Two-part article on Albert Woodfox, the Angola 3 and the broader epidemic of solitary confinement in US prisons, written by Katti Gray, The Root

(Herman Wallace, left, with Albert Woodfox, right.)

We are reprinting in full, two recent articles by Katti Gray, writing for The Root. Part one, entitled "Freedom After 40 Years in Solitary?," focuses mostly on the pending decision from US District Court Judge James A. Brady, who in 2008 ruled to overturn his conviction. That ruling was ultimately reinstated on appeal by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Part two, entitled "Reforming Prison's Harshest Tactic," focuses mostly on solitary confinement in US prisons. You can read parts one and two at The Root, or you can read the two articles reprinted below, with our own photos added (quick link here).

Reforming Prison's Harshest Tactic
--The Angola 3 case may help change the arbitrary and sometimes abusive use of solitary confinement.

(The second of two parts)
by Katti Gray

(This article was originally published by The Root on January 30, 2013 and is being reprinted here by Angola 3 News with permission from the author. Click here to read part 1, "Freedom After 40 Years in Solitary?" on The Root website or scroll down to view the full article by Angola 3 News below. Special thanks to Katti Gray, whose articles for The Root are archived here.)

In December 2012 the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to curb the use of solitary confinement in that state's prisons, broadly decrying it as "extreme isolation" that imperils the physical and psychological well-being of inmates on solo lockdown and risks undermining prison safety overall.

Also in 2012, Maine lawmakers -- including a Republican governor considered tough on crime -- voted to formally ratchet back the use of solitary confinement in that state. In addition, Congress hosted a rare special hearing on the practice, highlighting the fact that the United States has no federal guidelines precisely defining when solitary confinement should begin, when it should end and which infractions merit such an added punishment for prisoners.

Prison watchers and reformers, however, say that incremental activity in 2012 does not in itself suggest that the nation is anywhere near a wholesale crackdown on what many deem to be arbitrary decisions about who is placed in solitary confinement. But in Louisiana, where the remaining two members of the Angola 3 are approaching 41 years in solitary confinement, there is cautious optimism.

"It's exactly the kind of movement on this issue that we've been pushing for," said attorney and law professor Angela Allen-Bell of Southern University Law Center. Allen-Bell is a member of Free the Angola 3, an international coalition of attorneys, human rights groups, grassroots activists and moneyed benefactors who are helping to pay legal fees related to the cause of Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace and Robert Hillary King.

The three black men have consistently held that white officials of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola punished them for organizing an arm of the Black Panther Party at the facility -- and, as self-taught jailhouse lawyers, for challenging systematic rape of inmates, racial segregation and other ills -- by falsely claiming that the men killed a 23-year-old white prison guard in 1972. All three, who did not know one another before Angola, landed at the prison in the 1960s after being convicted of robberies that did not involve physical assault.

(Flyer from a recent New York City event featuring Robert King and other important critics of solitary confinement.)

Hope for One of the Angola 3

Lawyers for Woodfox, 65, say that they expect a favorable ruling in his current petition to be released, which will be heard "any day now" by the same federal judge who ordered him freed in 2008. (State prosecutors successfully appealed to have that ruling reversed.)

But Angola 3 attorneys are convinced that, this time around, they have more emphatically proved the official corruption that resulted in the 1972 conviction of Woodfox and of Wallace, 71, the other Angola 3 member still on solo lockdown.

(Robert King upon his release.)

King, 69, was released in 2001, after accepting a plea bargain on charges unrelated to the murder. King, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement, was never formally charged in the killing, although Angola officials steadfastly claimed that he was involved.

After Woodfox's current petition for release has been adjudicated, lawyers plan to pursue the release of Wallace, who is diabetic and suffers from what his supporters say is unexplained swelling throughout his body.

"My brother's hearing is bad," Vickie Taylor, Wallace's sister, a retired security guard from New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, told The Root. "His health ain't so good. Period. He been in there so long, and that makes you feel real bad.

"But he ain't letting prison stop him," she continued. "God fixed it so that he and Albert and King remember everything from the beginning to the end ... And it was told to me by God that this is their season. My brother coming home, baby. I believe that."

(February 20, 2012 "Occupy San Quentin" protest. 
Photo by Alex Darocy, Indybay.)

A Spotlight on Solitary Confinement

Hers is a shared resolve. Other Angola 3 supporters have been fixed, not only on getting Woodfox and Wallace out of prison, but also on spotlighting the impact of solitary confinement on the broader array of people affected by it.

"Crowding, rape, long stints in solitary confinement, beatings and other abuses and forms of torture are not part of the punishment society has condoned. In fact, they are unconstitutional abuses ... precluded as torture by all international standards," psychiatrist Dr. Terry Kupers, a professor at the Wright Institute in Piedmont, Calif., told The Root. He is the author of Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It.

