Aaron Curtis: Sneak Thief

Aaron Curtis was born 15 Oct 1895 in New Orleans, LA to Alphonse Curtis (1864-1909) & Elizabeth Shelvy (1874-).

Inmate: 2339 New Orleans Jail

Rec: 7 Sep 1916

Crime: Sneak Thief

Alias: Walter Shelby

Age: 21 

According to his WWI Draft Card he was in Angola State Farm Prison. 

He had the following siblings:

Ruth May Curtis
1901–
James Wilson Curtis

1908–1995

This young man was in and out of jail over 24 times, not to mention how many times he was in prison or at the state farm. He had a hard life, lost his father age 14, I found so many newspaper articles on him, it broke my heart.


1906

1910

1911

Angola wasn't a fun place be as most prisons aren't, there are the worst of the worst.

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. 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 free 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, a slave trader and planter. He used profits from his 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, when she sold them all in 1880 to Samuel Lawrence James, the former CSA officer. The Angola plantation was named for the country in Africa from which many of its slaves had come. It contained a building called the Old Slave Quarters.

Under the convict lease system, Major James ran his vast plantation using convicts leased from the state as his workers. He was responsible for their room and board, and had virtually total authority over them. With the incentive to earn money from prisoners, the state passed laws directed at African Americans, requiring payment of minor fees and fines as punishment for infractions. Cash-poor men in the agricultural economy were forced into jail and convict labor. Such convicts were frequently abused, underfed, and subject to unregulated violence. The state exercised little oversight of conditions. Prisoners were often worked to death under harsh conditions.  James died in 1894.

The Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections says that this facility opened as a state prison in 1901.

Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, authors of The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, said that Angola was "probably as close to slavery as any person could come in 1930." Hardened criminals broke down upon being notified that they were being sent to Angola. White-black racial tensions in the society were expressed at the prison, adding to the violence: each year one in every ten inmates received stab wounds. Wolfe and Lornell said that the staff, consisting of 90 people, "ran the prison like it was a private fiefdom."

The two authors said that prisoners were viewed as "'ni--ers' of the lowest order." The state did not appropriate many funds for the operation of Angola, and saved money by trying to decrease costs. Much of the remaining money ended up in the operations of other state projects; Wolfe and Lornell said that the re-appropriation of funds occurred "mysteriously."

From Wikipedia

Aaron died 4 June 1939