Louisiana became kind of an epicenter of mass incarceration in the United States. And I unfortunately found that the last monograph on the Louisiana penal system was published in 1971, which is, you know, really before the era of mass incarceration gets started in earnest. Right.

And so I had all of these questions and I ended up really doing the project, which began as my dissertation and then turned into this book to answer that question that I had been trying to analyze and to understand myself.

As well as often the kind of stories about mass incarceration in Louisiana or imprisonment or policing had tended to focus in, you know, mainstream media and kind of popular discourses really focusing on the racial state violence issue.

which was accurate, but often invisibilized or completely erased the stories of organizing and activism, both behind bars and not, that folks were engaging with. And so also part of this project was also wanting to think about not just how did Louisiana become one of the most incarcerated places in the world, but what have been the strategies, the tactics, the

the visions of folks on the ground who have been organizing to undo the state of affairs and make a kind of more just or a more free world. So that's kind of it really emerged out of everyday, you know, questions that I had, you know, almost going back 20 years ago.

But that really have solidified and clarified in the, you know, remaining five, 10 years that I was working on the project. So many interesting books come out of I wanted to read a book about then I realized there wasn't. So I had to go figure it out myself. So speaking of that figuring out, there's some key terms here I want to make sure we clarify, specifically carceral infrastructure and carceral cooperation. Can you help us understand them? And especially in the context of Louisiana? Yeah.

Yes. So when I'm thinking about this kind of concept of carceral infrastructure, I both literally mean, you know, new state prisons, parish jails, parishes are what counties are called in Louisiana. That's something worth noting. So I mean, you know, prisons, jails, detention centers,

things that we often immediately think of when we hear the term infrastructure. But I'm also thinking about the kinds of broader kind of frameworks of both kind of hard and soft infrastructures that give rise to the carceral state. So alongside prisons, jails, detention centers, I'm also thinking about, you know, surveillance cameras. I'm also thinking about the kind of laws

and policies that undergird the carceral state. So these can be more draconian sentencing laws. These can be laws that, you know, intensify or expand prosecutorial or police power. It can also be kind of really mundane policies around questions of land use.

and other things that give rise to these systems. So it's really a host of different kind of policies, practices, as well as literal physical infrastructures that kind of give us a sense of carceral infrastructure. And that this is tied to this kind of conceptualization of carceral cooperation that I came up with. It's really one of those terms I found myself really organically writing over and over again in the archives while I was initially researching the project.

And by carceral cooperation, I mean thinking about the different kind of sites and spaces the carceral state is made and struggled over, not as a singular site, but the ways in which different sectors of the state, so police departments, the state legislature, the governor's office, city councils, police departments, and more,

How they kind of come together in alignment, but also at times and kind of antagonism to build up kind of carceral state capacities. So an example of this that I think about a lot is, for instance, what happens when, you know, the local police departments in a city like New Orleans are either buttressed by kind of lowercase s state police.

departments like the Louisiana State Troopers, but also what it means that federal funds can come in through things such as the 1994 crime bill by Clinton. So I think that both these kind of concepts of carceral infrastructure and carceral cooperation help us both in different but related ways see that the carceral state is not a monolith, but is a multiscalar, multi-assemblage institution of institutions that

that, again, sometimes are working together, but also at other moments there are fissures and there are breaks between them, sometimes in surprising ways. Sometimes you might actually have a warden of a prison actually going against a tough-on-crime district attorney because they might actually have some slightly competing interests at those moments in time.

And thinking about it helps us see kind of the webbing that leads to the kind of development of mass criminalization versus just focusing on police or prisons or jails or the courts. We're really helping to see how these sites are all kind of interlinked and are all kind of part of this carceral state apparatus.

Okay, that's very helpful to have laid out for us clearly. I wonder if we can start talking about this sort of 1970s pivot point, I suppose, not just when the last book was published on the topic, but as you identify in the research, a really key sort of turning point for the expansion of the Louisiana penal system. To understand that change, though, we have to go before that. What were the ways in which the penal system in Louisiana was organized before we get to the 1930s?

the 1970s, both literally organized in terms of infrastructure, but also ideologically organized? Yeah. So Louisiana is pretty notorious for having, to this date, the largest maximum security state prison in the United States in terms of population, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is more commonly referred to as Angola. So Angola, as a prison, you know, it

was initially the case that Louisiana, like many places in the South, had like one small prison in the kind of antebellum era. There was a small state prison in Baton Rouge, mostly, right, in that kind of pre-1865 period, mostly folks who were white or would be white who were incarcerated there because enslaved people were really understood as kind of outside of the domain of kind of the public punishment system.

In the years after the Civil War, Louisiana, like most other, if not actually all of the other southern states, turns to different forms of convict leasing or the kind of leasing out of incarcerated people to private businesses, specifically in the week of Jim Crow. So really, you know, not as much during the Reconstruction period, but in the kind of 1870s forward.

