Did you know? The largest maximum security prison in the United States sits on eighteen thousand acres of former plantation land in Louisiana. It is still a working farm. Men still pick crops in the fields by hand, watched by guards on horseback. And it is named after the country the people enslaved there were taken from. Angola. The land was four plantations. The one that gave the prison its name was called Angola because that was where its owner's workforce had come from. After the Civil War the property was leased for convict labour, and then the state bought it and kept the system going under a different name. Men still work the fields for cents an hour. Refusing to work has historically been punishable. It holds around five thousand people. The overwhelming majority are Black. Most are serving life without parole. It also hosts a rodeo, twice a year, open to the paying public, where prisoners compete for small prizes in front of an audience that drives in for the day. A plantation named for an African country, worked by Black men under armed guard, with a paying crowd on weekends. Nothing about that sentence is metaphor. Every word of it is the literal description of a functioning American institution.