About Louisiana Prison Museum
A museum beside the front gates of Louisiana State Penitentiary would already be an unusual destination. The Louisiana Prison Museum and Cultural Center goes further by preserving artifacts and stories from the state’s history of incarceration, punishment, reform, prison culture, and capital punishment. Its location at Angola means the subject is not safely separated from the institution it describes.
One of the strangest chapters began when Louisiana changed its legal execution method from hanging to electrocution in 1940. Another law still required executions to take place in the parish where the crime occurred. The state’s solution was extraordinary: place an electric chair and generator in a vehicle and transport them to the appropriate parish. Louisiana’s first execution using the traveling electric chair occurred in 1941.
The museum’s historical material also covers the Red Hat cellblock, built after a deadly 1933 escape. Prisoners assigned there wore hats dipped in red paint so guards could identify them while they worked. The electric chair later stopped traveling when executions were permanently moved to the state penitentiary in 1956. Louisiana retired the chair in 1990.
The main museum building is outside the penitentiary’s front gates, but visitors are still next to an active maximum-security prison and must follow specific rules. Check the museum’s current visitor information before making the long drive. Few museums can match the unsettling contrast of historical exhibits about confinement and execution sitting beside a prison that remains fully operational.