And the idea of punishment is to really use the punishment system to start kind of intensely incarcerating Black people specifically or predominantly Black men as a way to kind of re-inscript white supremacy and also as part of the capitalist modernization project of the so-called New South or the Jim Crow South. So in the state of Louisiana, this looks like

lot of comically saying with having incarcerated Black men who are getting, you know, locked up for things such as, you know, refusing to adhere to the new Jim Crow order, not having work passes on them, those kinds of really draconian laws to get them to do the labor of building new roads, to build up the levee system on the Mississippi River, to help do

do railroad kind of construction across the state of Louisiana, all of these kinds of activities. And the most prominent lesser in this kind of pre and the late 1800s is someone named Samuel James, who is a former Confederate general. He was from Tennessee. He had bought up a series of plantations

In Louisiana, one of which was called Angola and had been a former slave plantation. And it's there that he really centers on the convict leasing of Louisiana. It's almost every person who is locked up. The vast majority of them are kind of under his oversight.

And it's a really brutal work environment. Under James, something like someone died every three days, right? So thousands of people died during the 30 or so years of convict leasing as the kind of predominant form of the carceral state. And it's in this moment, obviously, that the penal population goes from having been previously overrun

overwhelmingly white pre-Civil War to overwhelmingly Black in just like a few years after the Civil War. So there's a real racial recomposition that happens during this period of time.

So we then see in this period of time, increasingly the state, you know, which was really cash strapped at the time. And the idea of convict leasing was that the kind of ideologies underlying it was that it would both re-inscript white supremacy. It would also be a way for the state to not have to spend a lot of money on incarceration or punishment while still being able to enact

this kind of mass project of mass criminalization that Jim Crow entailed. And on the other hand, the state starts to see, though, that someone like James is making a lot of money off of this project of convict leasing. And that, along with agitation by labor organizers, as well as some anti-Jim Crow activists, lead to the ending of convict leasing and the state buying, actually, the plantation

And turning it into the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1901. In 1901 forward, the state, you know, tries to basically replicate what James was doing with convict leasing. But this way is a way to accrue revenue for the state of Louisiana. So, again, trying to make money off of it.

However, what ends up happening is very quickly, while incarcerated people are both growing food on the grounds of Angola, and they're also engaged in road building projects on chain gangs and other things of that ilk, and

It quickly becomes clear to the state, actually, that this is not a money making endeavor, even though they'd hoped it was. It's actually incredibly expensive. And so they basically keep ending up, I would say, between more or less from 1901 until the 1960s. And this kind of cycle where there would be in Louisiana, the state would say, we're going to make money off of this labor force.

The state wouldn't really make money off this labor force. They would move people from being working on the farm to, you know, not working on the farm of Angola. There would be prison uprisings of various sorts, protests. There would be outrage. There would be some kind of legal investigation or, you know, the newspapers would do an investigative report. Progressive era reformers would come in and say, we need to investigate and, you know, institute reforms at Angola.

Some more money would get funneled into the penal system and it would lead to, you know, a kind of momentarily slight reduction in the violence of Angola. And then time would pass by. People would forget that this would happen and kind of the cycle would start anew. And I would say that cycle literally repeated itself several times. It was often articulated that kind of austerity was the rule of Angola. Right. So people are living in really terrible conditions.

The food is really bad. It's quite toxic. And then it also is the case that even though it's majority Black, there are still white prisoners at Angola. And there's, you know, really intensive systems of racial segregation and in the dining and where people sleep in their dormitories and the cell blocks and the different camps that make up Angola. And then there's also that increasingly racist

So there is this kind of development of something called a trustee system whereby prisoners would actually turn to, how would I put this? They would guard each other, right? So white prisoners, always white prisoners, would get appointed to basically be guards. They would at times have,

be armed and there would be a lot of brutality within prisoners through this structure that was, you know, put on by the prison, again, to save the state money, right? And so deeply brutal, a lot of really terrible violence happening within the prison itself. You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

When you check out at the pharmacy, you see the journey from idea to medicine, thanks to our intellectual property system, or IP for short. IP safeguards inventions, like a new way to prevent seizures or lower cholesterol. And IP supports competition from other brands, then lower-cost generics, which are 90% of prescriptions filled in the U.S. Innovation. Competition. Lower costs.

Thanks to IP. Learn more at phrma.org slash IPWorksWonders.

So this is kind of the main story of the first several decades of the 20th century of Angola or the Louisiana State Penitentiary. And then in about, we start to see some shifts starting in the 1960s. So one thing that happens is on one hand, there's the building of the first state women's prison, St. Gabriel, which previously all incarcerated people had more or less been incarcerated in Angola. But then also really significantly in the early 1970s,

four prisoners at Angola, four Black men, Arthur Mitchell, Hayes Williams, Lazarus Joseph, and Lee Stevenson, come together and they decide to issue conditions of confinement lawsuits against Angola. And this is really importantly built upon a series of wins within the Supreme Courts, often led by Nishim Islam prisoners,

to kind of win civil rights and constitutional guarantees for prisoners within prisons across the United States of America. So there starts to be legal precedent that really opens up a new space of opportunity for incarcerated people's legal challenges to the penal system.

So this these four prisoners came together initially that two of them had been in solitary confinement together. And that's really a precipitative issue for them. But they decide to really focus on basically calling attention to the systematic violence of Angola. So they charge Angola with really, you know, all of the issues I named. Right. So the violence within the prison population, the racial segregation, violence.

that's happening in terms of dorms and dining, also what jobs people are given with the best prison jobs being reserved for white prisoners, that there's a lot of toxicity in the prison. There's literally like raw sewage being pumped underneath the dining halls, for instance, or also the ways in which

There's really inadequate medical care. And then, you know, for them, really importantly, the like deep disciplinary violence of solitary confinement. So they issue this lawsuit. They, you know, get some help from outside legal attorneys. And because we're in this kind of moment that nonviolence,

not only has there been these like legal wins or new precedents being set in the courts because of the ways in which prisoners have been issuing these lawsuits, there's also kind of a growing prison reform movement. I would say that we're in the era of kind of liberal prison reform in the late 60s into early 70s. Across the United States, there's really a call to like make the prison system be better, be different. There's already an articulation that too many people are incarcerated. And I would like to remind us

In that period of time, there's about 200,000 people locked up in the United States versus the about 2 million people today. Right. So it's literally a tenth of the size of incarceration that we have today. But there's a sense even then that too many people are locked up.

And this really creates this opening. And so these federal courts, the Fifth District Federal Court in the United States ends up finding for the plaintiffs on every issue except for solitary confinement. And in tandem with this, the Louisiana governor, someone named Governor Edwin Edwards, he institutes and puts in place a series of reformers.

in the Louisiana Department of Corrections, somewhat to get around the court charges, but also I think truly as part of just this milieu of liberal reformers at the time.

And this leads to this dynamic where these reformers leading the Department of Corrections, leading Angola, actually start to push for what they call the decentralization of Angola, where they propose that Angola is part of the issue is that it's way too large and that it's wildly overcrowded.

And that what's needing to happen is that Angola should be shrunk down or perhaps even shuttered altogether and replaced with a series of smaller urban kind of rehabilitation focused prisons in Louisiana.

The idea being that there's already Angola is really far away from the major urban centers. It's in a pretty remote part of the state. It's hard to get to so that if you put the prison, say, near New Orleans or Baton Rouge or a city called Lafayette or Shreveport, it's going to be easier for folks to visit their family and friends. So this is kind of the liberal narrative of the time.

And that there's a real push to do this. And the governor gets behind it and they say, yes, we should do this. And so there's this real moment of kind of political opening of kind of changing these dynamics. Also part of this story is that because overcrowding becomes front and central in the story from the judge's perspective, which was not necessarily something the plaintiffs had brought up. There's

There's also new population limits placed on Angola, which leads to the conundrum where sheriffs who are responsible for jails, they are increasingly not able to send prisoners to Angola because there's a cap. And it starts this kind of temporary era of kind of prisoners being incarcerated in parish jails. So all of a sudden, it's the 70s and you have both state prisoners increasingly incarcerated in parish jails, which is creating its own kind of set of problems. You have this conundrum

conundrum where the state is trying to maybe shut down Angola and replace it with new kind of smaller prisons. But all the places people go, the state goes to try and build these new prisons. There's massive opposition to new prison siting, sometimes kind of bolstered by the rise of anti kind of prisoner law and order or tough on crime politics where people, you know, more or less say they don't want prisoners in.

in their backyards. And this is really bolstered by the rise of tough on crime DAs and also the kind of general national growing sentiment

That's happening through the 1968 crime bill in the United States, which was, you know, the called the Safe Streets Act and really led to a kind of heightened federal politic around tough on crime politics, which is also creating new monies available through federal funds for intensifying kind of prosecutorial and police power.

So you both have some liberal reformers trying to do one thing. You have some kind of federal projects that are more on the tough on crime end of the spectrum. You have local district attorneys really using those federal funds to ramp up their ability to arrest and prosecute folks, leading to the prison population continuing to balloon. And you have residents across the state kind of opposing new prison projects in their backyards. This leads to the phenomenon that,

where the federal courts say that they're not moving on the project of decentralization fast enough. And it ends up being that the official decentralization plan that the liberal reformers have wanted, it's no longer able to be feasible. And so instead, what ends up happening is Angola, which ends up getting expanded as a prison. So it goes from about 3,000 beds to

to about 4,000 beds. And then they also say, okay, we're going to build more prisons. But the kind of idea of having them kind of smaller and more urban locales is scrapped. And they actually start building the prisons closer to where Angola already is and other rural places that have less of a population to contest the new kind of prison building. So what you see is instead of a plan that had initially been

decentralization to shrink the Louisiana state prison system, you start to see a decentralization project to grow the Louisiana state prison system. And this is really this key marker of the kind of rise or the beginning of Louisiana multiplying its prison capacity at this key moment.

