He doesn’t want anyone else to face the injustices that he and the rest of the Angola 3 suffered
Albert Woodfox walked out of Louisiana’s St. Francisville jail in 2016 after serving more than 40 years in solitary confinement for a murder he says he didn’t commit.
While the decades-long battle to secure his freedom was finally over, Woodfox wasn’t done fighting. Today, he considers himself a committed activist and revolutionary and is working for “a better humanity” by educating people about the horrors of solitary confinement, which he said “serves no purpose.”
“It is a vicious weapon used by prison administrations and security forces to invoke fear and intimidation and control within the prison population,” Woodfox said in an interview with Street Roots.
IN OREGON: A prisoner's perspective on solitary confinement
Woodfox served more time in solitary than any other inmate in the United States. In 1972, he was serving a 50-year sentence at Angola prison for armed robbery when he and a fellow inmate, Herman Wallace, were accused and later convicted of stabbing and killing a 23-year-old prison guard named Brent Miller. Shortly thereafter, an inmate named Robert King was convicted of killing another inmate. All three maintained their innocence but served decades in solitary confinement. They later became known as the Angola 3.
Woodfox documented his experience in solitary confinement and his fight for justice in his 2019 memoir, “Solitary,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was listed among former President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019.
The Bloodiest Prison in the South
The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where Woodfox spent the majority of his sentence, is the largest maximum-security prison in the country, according Angola museum’s website. Angola was built on a former slave plantation, and in the early 1960s, violence was so prevalent that it was known as “The Bloodiest Prison in the South.”
Woodfox did his first stint in Angola in 1965, according to his memoir. The prison looked like the slave plantation that it used to be, and black prisoners were expected to do field work, such as picking peas, cotton or sugar cane.
Institutional racism also affected the guards, Woodfox said.
“Of course Angola was segregated,” he said, “so the white prison guard had an advantage.
“Black prison guards could not order white prison guards around, but white prison guards could order black prison guards,” Woodfox said.
Survival in Angola meant inmates preyed on one another, and cases of rape and sexual slavery were rampant.
“It was a common practice where young kids, at that time they were locking kids (who were) 16-17 years old in state prison, black kids, and so these kids nine out of 10 times were victimized” in prison, Woodfox said.
He said that the pimps were often protected by the prison security staff.
“It’s a practice that had been going on for who knows how long in Angola,” Woodfox said.
Woodfox said he started standing up for victims of sexual violence at Angola after talking with an inmate who had been victimized.
“I had an encounter with a young man in the dormitory I was housed in who had been raped,” Woodfox said. “I had accumulated enough self-education, enough wisdom to recognize for the first time what a broken human spirit looked like.”
Woodfox said that talking to the inmate and hearing his story made him realize that it could have been him, and he wondered what could have made a difference.
“It really had an effect on me,” Woodfox said.
Black Panthers
Before his sentencing for the initial robbery conviction, Woodfox escaped custody. He fled to New York and had his first encounter with members of the Black Panther Party, which taught inmates to read and become politically engaged.
“There was an extraordinary point in my life where a political organization of such magnitude, such power (would) come into prison and say to me, ‘Because of the way you carry yourself, because of the things you’re involved with, you’re a very worthy human being and we would love for you to be a part of us,’” Woodfox said. “To my knowledge, no other political organization in the history of the country had that kind of vision or had that kind of courage to do that.
“So it was a very, very proud moment when I was asked to join the party right in the Orleans Parish Prison here in New Orleans,” Woodfox said.
In his memoir, Woodfox said he learned the Panthers’ 10-point program, which listed what members of the party were fighting for, including freedom, an end of police brutality, full employment, and the release of all black people held in the country’s prison and jail system.
He said that being a member of the Black Panthers transformed him.
“For the first time, I realized that I was not born a criminal, that I had value as a human being; I had a right to have dignity and pride and self-respect and that I could make a difference,” Woodfox said. “But I just had to fight for it.”
Woodfox said that being a Panther helped him, King and Wallace while they were in solitary.
“We had a political foundation that gave us an understanding, or an awareness, of what solitary was and the forces that existed that caused us to be in solitary,” Woodfox said. “The first key to survival is knowing what you’re being exposed to.”
Q&A: Kent Ford, founder of Portland’s Black Panther Party, has advice for young activists
Solitary
Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement on April 18, 1972. While he never gave up hope that he would one day secure his freedom, he said he had no idea he would be locked away by himself for more than 40 years.
