The dungeon' at Louisiana's notorious prison reopens as Ice detention center

"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."

"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,"

Governor Jeff Landry declared a late-July state of emergency citing bed shortages at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The order enabled rapid refurbishing of Camp J, a shuttered unit known as the dungeon for extended solitary confinement. Officials withheld details for over a month while observers connected the move to overcrowding from Landry's tougher sentences, abolition of parole, and placing 17-year-olds in adult prisons. Advocates and a former inmate objected because of Camp J's brutal history. The refurbishment was used to house immigration detainees as part of a nationwide immigration crackdown rather than to address the state's own prison population growth.

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