This is a fascinating change to understand because it does seem kind of odd when you go back into the record and go, well, this is what they were initially trying for. Wait a second. How did that end up happening in the way that it did? So thank you for kind of explaining that for us. I wonder if we can zoom out the lens a little bit, though, because, of course, at this moment, there's also a bunch of other things happening, right, around, for example, the political economy of oil, the Reagan administration, and

Are those things impacting what's going on with the Louisiana penal system as well? Yes. So Louisiana is a state that has built its political economy on oil and other forms of petrochemicals. So also things such as natural gas,

for a very long time. So 1901, the year I said was when Louisiana State Penitentiary or Angola was bought by the state and turned into the Louisiana State Penitentiary was also the first year that oil was found in Louisiana.

And slowly but surely over the 20th century, Louisiana really sutures its political economy to oil and oil revenues and to finance much of the state. So increasingly, we see in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, Louisiana kind of increasing its reliance on oil and literally cutting its other taxation basis. So there's cuts on personal income taxes.

There's cuts on property taxes from the understanding that we can look back at as erroneous for all kinds of reasons. And that basically oil revenues will continue to bolster the Louisiana economy and therefore write low taxes on basically everything else is fine because oil is going to finance, you know, the the state's roads. It's higher education, public works, all kinds of things.

So this really is intensified in 1973, when in response to the kind of OPEC's oil embargo on the U.S., as well as kind of its rising rates of oil or rates on oil to kind of take advantage of the ways in which kind of the colonial oil regimes of

particularly Britain, have been undermining Middle Eastern states oil financial kind of revenues for a long time leads to the 1973 oil price hikes and the real kind of massive leap in oil prices for the United States.

Well, for most of the United States, this produces the 1973 recession and really has all kinds of negative economic consequences. In the case of Louisiana, all of a sudden the state is bolstered with so much economic

oil revenues on hand, that the state is just flush year after year after year. It's basically not only buffered by the states, by the recession, but it also just has more money than it knows what to do with. And I really mean this. I read decades of Louisiana state budgets, and I was shocked how much it would be in the kind of executive summaries

And these budgets in 73, 74, 75 and so on that they would say another year in a row, our revenues like surpass what we expected. And the state is put in this position where it all of a sudden has the funds to put money towards all kinds of things.

And when I say all kinds of things, it truly mean all kinds of things. So the governor, Edwin Edwards, who I previously mentioned, he has a real orientation that the state should be kind of built out in all kinds of areas. So he really takes a broad based state building approach, kind of a welfare state orientation for using these mineral revenues.

However, this also coincides with this federal court order, the Hayes-Williams federal lawsuit.

And this creates the conditions through which the state's Department of Correction also has unlimited money, it appears, to put into the expansion of prison projects. So whereas other states in the United States had really similar lawsuits, Florida, Texas, California, New York, many of them have these kinds of federal prisons conditions lawsuits in the 1970s, almost everywhere else was in a financial crisis.

difficulties at the time because of the recession, Louisiana had so much cash on hand that it's able to actually start building out prisons earlier than almost any other state during this time. And they, in fact, have so much money

money on hand that they're not, you know, taking out credit to pay to build out prisons, which is almost always what happens. They're mega projects. It's very expensive. It's literally able to just finance the building of these with the cash that it has. So it's not even any debt that's getting taken on. So Louisiana is really able to build out, I would say, earlier than most other places and with much less financial consequences.

On the other hand, as the prices of oil start to drop into the early 1980s, due to a mixture of overproduction and kind of a global oil glut, Louisiana all of a sudden finds itself in a financial tailspin. Because again, most of its political economy, most of the state's tax revenues are tied to the oil economy. So when oil prices drop,

All of a sudden, there is not money, and Louisiana finds itself in a fiscal crisis. And the governor that gets elected in 1979 is someone named David Treen, who's very much in alignment with Reagan. He's very much part of a kind of new right electoral strategy. He's also a former member of kind of the Southern states' rights head of Louisiana. So he's also, you know, has some deep white supremacist politics to him. So David Treen uses this moment of the oil bust to,

to kind of take advantage of this crisis to push forth austerity on Louisiana. He at one point is a 4% cut across the board of every single department of the Louisiana state. So many people are going unemployed in this era because of not just folks who lost their jobs in the oil economy, but all the kind of ripple effects that

that the state's unemployment fund goes broke during this period of time, and countless and countless numbers of people are immiserated. And then surprisingly, Black Louisianians, right, their unemployment rates end up being about double what white Louisianians are. So it's upwards of 20% Black unemployment in the state during this era. And

And in this kind of conundrum, we should not be surprised that there is increasingly, on one hand, people turning to kind of criminalize economic survival strategies to make ends meet. But also David Treen, who has a real commitment to law and order policy.

or politics, he also starts funneling the remaining monies that the state has, literally moving money from things like levy building to jail construction to make sure that the Department of Corrections is the one area that does not experience cuts during this time. And someone, this is part of the federal court mandates that require a base level of funding, but he goes above and beyond this.