"Even if [the Angola 3] had committed the crime for which they are accused," continued Kupers, another Free the Angola 3 coalition member, "the constitutional and legally sanctioned punishment would be time in prison, not torture in solitary."

Written comments that he submitted to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, which convened a hearing last June on "Reassessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal and Public Safety Consequences," noted, among other "psychopathological effects of social isolation," the "obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes ... oversensitivity to stimuli, irrational anger and social withdrawal" of some solitarily confined inmates.

Citing the research of psychologist and lawyer Craig Haney, author of Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment, who testified in person before the Senate committee, Kupers added: "More than four out of five of those evaluated suffered from feelings of anxiety and nervousness, headaches, troubled sleep and lethargy or chronic tiredness, and over half complained of nightmares, heart palpitations and fear of impending nervous breakdowns ... Well over half reported violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic depression and feelings of overall deterioration, while nearly half suffered from hallucinations and perceptual distortions, and a quarter experienced suicidal ideation."

Solitarily confined prisoners self-mutilate at rates higher than those of the regular prison population. Once released from prison, they recommit crimes at higher rates, too, according to a solitary-confinement fact sheet (pdf) developed in 2011 by Solitary Watch, an online advocacy news site.

"There is more interest in the subject than there was a couple of years ago. When we started, there wasn't much interest at all," says journalist James Ridgeway, co-editor and co-director of Solitary Watch. "And so far, I don't think the effect of this new interest has changed the lives of these people at all. They are just shut away. Forgotten people -- really, disappeared people. Most of them are people who are permanently excluded. They are never going to come back. And they are in this complete limbo."
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 80,000 inmates nationwide (more than 2.5 million people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails) were in solitary confinement on any given day in 2005, which is the latest year for which federal data are available. Given that blacks and Hispanics make up a disproportionate percentage of the prison population, they also disproportionately account for those remanded to solitary confinement.

Concerning the Angola 3, the prison's warden, Burl Cain, has affirmed that he would never transfer Woodfox out of solitary confinement and into the general population. "I would still keep him in [solitary]. I still know he has a propensity for violence. I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand. And I would have the [whites] chasing after them," Cain told questioner Nicholas Trenticosta, Woodfox's lawyer, during a 2008 court hearing.

Case May Bring Crucial Change

"If we prevail, the benefit will be extended to everyone who is in a similar situation," Trenticosta, of New Orleans, told The Root.

"What happens in Mr. Woodfox's case will be instrumental. It will be crucial," says Parnell Herbert, a New Orleans playwright and Free the Angola 3 coalition member.

Apart from Woodfox's petition for writ of habeas corpus, a civil lawsuit seeking $5 million in compensation for an extended and unmerited solitary confinement has also been filed on behalf of the Angola 3.
The Angola 3 supporters contend that thus far, Louisiana's attorney general, James "Buddy" Caldwell, has been typical of prosecutors who refuse to admit that they made a mistake. (His office would not comment for this article.)

"We're not saying solitary confinement is never necessary. We're saying this is not the way to go about it," Allen-Bell says.

She continues: "The greater issue is one of prisoners routinely in this country being thrown into solitary cells for no infraction whatsoever. They're subject to what I call perception profiling: A woman who complained of being raped [by a prison guard] has the baby, then gets thrown into solitary. People who [are gay] get thrown into solitary. [So do] people who were in gangs when they were in their 20s, have tattoos on their arms still, but they're 35 now and not involved in gangs. This an arbitrary system with no legal criteria for putting people into solitary and no legal means of getting them out."

Says freed Angola 3 member King, now a globetrotting prison reformer whose 2008 memoir, From the Bottom of the Heap, has been revised and expanded: "The broader aspect of this -- and this is what keeps Herman and Albert and myself going -- is that we are just the tip of the iceberg. We have to convince the public of that. We have to let folks know that what's going on with regard to solitary confinement in America is totally reprehensible."

Freelancer Katti Gray specializes in covering criminal justice, health care, higher education and human resources. She is a contributing editor at the Center on Media, Crime and Justice in New York City.

(Albert Woodfox, left, with Herman Wallace, right.)

Albert Woodfox: Freedom After 40 Years in Solitary?
--Supporters of one of the Angola 3 tell The Root why he might be released this time.

(The first of two parts)
by Katti Gray

(This article was originally published by The Root on January 29, 2013, and is being reprinted here by Angola 3 News with permission from the author. Special thanks to Katti Gray, whose articles for The Root are archived here.)

After four decades of solitary confinement in the nation's most populated maximum-security prison -- and one of its most historically brutal -- a member of the internationally known "Angola 3" has reasonable cause to expect that he will soon be released, his attorneys and supporters say. The request to set free Albert Woodfox, 65, is being heard by the same federal judge who in 2008 ordered that Woodfox be released, a ruling that Louisiana prosecutors successfully appealed and blocked.

