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.
The current status of the United States Criminal Justice System is chaotic to say the least Curtis Ray Davis speaks from more than opinion when he states that it is extremely unfair and designed to marginalize people of color. In September of 1990 he was arrested in Compton, California and extradited to Shreveport, Louisiana on a warrant for 2nd Degree Murder; the only problem, he did not commit the crime. Having enlisted in the U.S. Army he believed in law and order and the moral correctness of the judiciary; however, once he fell down the rabbit hole of the system, he learned firsthand that not only is our system fallible, it is most times downright cruel. Without a shred of physical evidence, he was sentenced to Life in prison without benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence. Nevertheless, it was in Angola that he found that he possessed a talent for organizing as well as an extraordinary aptitude for the science of law. The prison's warden drafted him into the State Certified Tutor Program where over a period of 7 years he was on the team that lowered the LSP recidivism rate by 60%, (although the statewide rate is 67%, the rate for inmates returning to prison after going through the program in Angola is 7%) by addressing life skills as well as academics. His work in the law library gave me the tools that he needed to win his 9th Application for Post-Conviction Relief in the La. Supreme Court. He was released from Angola on July 8th, 2016 and immediately joined the fight for penal reform in Louisiana through his work at Vote-Nola, SPLC and the LPA. His first book "Slave State: Evidence of Apartheid in America" is a collection of essays written during his incarceration. He currently heads Mindfield Unlimited, LLC, a consultancy that helps advise organizations working to change the way that justice is administered in the United States.