So this like mixture of kind of a new right politic, tough on crime, as well as this economic kind of bust puts Louisiana in this tailspin.

leading to an intensified funneling of folks, predominantly working class and poor Black Louisianians into the penal system. And that the Reagan administration is also really kind of backing this, both ideologically with its tough on crime rhetoric, but also financially as, you know, Reagan also institutes

You know, 1981 at the time and hopefully still to this day, the largest tax cut in the United States, which leads to massive cuts in things like federal revenue sharing programs for folks in cities, particularly New Orleans and Baton Rouge. So all of a sudden there's just this massive economic crisis.

contraction and there's very little finances available to kind of support people at this moment. But the one thing that is on offer to Louisianians are more police, more jail beds, more prison beds.

harsher sentencing laws. People going from saying, you know, having the ability, you know, sentences going from maybe one to five years is the sentence to five to 20. And increasingly people having to, Louisiana very quickly during this era of time, ending up being the state with the most people convicted of life without parole sentencing in the United States, which also balloons further the Louisiana penal system. So

All of these different factors are really, you know, leading to a new rounds of overcrowding crises time and time again in the 80s that just, you know, is cyclical and just kind of gets worse over and over and over again. I'm ready for my life to change. ABC Sunday's American Idol is all new. Give it your all. Good luck. Come out with a golden ticket. Let's hear it. This is a man's world.

I've never seen anything like it. And a new chapter begins. We're going to Hollywood! Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryan, and Ryan Seacrest on American Idol. New Sundays, 8/7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu.

Membership means more with American Express Business Gold. Earn four times membership rewards points in your top two eligible spending categories every month, including eligible U.S. advertising purchases and select media and U.S. purchases at restaurants, including takeout and delivery. What are you waiting for? Get the card that flexes with your spending every month. Terms and points cap apply. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com slash business dash gold. MX Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express.

That is rather a shocking change for a whole number of aspects of the political economy and the obviously lived reality on the ground for Louisiana. What does this look like if we think about sort of parish and local jails? How are they transformed in the 80s and 90s? Right. So as I said, in the 1970s, so when the Hayes-Williams lawsuit happens in 75, as I said, there was initially a population put on Angola to manage overcrowding crises.

So the sheriffs who in Louisiana are some of the most powerful political actors in their parishes. There's many parishes that don't even have like a parish governing council or anything or a city council. And that the sheriff, you know, there's no term limits on them. They're not really accountable to anyone. They really often kind of operate as kind of how would I put this as, you know, as like rulers of these tiny kingdoms across the state.

So they are really angry initially that the state is putting is requiring them to incarcerate all these state prisoners or people that have already been convicted of state sentences and under normal circumstances would be getting sent to ankle or then one of the other many state prisons that are getting open by that time. Dixon, Wade, what have you.

So they, you know, are protesting often through this body called the Louisiana Sheriffs Association, which is a very powerful state association against these issues.

And in 1976, the state legislature kind of wants to create kind of a nominal form of how would I put this? They would like they would basically want to kind of appease the sheriffs. And so they create this system called a per diem system whereby the Department of Corrections will pay each sheriff X.

X amount of dollars per day for every state prisoner they have staying overnight in their jail. So what this and it's not very much money. It's a couple of dollars at first. So it's not necessarily going to cover the cost, for instance, of a state prisoner staying a night in your jail. But it's basically something to say, look, we're covering something. Please don't be too upset to try and kind of, you know, keep the sheriffs happier again because they're incredibly powerful political actors in Louisiana. Yeah.

In time, especially into the 80s. So what we see is the per diem system would be in effect. The sheriffs would say we would we don't want these prisoners in our jails, but we'll like deal with it as a temporary situation. A new prison would open.

The number of prisoners and being held in parish jails would drastically decrease as that new prison was opened. And then because of these kind of draconian sentencing laws, the police saying that would outpace actually the level of state prison beds being opened up. So over and over again, the jails are being turned to as always a kind of framed as a temporary site of incarceration of state prisoners.

sheriffs come to see in time that this is actually a really key source of financial revenue for them. And that while, you know, if you maybe have, you know, four or 10 or 15 state prisoners staying in your prison, that's not actually offering that much revenue for your sheriff's department. But if you say have 15,

or 100, that very quickly becomes actually a key source of revenue for you. And that revenue, while it's supposed to go towards, you know, I don't know, food or electricity or another mattress or what have you, what's actually happening is that sheriffs are able to use that money in a host of ways to buy new sheriff's cars, to, you know, hire more staff, not to pocket it, right?

Right. But to otherwise expand out what the sheriff's department can do. So in time, sheriffs start organizing through the Louisiana Sheriff's Association at the state legislature to increase the number of state prisoners that are locked up in local jails. So this is an absolute flip.

from what was seen only a few years prior. So in the 80s, they try to get actually the state legislature and they succeed to create new financing mechanisms to expand out jails explicitly to be incarcerating state prisoners. And then by the early 1990s, Louisiana finds itself in this really negative economic situation that it's because of all these kind of economic problems

in the 1980s. It finds itself with the lowest bond rating in the nation, and it literally cannot afford to build out prisons anymore. And so sheriffs leverage this along with...

with the governor at that period of time, who actually say they use the rhetoric of decentralization, actually going back to the 70s, saying we'll start incarcerating state prisoners closer to their home communities and all of this kind of other rhetoric that actually just fortifies state prisoners being locked up in local jails.

