Spanning 18,000 acres in West Feliciana Parish, the 124-year-old Louisiana State Penitentiary—colloquially known as Angola for its antebellum roots and the small employee community established inside its perimeters—houses roughly 4,500 criminally convicted men. It is also home to the last of the great prison spectaculars, a biannual romp-and-stomp rodeo overload in the heart of the largest maximum security prison in America.
Each year, thousands of curious newcomers, sports fans, shoppers, journalists, and adrenaline junkies from across the country and around the globe traverse the winding, twenty-mile stretch of state Route 66 from St. Francisville that leads to the penitentiary’s front gate and the Angola Prison Rodeo. From the breakneck entry of the Rough Riders drill team to the breath-catching intensity of the Guts & Glory finale, the show is chaotic, controversial, gratifying, and complex.
The rodeo started in the mid-1960s as evening recreation for a handful of prisoners who tended the livestock. Convict cowboys cordoned off a swath of flatland, brought out the ropes and spurs, the swayback field horses and back lot bulls, and ate a lot of dirt. Informal free-for-alls, staged for the amusement of incarcerated onlookers and prison supervisors, raised the eyebrows of interested movers and shakers. The shows were fun, different, and held dynamic potential.
At that time, the prison was known for its violence. Local historian and author Anne Butler describes the 1960s penitentiary in Angola: Louisiana State Penitentiary—A Half-Century of Rage and Reform (1990) as “a brutal world of violence and intrigue, political abuse and racial turmoil.” One in ten prisoners suffered stab wounds, and many wore body armor fashioned from mail order catalogs while they slept at night. Prisoners were forced to navigate “cramped and unsanitary living conditions, slave-like working environments, inmate-guards, a lack of clean clothes and hot water, and an in-house judicial system based on violence.”
Corrections officials may have viewed a prison rodeo as a distraction from these awful conditions, or even a transformative catalyst for prisoners who had few positive outlets in their lives. Similar productions in Texas and Oklahoma were huge successes. While the penitentiaries at Huntsville and McAlester were not country clubs, unlike Angola neither had been branded “the bloodiest prison in America” by the press.