Woodfox and Herman Wallace, now 71, were placed in solitary confinement in 1972 -- theirs is the longest-running solo detention of which human rights group Amnesty International is aware -- after being convicted of killing a white guard at Angola prison, the slave plantation-turned-Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Both men have consistently said that they were falsely accused and that their conviction was the means by which prison officials punished the Angola 3 for their membership in the Black Panther Party. Also a member of that trio is Robert Hillary King, now 69, who was released in 2001 after plea-bargaining to a crime unrelated to the murder, a crime for which he was never officially charged, although prison officials insisted that he was involved.

(Left to Right: Herman Wallace, Robert King, and Albert Woodfox)

As prison activists, the Angola 3 had challenged ongoing, unpunished rape of inmates -- including a system of "sexual slavery" that prison officials eventually acknowledged -- racial segregation and other adverse prison conditions. The three, who did not know one another before landing at the 18,000-acre prison farm -- named for the town where it is located, roughly an hour's drive from Baton Rouge -- initially were convicted in the 1960s of assorted robbery charges that they do not contest.

Concerning Woodfox, his lawyers say that this time around, they believe they have unequivocally affirmed several points favoring their client:

* An all-white, all-male jury -- seated in a jurisdiction where almost half the residents are black -- was wholly disinclined to consider that the Angola 3, who are black men, were innocent of killing a white prison guard, 23-year-old Brent Miller.

* State prosecutors bribed the sole, alleged witness to the killing with a weekly pack of cigarettes and better living quarters in exchange for reversing his initial claim that none of the three was at the crime scene. Prosecutors and prison officials withheld details of that bribe and other essential information during the trial; have since contended that they lost evidence, including scrapings from the dead guard's fingernails; and refused to release inmate fingerprints to compare with fingerprints left near Miller's corpse that the Angola 3's lawyers obtained.

* Subsequent court proceedings, including Woodfox's 1993 retrial, were tainted by a pattern of excluding blacks from juries and of judges exclusively choosing whites as foremen of grand juries that decide whom to indict for trial. For that 1993 retrial, a white grand jury foreman with a high school diploma was chosen over a black candidate who had a college degree.

(Photo of the April 17, 2012 delegation that delivered to the Governor's office, a 67,000 signature Amnesty International petition demanding Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox's immediate release from solitary confinement. Governor Jindal refused Amnesty's requests to meet with the delegation.)

Racism's Pervasive Influence

"We had a jury of angry white men in 1972," Nicholas Trenticosta, a lawyer from New Orleans who mostly handles death-penalty cases and is representing Woodfox, told The Root. " ... Pure, flat-out racism is driving this train."

To amplify what the Angola 3's supporters say was the prevailing racial climate at the prison, they point to a 2008 court hearing during which Trenticosta questioned Burl Cain, installed in 1995 as Angola's warden and widely viewed as a prison reformer who has overseen a decline in violence at Angola.

(Transcript begins)
Trenticosta: OK. What is it about Albert Woodfox that gives you such concern?

Cain: The thing about him is that he wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant.

Trenticosta: Well, let me ask you this. Let's just, for the sake of argument, assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of [officer] Brent Miller.

Cain: OK. I would still keep him in [solitary]. I still know he has a propensity for violence. I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand. And I would have the [whites] chasing after them. I would have chaos and conflict, and I believe that. He has to stay in a cell while he's at Angola.
(transcript ends)

While Judge James Brady of U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge, where Woodfox's request for release is on the docket, is prohibited from commenting on cases before him, court watchers say that he is keenly aware of the racial dynamics of the Angola 3's case and the constitutional issues it raises. (Brady issued the 2008 order for Woodfox's release.)

"In 2008 Judge Brady ruled they should release [Woodfox]. I have no reason to believe Judge Brady will not rule the same way today as he did back then," said attorney Angela Allen-Bell of Baton Rouge's Southern University Law Center, a member of Free the Angola 3, a coalition of human rights groups -- including Amnesty International -- corporate moguls, philanthropists, grassroots activists and others who are helping to pay legal fees related to their cause.

If Woodfox wins his petition for writ of habeas corpus -- Latin for "free the body," a maneuver that does not address the question of innocence or guilt -- he could be retried. Or, as his lawyers are banking on, he could reach a settlement with state prosecutors, who retained a private New Orleans firm to handle the case, that would permanently end his incarceration.

The office of Louisiana Attorney General James D. "Buddy" Caldwell would not comment for this article.

(April 17, 2012, the day Amnesty International's petition was delivered, marked 40 years since Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace's were placed in solitary confinement.)

The Cruelty of Solitary Confinement

As much as the Angola 3's case spotlights such concerns as racial bias in jury selection, it brings to the fore the broad subject of solitary confinement in a nation that, according to 2005 U.S. Department of Justice data -- the latest federal tally available -- holds 80,000 prisoners under such terms on any given day.

