BATON ROUGE – Prison rights advocacy group Voices of the Experienced has filed suit against the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Commissions. The lawsuit will be heard in federal court for the first time Tuesday afternoon.
The lawsuit, Voices of the Experienced v. James LeBlanc, fights against Angola’s infamous hard labor practices where inmates do agricultural work outdoors.
VOTE says this kind of work in Louisiana’s high temperatures is “harsh and unconstitutional.”
“The purpose of the farm line is to send the person out into extremely difficult manual labor in the extreme heat and humidity of Louisiana summer in order to ensure their submission in order to break people’s bodies and their spirits,” Lydia Wright with the Promise of Justice initiative said.
The group is asking federal Judge Brian Jackson to put a hold on labor when the heat index is 88 degrees or above.
Wright says the group is not against the use of hard labor.
“The argument is not that there should not be valuable work opportunities available to people who are incarcerated. Work can be valuable but it should be fairly compensated and it should be safe, it should be rehabilitative and the farm line is none of those things,” Wright said.
They say this labor is eerily similar to slavery because Angola is on the grounds of a previous plantation and the majority of men working the farm line are black.
“Some are paid two cents an hour for their labor. Many are paid nothing at all. They are forced to work in extreme weather conditions, without basic safety gear or modern agricultural equipment—even though the State has that equipment—under threat of serious harm if their work is unsatisfactory,” the lawsuit says.
Wright says the inmates only make two cents an hour, if they get paid at all, making their healthcare nearly unaffordable.
“To put this into context for you, at two cents an hour in order to pay the copay to see the doctor at Angola, an incarcerated man at Angola has to pay 3 dollars. That’s 150 hours of work on the farm line. If the person suffers an emergency, it costs six dollars which is 300 hours of work, assuming they’re being paid two cents an hour at all,” Wright said.
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