Louisiana

Lousiana is the most incarcerated state in the most incarcerated country in the world, a place where one in fourteen young black men will end up in prison; Angola, the state penitentiary, is America’s largest high-security jail.

Economics behind bars

Louisiana is the world’s epicentre of incarceration. There are 2.1m prisoners in America, by far the highest number of any country, and among all the states Louisiana stands tall. Its incarceration rate is 1,420 per 100,000, more than double the national average. It has the longest sentences and the country’s largest maximum-security jails. 

Like disaster zones and refugee camps, prisons are places where economic life has been stripped back to nothing. In a sense, the damage here is even greater: unlike people devastated by nature or by war — free to bounce back if they can — convicts’ crimes mean their lives are contained and controlled in an ongoing way. Yet to talk to any prisoner or off-duty prison officer is to discover that an underground economy of sorts flourishes in all prisons. How does the underground prison economy work?