Although prisoners face dangerously harsh conditions while working the “farm line” at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—including laboring outdoors in extreme heat—a federal judge presiding over a long-running suit filed by prisoners forced to work in the fields around Angola has ruled he could not force the state to fix the problem.
In a 60-page opinion released Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson in Baton Rouge said his decision would have been different just a few months ago, but a recent appeals court decision in a separate civil rights case against Angola stayed his hand. In March, the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled with the state in the other suit—Parker v. Hooper—in which prisoners accused Angola officials of providing unconstitutionally poor medical care. In his Tuesday opinion, Jackson wrote that the 5th Circuit judges’ decision in that case weakened the standard for proving cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Now, if the state can demonstrate that it took any action toward remedying a potential Eighth Amendment violation—no matter how ineffective—it is cleared of liability.
Jackson reluctantly found that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections met that bar in the farm line case.
Four Angola inmates and the New Orleans-based Voice of the Experienced, or VOTE, a group that advocates for the rights of the currently and formerly incarcerated, filed a lawsuit in 2023 asking the court to cease farm line work at Angola. Since then, the number of plaintiffs on the suit has grown.
The New Orleans-based legal advocacy organization the Promise of Justice Initiative and the national civil rights group Rights Behind Bars represented VOTE and the people at Angola in the suit. They argued that the farm line work, especially in excessive heat, violated their clients’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment and that it violates parts of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.
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