The Louisiana State Penitentiary (known as Angola, and nicknamed the "Alcatraz of the South", "The Angola Plantation" and "The Farm") is a maximum-security prison farm in Louisiana operated by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections. It is named "Angola" after the former slave plantation that occupied this territory. The plantation was named after the country of Angola from which many slaves originated before arriving in Louisiana. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States with 6,300 prisoners and 1,800 staff, including corrections officers, janitors, maintenance, and wardens. Due to these large numbers, it has been given the nickname "a gated community". Located in West Feliciana Parish, the prison is set between oxbow lakes on the east side of a bend of the Mississippi River, thus flanked on three sides by water. It lies less than south of Louisiana's straight east-west border with Mississippi. The of land the prison sits on what was known before the American Civil War as the Angola Plantations, a slave plantation, owned by slave trader Isaac Franklin. The prison is located at the end of Louisiana Highway 66, around northwest of St. Francisville. Death row for men and the state execution chamber for women and men are located at the Angola facility. History Before 1835, state inmates were held in a jail in New Orleans. The first Louisiana State Penitentiary, located at the intersection of 6th and Laurel streets in Baton Rouge, was modeled on a prison in Wethersfield, Connecticut. It was built to house 100 convicts in cells of by . In 1844 the state leased operation of the prison and its prisoners to McHatton Pratt and Company, a private company. During the American Civil War, Union soldiers occupied the prison in Baton Rouge. In 1869 during the Reconstruction era, Samuel Lawrence James, a former Confederate major, received the military lease to the future prison property along the Mississippi River. He tried to produce cotton with the forced labor of African Americans. The land that has been developed as Angola Penitentiary was purchased in the 1830s from Francis Rout as four contiguous plantations by Isaac Franklin. He was a planter and slave trader, co-owner of the profitable slave trading firm Franklin and Armfield, of Alexandria, Virginia, and Natchez, Mississippi. After his death in 1846, Franklin's widow, by then known as Adelicia Cheatham, joined these plantations: Panola, Belle View, Killarney, and Angola,