Lois Ratcliff says she hardly survived watching her son slowly die in one of the US south’s most brutal prisons.
Ratcliff’s son, Farrell Sampier, was one of the at least 500 incarcerated people – most of whom were Black men over the age of 55 – who died within Louisiana’s prison system in the last three years, according to a recent report by Loyola University New Orleans’s college of law. And another report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the most prison deaths between 2018 and 2022 occurred at Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison.
