I don’t think we’re in Wisconsin anymore.

Moving to Louisiana has been surprising in many ways – the obsession with crawfish, the flowers that bloom all year long, the changing of every word that ends with an “oh” sound so that it ends with “eaux” (for example, the rally cry for LSU is “Geaux Tigers!”). However, one of the strangest, most foreign things from upper-Midwest life that I could imagine was the phenomenon of the Southern Prison Rodeo.

We’d heard about the Angola Prison Rodeo since we had moved to Baton Rouge in August. In fact, we had tried to go in October and then realized that they were on Sundays, not Saturdays. We were glad we had driven out to Angola State Prison despite the date mix-up – the prison has its own Museum, which was fascinating.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola (and also referred to as “The Farm”) is a truly fascinating place. It’s one of the largest prisons in the country, and is called Angola for the plantation which once stood on the land. The prison sits on 18,000 acres of beautiful farmland, bordered on three sides by the Mississippi. Crops and livestock are raised by inmates on the rolling hills.

I make it sound idyllic, but it was a place that once ran rampant with abuse.  In the early years of the 20th century, guards were fired and replaced by inmate trustees to save money.  Conditions were so appalling that in 1952 31 inmates sliced their Achilles’ tendons in protest. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the prison was fully reformed.

This tragic history has inspired some fantastic art. Stephen King’s The Green Mile was based on life on death row in Angola in the 1930s. Numerous blues songs immortalize the prison. The films JFK, Dead Man Walking, and Monster’s Ball were all partially filmed at Angola. In fact, the prison uniform that Heath Ledger wore in the latter film is on display at the prison’s museum.  Those uniforms are the same ones that we saw when we returned to the prison on Sunday.

We went Sunday to see the Angola Prison Rodeo in person. The rodeo has been running annually since 1972, and the inmates constructed a new 7,500 seat stadium specifically for the rodeo in 2000. In addition to rodeo events, there are some carnival rides, lots of food (jambalaya, shrimp on a stick, pig cracklins [the rest of America calls them pork rinds], chili cheese fries, etc.), and a wide variety of inmate-made “hobbycrafts.” The inmates display and sell just about everything – landscape paintings, children’s shoes made of candy bar wrappers, roses intricately carved from wood, plaques featuring lacquered pictures of celebrities taken from magazines, and sturdy, beautifully-made rocking chairs.

It shocks many of my friends that live outside the South when I tell them that the prisoners themselves are the ones competing in the rodeo: the inmates, in their semi-comical black and white striped shirts, ride the bucking bulls, wrestle the steers, and gallop their horses around the arena holding the various flags that have historically flown over Louisiana. One of the most nail-biting events to watch is called “Convict Poker” – four inmates are seated in plastic chairs around a card table. The gate is opened, and a snorting, bucking bull enters the stadium. The four inmates are to remain still and seated while rodeo workers incite the bull to charge – and charge he does! By the end of the event, three of the chairs and the table were completely destroyed. The last inmate left sitting in his seat is the winner. In another event, a bull is released into the area with about 25 inmates. Each inmate is vying to remove the poker chip that has been taped between the bull’s horns. That lucky man (yes, all of the prisoners participating in the rodeo were men) wins $600.

I’ve always been kind of iffy about rodeos – the whole animal exploitation thing, and fear that the animals would be hurt. But despite a good deal of slippery mud, no animals were injured on Sunday. A few of the inmates were definitely hurt – when you mess with the bull, you get the horns – and one even left in an ambulance.

The two best parts of the rodeo were definitely the monkeys riding dogs, and leaving with a bottle of this: