Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum

The Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum stands at the end of Tunica Trace, beside the penitentiary and outside its front gates. It opened in 1997 as the Museum at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, to preserve the history of crime, punishment, rehabilitation, criminal justice and reform in the state, and a nonprofit foundation supports it. It sits on Angola, a plantation in West Feliciana Parish that Major Samuel James worked with leased convicts.

64 Parishes records how the lease worked. The state leased the penitentiary to private firms, and James held the contract for more than thirty years beginning in 1867. He used prisoners on Mississippi River levees and as farmhands at Angola, and 64 Parishes says convicts were used, in essence, as legal slave labor after slavery was abolished. In 1900 James sold about 8,000 acres to the state for $200,000, and the state took control of the penitentiary and its prisoners in 1901 when public demand ended the lease system. In 1951, thirty-one inmates slashed their Achilles tendons in protest, and Collier's called Angola America's Worst Prison.

The museum is at 17544 Tunica Trace, open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and closed weekends and state holidays. Admission is $5, as listed in 2026, and the main building is self-guided and takes about an hour. Visitors and vehicles can be searched without warning, weapons are prohibited, and phones and recorders are allowed only in the main building. Children 12 and under must come with a parent or guardian, and the dress code bars camouflage.