And so you start to have all of these parishes, many of them rural, overwhelmingly in very rural locations that are incarcerating almost 100 percent of their jail beds with state prisoners, usually from places like New Orleans and Baton Rouge. And so you end up having basically jails become state prisons or jails become kind of jails alongside state prisons.

And it leads to a real massive boom of the state penal system. We end up in the point that by 1998, when Louisiana has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the U.S., that over 50 percent of state prisoners in Louisiana are actually incarcerated in jails. And so it goes from being what I articulate in the book as a kind of temporary stop gap between

or temporary geographic solution to the long-term geographic solution for the Louisiana overcrowding crisis in the site of the kind of the jail structure. So it's really, again, this is part of this carceral cooperation I was talking about before.

And I also want to note that alongside with this happening at the state level, also in the mid to late 80s, you also increasingly have this operating at a federal level, whereby federal prisoners mostly at the time outlawed

INS detainees are also getting incarcerated in Louisiana's jails. So sheriffs are also starting to make even higher federal per diems on locking up immigrant prisoners initially, as well as a lot of prisoners from D.C., which is having who are under a federal system who are having their own kind of overcrowding crises. So increasingly, it's INS and then later into the

ICE detainees are being held in jails. And this is a dynamic we see across the United States growing. But Louisiana is really kind of a key site that this kind of formation or this structure begins. So there's not just a Louisiana story here. There's also kind of the beginnings of a national story of using jails as a kind of flexible, carceral infrastructure that can incarcerate pretrial people, convicted people, people who've been convicted for state time, as well as kind of immigrant detainees.

And really kind of building up power in these localities through kind of caging people for a host of reasons. So that carceral infrastructure is starting to sound very unfathomable.

unfortunately familiar to where we're at now. But of course, thankfully, part of where we're at now as well is pushback against these kinds of structures and forces. So can you tell us about how that developed, especially after these things were all expanding in kind of the late 90s, early 2000s? Yep. So there's a host. So I want to really name that. And every single conjuncture that this book

kind of tracks, there are folks who are fighting back against these. And sometimes they're behind bars at Angola or other state prisons or jails. Sometimes they're folks who have been criminalized in the streets of New Orleans or Baton Rouge or Lafayette. And sometimes they're their loved ones. So there's all kinds of different organizing that is increasingly happening behind bars and out. Because one of the kind of central contradictions

The carceral state is as more and more and more and more people are getting locked up, more and more and more people are either having direct knowledge of kind of the violence and the harm of the criminal legal system or they know someone who has. Right. So there's this kind of growing number of people there.

Who are seeing that the criminal legal system is not about, you know, you know, making the streets more safe or public safety, but is actually a way to kind of really entrench inequality, to really entrench state violence and to expand it on an unprecedented level.

So in the kind of late 90s, you see this taking a series of different forms. And a lot of this activism is centered in New Orleans for a couple of reasons. Both New Orleans has a kind of long political tradition going back, you know, all the way to the era of slavery, contesting racial state violence. But also, you know, there's a lot of activism that happens in the civil rights movement.

And also, it's also an epicenter of mass incarceration in Louisiana. And so you have by the late 90s, increasingly people calling attention to kind of the violence of the New Orleans Police Department, as there is a kind of series of high profile kind of police shootings against New Orleanians.

In the 80s and 90s, there's also increasingly folks who are having really intensive health issues in the New Orleans City Jail, which is known as Orleans Parish Prison. So folks are dying in the jail for not getting good medical care. And there's also a series of human rights watch reports about the detainee of immigrants at

at Orleans Parish Prison in the late 90s that, you know, garners a fair amount of attention by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, as immigrant prisoners are like, what is happening here?

And much of this organizing coalesces in the late 90s with a series of small grassroots organizations in New Orleans. One of them is called New Orleans Police Organizing Resource Center. One is called Education Not Incarceration. And they end up coming together together.

Through this kind of national burgeoning abolitionist movement that's calling for not just a reform of prisons and police, but the kind of abolition of what's getting articulated at the time as the prison industrial complex.

Through a series of conferences, an organization that gets developed called Critical Resistance, which hosts its initial conference in Berkeley, California in 1998. And then it was a second conference, I think in 2002. I might be off on the year by that in New York City.

And then a series of these organizers in New Orleans end up hosting what becomes known as Critical Resistance South in 2003 in New Orleans, Louisiana, which becomes a really critical regional meeting of folks who are working to abolish the prison industrial complex in the South. And so folks

organizing New Orleans really call attention to kind of these legacies of imprisonment in Louisiana. They talk a lot about political prisoners. There's some very infamous Black Panther political prisoners in Louisiana at the time at Angola. They're known as the Angola Three for having done, you know, been in solitary confinement for decades.

for their political positions. And there's also a lot of organizing kind of at the intersection of thinking about gender justice and the criminal legal system with a bunch of kind of Black feminists organizing. And so all of these issues really are key and lead to kind of a burgeoning kind of abolitionist movement in New Orleans as folks are really starting to work to shift and

And the narrative that to be criminalized is an individual failure to saying that criminalization is a political project that folks should organize. So people are really working to interrupt the stigmatization at that time of having been incarcerated or having been arrested or have family that had or friends or what have you. But to really kind of shift the narratives and open up a new way of thinking about

kind of what actually could a world look like that was actually where the state was invested and kind of meeting people's needs versus invested and kind of intensifying the policing and imprisonment of criminalized people. So this becomes like a re-key moment, not necessarily of like a campaign moment,

but a kind of re-articulation and that kind of infrastructure building for grassroots organizing around policing imprisonment in New Orleans and indeed much of the South.

