The Best Day Trips From New Orleans

In order not to repeat the horrors of the past, the Angola Museum is housed right outside the gates of the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, which was known for a time as the ‘bloodiest place on Earth’. The prison was built on the site of a plantation, and became known as the Angola Penitentiary after the country where most of the former slaves came from. The correctional facility officially opened in 1901, though convicts were used there as leased labor as early as the 1880s. Today, Louisiana State Penitentiary stands as the largest maximum security prison in the United States, and the Angola Museum is the only prison museum in the country operated within an active prison.

Receiving more than 120,000 visitors a year, the museum is located in an old bank outside the main gate, and features permanent and changing exhibits that chronicle what life was like life inside Louisiana’s prisons. The exhibition also showcases a plastic comb carved into a key so effective that locks had to be changed, a shotgun a prisoner made from metal pipes, and ‘Gruesome Gertie,’ the wooden electric chair where 87 inmates took a seat for the last time.

The 1,800-acre penal complex also hosts an arts and crafts fair with works created by inmates during Sundays in October, and for one week each spring, as well as a rodeo featuring professional acts and inmates taking on bulls and wild horses.