"We're asking the federal court to consider what's taken place in the state, to consider that what happened with the jury is a constitutional violation and to set Woodfox free," said Allen-Bell, author of the article "Perception Profiling & Prolonged Solitary Confinement Viewed Through the Lens of the Angola 3 Case." "We're also pushing to change the status quo."

Published in the summer 2012 edition of the University of California's Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, that research takes aim at what Allen-Bell and others contend is the arbitrary choosing of whom to remand to solitary confinement in prisons across the United States, a process that lacks streamlined criteria for such decisions and places no limits on the duration of confinement.

That, said Amnesty International spokeswoman Suzanne Trimel, is blatant hypocrisy: "The 40-year isolated incarceration of [Woodfox and Wallace] ... is a scandal that pushes the boundaries of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and flies in the face of international standards to which the United States is a party."

Being constrained in a 6-by-9-by-12-foot, windowless cell was inexpressibly difficult, Angola 3's King, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement, told The Root. "You've got an iron bunk, suspended on the wall, and an iron bench, a small table, a commode and a sink," said King, whose jailhouse lawyering, alongside that of Woodfox and Wallace, did eventually result in Louisiana's solitarily confined inmates being allowed one hour, thrice weekly, in the prison yard.

Staying Strong in Isolation

Assuming that Woodfox is released, that leaves behind bars, at least for now, Wallace. His attorneys are also preparing to request his release.

Roughly a year ago, Woodfox and Wallace were transferred to separate Louisiana prisons, where they remain in solitary confinement and under conditions, King says, that are harsher than those at Angola. April 2013 will mark Woodfox and Wallace's 41st year in solitary confinement.

"There were some things in Angola that they don't practice at Wade Correctional Facility, where [Woodfox] is now," said King, now an Austin, Texas-based, world-traveling prison reformer and author of From the Bottom of the Heap, a 2008 memoir that has been revised and expanded. "He says the food at Angola was better -- though food is generally bad in any prison -- and the condition of the yard at Angola was better.

"He is separated from people with whom he was familiar," King continued. "And he is 70 miles farther away from his brother, who he can see now only while shackled and handcuffed. There are no contact visits like what he had in Angola. So of course, Albert feels these are added punishments."

(Robert King with Anita Roddick, August 2002.)

Until the mid-1990s -- when the Angola 3 drew moral and financial support from a wide swath of people, including global activist Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop -- the men represented themselves in court matters involving conditions at Angola and other concerns.

"We were motivated by what had us in confinement," King said, "and under those conditions, we had become politically aware and politically conscious of what was going on. We operated out of a sense of consciousness and the reality that there are flaws in this system that need to be fixed."

Their activism, he added, helped them maintain their sanity and focus.

"After being in there for so long, you're not desensitized to the situation, but you build up a resistance, so to speak, against the wear and tear. You're in there ... so you have to become inured to being in there," said King, who, postprison, has lectured and lobbied globally against solitary confinement, conferring with former South African President Nelson Mandela and actor-activist Harry Belafonte, among others.

According to King, who recently spoke by telephone with Woodfox, his friend's optimism regarding his pending court case is clear. "His spirits -- notwithstanding the pressures of all this -- seem pretty uplifted," said King. "He read the argument. He read the brief, both sides. He imagines that the lawyers did a good job. His expectation is high. Ask him if he'll be coming home and he tells you, straight up, 'Yes.' "

Even amid that hopefulness, there's reason for caution.

Californian Marina Drummer -- a Bay Area nonprofit executive, coordinator of the Free Angola 3 campaign and co-founder of Solitary Watch -- said: "I can't say I'm [unequivocally] optimistic. We're dealing with the state of Louisiana ... It seems as if they'll do anything to cover their tracks. If we were going on the issue of justice, they'd all be out by now."

(Professor Angela A. Allen-Bell, author of a recent Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly article focusing on the Angola 3, speaks in Baton Rouge at the Louisiana State Capitol on April 17, 2012 when Amnesty International delivered a 67,000 signature demanding Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox's immediate release from solitary confinement. Read her interview with Angola 3 News here.)

The state could, as it did previously, appeal to have a ruling in Woodfox's favor overturned, says attorney Allen-Bell.

After her own recent visit with Woodfox, Allen-Bell had this observation: "What I do not hear from [him] is anger or bitterness. I see them as civil rights icons, which they're very humble about ... They don't see themselves as anyone special. They were doing the human work that humanitarians do." She quotes Woodfox: " 'We were doing what Panthers do. This is the penalty you pay for doing this kind of stuff.' "

--Freelancer Katti Gray specializes in covering criminal justice, health care, higher education and human resources. She is a contributing editor at the Center on Media, Crime and Justice in New York City.

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.