Slave State is an incarcerated author’s attempt to illustrate historical and contemporary failures in the Louisiana Criminal Justice System. It is a collection of essays and articles written by a man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to serve the balance of his life in a modern day penal colony in Louisiana, known commonly as Angola. He was actually innocent, but truthful convictions are not the aim of the weaponized legal system constructed by the White Supremacist who designed the State’s penal code in the Jim Crow era.
The obvious questions are (1) How did the State of Louisiana come to lead the entire world in per capita incarceration of her citizens? and (2) why are over 80 percent of her prisoners of African descent?
Antebellum scholars and academicians debate the actual genesis of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation practiced in the Southern United States. However, almost all of them agree that the advent of the Black Codes immediately following the Civil War represented the definite legal codification of institutional discrimination based solely on race. According to the legislators who crafted Louisiana’s Constitution these laws were specifically designed to subjugate the African American population and perpetuate White Supremacy into infinitum.