'The dungeon' at Louisiana's notorious prison reopens as Ice detention center
Source: The Guardian
Thu 18 Sep 2025 07.00 EDT
Last modified on Thu 18 Sep 2025 07.01 EDT
There were no hurricanes in the Gulf, as can be typical for Louisiana in late July – but Governor Jeff Landry quietly declared a state of emergency. The Louisiana state penitentiary at Angola – the largest maximum security prison in the country – was out of bed space for “violent offenders” who would be “transferred to its facilities”, he warned in an executive order.
The emergency declaration allowed for the rapid refurbishing of a notorious, shuttered housing unit at Angola formerly known as Camp J – commonly referred to by prisoners as “the dungeon” because it was once used to house men in extended solitary confinement, sometimes for years on end.
For over a month, the Landry administration was tight-lipped regarding the details of their plan for Camp J, and the emergency order wasn’t picked up by the news media for several days. But the general understanding among Louisiana’s criminal justice observers was that the move was in response to a predictable overcrowding in state prisons due to Landry’s own “tough-on-crime” policies. Though Louisiana already had the highest incarceration rate in the country before he got into office, Landry has pushed legislation to increase sentences, abolish parole, and put 17-year-olds in adult prisons.
Advocates swiftly objected to the reopening of Camp J, noting its history of brutality and violence. Ronald Marshall served 25 years in the Louisiana prison system, including a number of them in solitary confinement at Camp J, and called it the worst place he ever served time.“It was horrible,” Marshall said. It turns out, however, that Landry’s emergency order and the renovation of Camp J was not done to accommodate the state’s own growing prison population. It was in service of Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/18/louisiana-angola-prison-trump-ice-immigration