Please Help Us Stop Kids From Being Sent To the world’s deadliest and most violent Adult prison

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Dear Governor John Bel Edwards,

Please withdraw your plan to send children to the Angola prison. If you proceed with this unprecedented plan, you’ll be the first governor in modern American history to place children adjudicated delinquent on the grounds of a maximum-security adult prison — and not just any maximum-security prison.

Angola is a former slave plantation and the largest prison in the country. No amount of cosmetic change will erase the fact that Angola is haunted by and remains the site of human rights abuses and racial subjugation: enslavement, convict leasing, white guards lording over incarcerated Black people.

Under your plan, kids will pass through gates topped by razor wire and be housed in single-cells of Angola’s former death row. You want to put children who have not been convicted of any crime in the same cells that once held the condemned.

Pursuing this plan would make Louisiana the first in the nation for the wrong reason, and it would make Louisiana a national pariah.

You have another choice. You can invest in Louisiana’s young people. You can put Louisiana back on the right track to be a national leader in juvenile justice — as it once was when it closed the notorious Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth — by investing in rehabilitation, treatment and care.

Governor Edwards, abandon the plan to place kids in Angola’s former death row. Instead, invest in community-based programs and interventions that protect youth, provide them the skills they need to get back on track, and improve public safety.

Children are capable of growth and redemption. You can be the governor who invested in Louisiana’s young people, and made Louisiana the first in the nation for the right reasons.

Sincerely,
[first name] [last name]