a dog trainer and K-9 officer, who died in 1997 aged 89. The Louisiana State Penitentiary Wastewater Treatment Plant serves the prison complex. The prison also houses an all-purpose arena. History of infrastructure at the prison Camp A, the former slave quarters for the plantation, was the first building to house inmates. In the early 21st century, Camp A did not house prisoners. Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, authors of The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (1992), said that during the 1930s, Angola was "even further removed from decent civilization" than it was in the 1990s. The two added "that's the way the state of Louisiana wanted it, for Angola held some of the meanest inmates." In 1930 about 130 women, most of them black, were imprisoned in Camp D. In 1930 Camp A, which held around 700 black inmates, was close to the center of the Angola institution. Inmates worked on levee control, as the springtime high water posed a threat to Angola. The Mississippi River was nearly wide in this area. Many inmates who tried to swim across drowned; few of their bodies were recovered. The prison hospital opened in the 1940s. The campus had only one permanent nurse and no permanent doctor. In the 1980s the main road to Angola had not been paved. It has since been black topped. The outcamp buildings, constructed in 1939 as a WPA project during the Great Depression, were renovated in the 1970s. During May 1993 the buildings' fire safety violations were reported. In June of that year, Richard Stalder, the Secretary of Corrections, said that Angola would close the buildings if LDP S&C did not find millions of dollars to improve the buildings. Red Hat Cell Block The most restrictive inmate housing unit was colloquially referred to as "Red Hat Cell Block", after the red paint-coated straw hats that its occupants wore when they worked in the fields. "Red Hat", a one-story, 30-cell building at Camp E, was built in 1933. Brooke Shelby Biggs of Mother Jones reported that men who had lived in "Red Hat" "told of a dungeon crawling with rats, where dinner was served in stinking buckets splashed onto the floors." Warden C. Murray Henderson phased out solitary confinement at "Red Hat". In 1972 his successor Elayn Hunt had "Red Hat" officially closed. In 1977 the administration made Camp J the most restrictive housing unit in Angola.