And is this the same sort of foundation that we're still seeing with this kind of organizing today? Did, I don't know, did Hurricane Katrina completely change the dynamics here? Yeah. What does this look like more recently? Yeah. So I would say, so Katrina is a key turning point. So for folks who might not remember Katrina, the Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29th, 2005.

And, you know, the state's immediate response was a kind of law and order disaster response where criminalization was, you know, what happened first and foremost. You know, it's been wildly documented the levels of kind of the criminalization of black Katrina survivors in search of provisions under the guise of deeming them looters, the kind of rampant police violence against black people.

Men. There's also the abandonment of the city jail at that moment in time to the floodwaters where about 8000 people were incarcerated in the New Orleans city jail at that time had been wildly expanded out.

And that really no one except prisoners went to save themselves if they could during that time from the floodwaters. And that the city's first rebuilding project when the floodwaters started to recede a few days later before getting people really shelter or food even was the transformation of the city's bus and train station into a temporary jail.

So, you know, this is really central to this moment is this kind of widespread, deeply racialized criminalization project. And for folks on the ground, there's a lot of well, first of all, people are immediately displaced. So I should say this, you know, most of the city was gone for, you know, anywhere from two to eight months. And many people never were able to return.

But in this moment, organizers, both local activists as well as folks nationally, really see this as a key critical moment because New Orleans is framed as part of a neoliberal rebuilding project. And there's a real narrative at the time that what happens for New Orleans is going to kind of set the stage of what's going to happen for elsewhere in the United States of America in terms of displacement of people.

particularly Black working class communities and kind of the gentrification and the privatization of New Orleans' various critical infrastructures.

So in this moment, there's a lot of organizing pretty immediately. And because of things like the Critical Resistance South Conference and other events that had happened, you know, in the, you know, just a few years prior to Katrina, there's New Orleans organizers are really kind of keyed into and part of national networks, particularly black left formations, right?

And folks early on decide that there needs to be a lot of organizing around the criminal legal system. So this takes a lot of different forms. So on one hand, people with the organization Critical Resistance, which I previously mentioned,

They kind of start saying there needs to be an organized campaign for the amnesty of what they articulate as prisoners of Katrina. So people who had been abandoned in the city jail or had been criminalized for seeking food or health care or what have you right after Katrina. And basically that they should all get amnesty, that their charges should be expunged from their records.

And that's really a key part of their articulation, not whether someone was guilty or innocent, but to, you know, really putting the state on trial for the kinds of violence enacted against Katrina survivors. On the other hand, there's also simultaneously grassroots organizers who are increasingly starting to try and figure out what happened to people who got lost in the jail.

Because a lot of those folks ended up and they were all sent to prisons throughout the state, but often with little to no paper trail. And in that instance, you know, people are trying to figure out what's happening. And it's a lot of folks who work with something called the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. So something that was really focused on juvenile prisoners as an organization, but they start to really think about the adult system.

And out of this, they like are going to shelters around Louisiana in the South, trying to track people down and try to figure out what's happening. Why aren't there public defenders looking into them? All of these different pieces.

And what they're realizing is, is that, A, the public defense system doesn't really exist. It's been mostly kind of a patronage system of a handful of attorneys in Louisiana that are mostly working under a board that includes key members of the board or people who are, for instance, the attorneys of the New Orleans Police Union. And so there's a fundamental conflict of interest there.

And that most of these attorneys are only working part time and, you know, not really serving their clients well or, you know, using their role as a part time public defender to say, if you pay me, you can make more money or you're more. Excuse me, not that you'll make more money, but if you pay me, I'll give you a better service. So actually, you should hire me now as your private attorney. There's all these issues going on. So people are trying to figure out what should be done.

I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto-friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger, so I can get in more squats anywhere I can. One, two, three. Will that be cash or credit? Credit. Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you. Get yours at Samsung.com. Compatible with select apps requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input check responses for accuracy.

Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details, and private messages. McAfee helps stop them. SecureVPN keeps your online activity private. AI-powered text scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly. And with award-winning antivirus, you get top-tier hacker protection. Plus, you'll get up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com. Cancel any time. Terms apply.

And out of this emerges a new organization called Safe Street Strong Communities, which is a grassroots organization that decides to, in their words, work on organizing to reconstruct the criminal legal system of New Orleans.

And so they decided to agitate and organize for the creation of a real public defender's office with, you know, fully funded or better funded is actually what I should say, a better funded public defendant office with, you know, you know, full staffs of attorneys whose only job is to work with their clients, not to also be private attorneys and a completely separate board outside of this kind of kind of really, you

old boys club that's been running public defense in New Orleans forever. They also argue for the need to organize greater police accountability given the widespread police violence against Katrina survivors, but also to kind of leverage this moment of exceptional state violence to talk about also the everyday violence, the everyday police shakedowns, the everyday kind of targeted harassment, brutality, and arrests that Black New Orleanians face with the NOPD.

So Safe Streets Organize is also for the creation of something called an independent police monitor to have greater police oversight outside of the New Orleans Police Department, outside of the bounds of the mayor's office that can have some teeth to it. And that they also decide to start thinking about the jail, given the kind of...

How do I put it? The abandonment of the jail in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And so Safe Streets kind of organizes. They build a broad based membership in this political moment. And they pretty quickly win a new public defense office. And over a kind of longer period of struggle, they organize for an independent police monitor, which does end up getting instituted to try and chip away at police power.

And then they're kind of organizing around the jail morphs into something called the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, which was a coalition that predated Hurricane Katrina. It was actually founded in 2004 that decides it really needs to organize against the jail getting expanded. The jail had been destroyed a fair amount of it from its flooding during Hurricane Katrina.

What ends up happening, so it goes from about 7,000 beds at the time of the storm. There had been 8,000 people in it because people were overcrowded, but there had been about 7,000 beds. But then a series of the buildings of the jail, you know, are destroyed from the federal floods. And from there, there's about 3,000 beds when the jail reopens in the fall of 2005, so a few months after Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA funds come through to rebuild the jail. And the then sheriff, Sheriff Marlon Gussman, decides to utilize those funds to push for an expansion of the jail up to 5,800 beds. So to try and rebuild the jail, getting it closer to its initial size when Katrina hit, the goal of expanding it even further out. So this kind of threat, this political threat of FEMA funds being utilized for jail expansion,

leads to the reformation of Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition in 2006, 2007. And they end up really growing as a coalition. And they increasingly, there's this host of new grassroots organizations in the city. So organizations like Safe Streets, but also organizations like the Congress of Day Laborers that's increasingly dealing with

the kind of intensified surveillance and harassment of immigrant day laborers who are increasingly being recruited to the rebuilding of the city.

So there's a host of grassroots communities of color organizers coming together under the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, also abolitionists with critical resistance, also some people working with more kind of think tank organizations who are trying to fight back against the city jails redevelopment as a larger jail. And they end up organizing not just to keep it from expanding, so not just to keep it to go from 3,000 beds to 5,000 beds,

But they also say that the jail should be actually shrunk even further. So they argue that the jail at that time, they articulate that if it was like New Orleans was in norms with other people,

cities across the nation that New Orleans City Jail would have 850 beds given its population size. So they do a host of organizing against the bigger jail and for a smaller jail, you know, over the course of, I would say, 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, they do a series of public education events.

They do research into various laws and mechanisms. They really make connections between the over-incarceration of Black Norlinians, many because of issues of pretrial detention and really high bail, alongside the increase of immigrant detainees in the jail. So they are making those connections. They also really highlight the per diem structure.

That leads to state prisoners being incarcerated in the jail and saying, this is terrible. Also, the per diem structure incentivizes more and more people locked up as sheriffs get more and more money. And through a really intense grassroots campaign that really builds much of the city around it.

They end up winning and the city council and the mayor ends up saying, we're not going to have the jail be the expanded to the 5,000 beds that the sheriff wants. But they also say it won't stay at 3,000 beds. And so instead what ends up happening is they don't get it down to the 850 they wanted, but the city council says that,

you know, the right size for the city jail is a cap at 1,438 beds. And in that instance, it leads to the city jail having 80% less beds than it had pre-Katrina. So it's this massive reduction in the city's capacity to incarcerate people. Again, because people kind of leveraged

The moment of Hurricane Katrina and the years of organizing it after Hurricane Katrina to not just call into question kind of the state's extreme violence at that moment, but to call attention to all of these everyday practices of criminalization that led to so much violence and to kind of scale that back and try and create a different kind of future for the city.

An ambitious goal indeed, and one that takes us right back to where we started of you getting involved in some of this activism work, seeking out a book that would help explain how we got here, not finding one, and now obviously written it. So I think that's probably a good place to end our conversation about the book.

is there anything you're currently working on? You want to give us a very brief sneak preview of? Um, my very next project, which I'm very early in on is thinking about, um, the carceral state and climate change. So some of it is out of this questions of hurricane Katrina. So I'm trying to think about is particularly related to hurricanes. Um,

And what are the ways in which kind of carceral state orientations have been intertwined into kind of climate change responses through FEMA and also at the state and local levels, as well as what are the different visions of abolitionist climate justice that folks are engaging in on the ground?

All right. Well, continuing to ask the big questions then. Best of luck with that project. And of course, for listeners who want to get into all of the details of this book, you can read it titled Prison Capital, Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2023. Lydia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book. Thank you so much, Miranda. It was a pleasure.