Under international law, solitary confinement may be imposed only in exceptional circumstances, and “prolonged” solitary confinement, in excess of 15 consecutive days, is regarded as a form of torture or ill treatment. Just last month, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of punishment, Nils Melzer, presented his report after years of research. He specifically called out solitary confinement in U.S. prisons as a form of torture, capable of resulting in irreparable mental and physical harm.
Woodfox developed claustrophobia when he was in solitary. He said he could feel the walls closing around him, which could last for a few minutes or hours at a time. It was part of the stress of being locked in a confined space for 23 hours a day.
“If you had told me I would have to live in a 9 by 6 cell for 44 years and 10 months and that I would have to fight to maintain my sanity after being surrounded by so much chaos, and seeing so many men losing that battle and hurting themselves, and in some cases taking their own lives, it was beyond my imagination at that time,” Woodfox said.
During that time, he said, he was “fighting constantly to maintain sanity.”
While he was in prison, before and after he was placed in solitary, Woodfox would fight injustices where he saw them and work to improve conditions for himself and his fellow inmates. In one instance, he and other inmates staged a 45-day hunger strike to get prison officials to cut food slots into their doors instead of sliding their meals under their cell doors.
Another time, he and another inmate filed a lawsuit that put limits on when prison officials could conduct strip searches and conditions on how visual cavity searches could be conducted. He even taught a fellow inmate how to read.
“We would constantly say, ‘If your cause is noble, you can carry the weight of the world on your shoulders,’” Woodfox said. “It was something that was inspired by Nelson Mandela.
“We thought what we were doing, fighting for humanity, fighting against corruption, and racism, both individual and institutional, was a noble cause,” Woodfox said. “So we were willing to make whatever sacrifices necessary.”
IN OREGON: Solitary confinement suit against state DOC dismissed in federal court (from 2019)
Freedom
After several decades in solitary, Woodfox and Wallace caught the attention of Amnesty International, which looked into their case and found “no physical evidence linking them to the crime, and their conviction relied mainly on the dubious testimony of another prisoner, who received a pardon in return.”
Woodfox and Wallace had spent years representing themselves in court battles with the prison administration, until catching the attention of attorney George H. Kendall in 2005.
“They litigated largely on their own for two decades,” Kendall said. “And then finally lawyers began to show up and to take parts of the case to overturn their convictions, because they were innocent.”
Kendall said he couldn’t believe they had been locked up for more than 30 years. When he went to meet Woodfox and Wallace, he said he was surprised to find them in good spirits and credited their commitment to the principles of the Black Panther Party for keeping both men going.
“They were well read, they were very disciplined, and that’s what saved them,” Kendall said.
After taking the case, Kendall said that it was astonishing how much work the state put into keeping these men in solitary.
“We’ve seen all kinds of things, but I must say what is distinct about this case is the degree to which the system, both in withholding information in the criminal cases and then just spending millions of dollars to fight to keep these aging men in solitary despite very good behavioral records, was astonishing,” Kendall said. “It really confirmed, at least with regard to the administration of criminal justice, how little has changed in Louisiana.”
Eventually, their efforts paid off.
With the help of the Amnesty International investigation, Wallace was granted a new trial and was released from prison in 2013. He died a few days later, even as the state sought to reindict him. King was released in 2001 and has written a book documenting his experiences.
In the appeals process, judges overturned Woodfox’s murder conviction three times due to racial discrimination, misconduct, inadequate defense and suppression of exculpatory evidence, only for him to be reindicted three times by the state.
In 2016, Woodfox reached a deal with prosecutors in which he pleaded no contest to manslaughter, which allowed him to avoid a new trial and be released with a sentence of time served, while also maintaining his innocence, according to his memoir. He was released from prison on his 69th birthday.
“It’s a remarkable story,” Kendall said. “And these are remarkable men.”
The fight
Today, Woodfox and King travel the world giving lectures about the horrors of solitary confinement.
“We’ve had conversations with world leaders and legislatures and community activists about the horrors of solitary confinement, about the injustice that goes on in America, contrary to the image,” Woodfox said.
He said he works to educate people on what it means to be incarcerated.
“Most people don’t realize that in America, slavery is still legal,” Woodfox said. “There’s a clause in the 13th Amendment that legalizes slavery, where if you’re convicted of a felony and go to prison, you become the property of the state or the city. And slaves do not have rights, they don’t have human rights, they don’t have civil rights, they don’t have legal rights, and therefore, (the) prison administration … (is) able to treat them any way they want.”
Woodfox said he has four great-grandchildren and hopes they don’t have to fight the same fights against injustice that he has throughout his life.
“That’s my hope and dream,” Woodfox said, “to leave a better world, a better society, a better humanity for them.”
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