Solitary

by Albert Woodfox

  I said, “Ms. Cullen, you know I didn’t kill Brent Miller because you know I passed a lie detector test.” It was not premeditated. I knew the results of polygraph tests were not admissible in court, because they are considered unreliable. I had no intention of saying it. I spoke out of frustration. The judge admonished the jury to disregard the statement.

  Later, when a reporter interviewed jurors at my trial one of them told her I should have “known better” than to “slip” that in. “I think his slipping that information in may have turned the jury off,” she said. “It did me. I believe that Albert Woodfox knew that that was not admissible, that we weren’t supposed to hear it.” The truth of my statement was less important to this juror than me knowing my place.

  The trial lasted nine days. On the last day, the courtroom was packed with white-gloved, uniformed police officers, prison guards, and sheriff’s deputies. It had been difficult for me to watch my family get their hopes up, even when I knew deep in my soul what the end was going to be. I was worried about my brother Michael. He’d been so hopeful before my trial and even throughout it, whereas a lot of people in the courtroom knew my best chance was a hung jury. The jury deliberated for about five hours. When they read the guilty verdict, I turned to my brother and sister first. Violetta’s eyes were filling with tears. I looked at her and met Michael’s eyes. “They will never break me,” I told them. “They will never break my spirit.”

  After the trial Bert Garraway told a reporter, “Basically, the state put the Black Panthers on trial, and the state convicted the Black Panthers.” Ramsey Clark issued a statement calling what happened at my trial an example of “egregious prosecutorial misconduct.” Stan Miller, Brent Miller’s brother, told the Baton Rouge Advocate, “This is like an early Christmas present for our family.”

  WBAI–Pacifica Radio in New York City interviewed me the night after I was convicted. “I don’t blame the jurors,” I said. “They didn’t have all the information.” At the end of the interview I was asked what I believed in. “If you are not willing to struggle,” I said, “if you are not willing to sacrifice, then you can never change things. Struggle is the essence of change and that’s how I try to live my life. I’ve paid a heavy toll for it but I don’t have one regret. If I knew everything that was going to happen to me and I could turn back the hands of time, I would not change one thing about my life—not one moment of dedication, not one moment of struggle, not one moment of physical pain that I’ve suffered from beatings by prison people in New York and in Angola.”

  Chapter 39

  Back to Angola

  While I was in the Amite City jail a new colonel at Angola, nicknamed Macho Man by prisoners, was making conditions worse at CCR. He oversaw Camp J and CCR at the same time and started taking away CCR privileges, making CCR more punitive. I received letters from King and Herman describing the situation. Since all prisoner mail is opened and read by prison officials, I had to read between the lines. When King wrote, “Man, shit is going down” somewhere in the prison, I knew he was talking about CCR. When he wrote, “Man, I haven’t had anything to eat all day,” I knew they were planning a hunger strike.

  I was sentenced on February 23, 1999, to natural life without the possibility of probation, parole, or suspension of sentence. I was ready to go back and stand with my comrades. Since my conviction, I had been mentally preparing myself to be locked down again for 23 hours a day. It was very difficult to think about being put back in solitary after almost three years in the general prison population, but I didn’t have a choice. The alternative to surviving it was to be broken. When I was returned to solitary confinement in CCR I was placed on B tier. My comrade and friend Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore was on that tier. Herman was on F tier and King was on C tier. Zulu passed me a cassette tape of Malcolm X speaking that I listened to in my cell that night. I’d read Malcolm’s writings in books many times before. It was something special to hear Malcolm’s voice. The biggest lesson I learned from Malcolm is that change is possible, that you can transition from what society has made you, as a result of your race and your economic situation, and redefine yourself. Malcolm also taught me how to look beyond my immediate surroundings.

  King and Herman had already put together a petition, gotten it signed by prisoners, and filed a grievance with the warden about the stricter conditions at CCR. The warden never responded. When I arrived, notes were being passed between tiers to plan the hunger strike, encouraging guys to participate and to stay strong. Without our knowledge one of the orderlies who had been passing the notes for Herman and King was showing them to prison officials. No names were mentioned in the notes but it was easy for security to identify handwriting. Approximately 60 prisoners went on the hunger strike. King and Herman were called out of their cells for what they were told would be a meeting with the warden. They were gassed, beaten, and put in the dungeon at Camp J. They stayed on the hunger strike in the dungeon while we stayed on it at CCR.

  They couldn’t put me in a punishment cell because they didn’t have my name or handwriting on any of the notes about organizing the hunger strike. The day they put King and Herman in the dungeon I tried to keep the prisoners on other tiers going while I was out on the yard. “Stay strong. Don’t give up. Don’t let them intimidate you,” I yelled. I hollered up to the prisoners on the other tiers. “We’re not at Camp J, they can’t treat us like we are.”

  The next day, after yard, instead of being taken back to my cell I was taken to Macho Man’s office. He asked me why there was a hunger strike. I said, “Why are you asking me?” He said, “I heard you are a ringleader; you have a lot of influence with other prisoners. If you tell them not to eat they aren’t going to eat.” I said, “I ain’t no ringleader. You have no proof.” He told me he had proof and I said, “Then why are we having this conversation? I should be at Camp J with Hooks and King.” He asked me again why we were doing it. I told him, “The reason we’re on a hunger strike is that you say one thing out of one side of your mouth and another thing out the other side. People don’t trust you. We want the warden to come and see for himself this mess you created.” He looked at the guard who brought me into the room and said, “Lock him up.”

  They put me in the CCR dungeon. I had a mattress, a sheet, and one blanket. I wore a jumpsuit. No radio, no TV, no possessions. I could get legal books but no other books. We were out of our cells only 15 minutes a day for a shower. Most of the men in the dungeon were mentally ill; some had already been gassed and beaten before being moved to the dungeon. They screamed or banged on their walls for hours, trying to handle the pressure however they could. I had to turn off my emotions. As usual, I forced myself to have an intellectual response to everything going on around me. Sometimes it was the only way to stay sane. I stayed on the hunger strike in the dungeon. I was never written up for it though. In all the years I was at Angola, I’d been on so many hunger strikes I can’t count them, yet I was never written up for one. They wrote me up for “defiance” or “disobedience” or “aggravated disobedience.” They didn’t want a record of our protests.

  I was kept in the CCR dungeon for 30 days. Herman, King, and I stayed on the hunger strike all that time. Once a week I was brought before the disciplinary court and told that I was being investigated for planning a second hunger strike and I was told the investigation was still ongoing. At the end of 30 days the investigative report cleared me. The major on the disciplinary board asked me if we could go off the record. “I’m caught between rock and a hard place,” he told me. “There is no evidence for me to find you guilty but I got word from the very top to send you to Camp J.” I said, “Do your job then.” He found me guilty of something and they sent me to Camp J. I didn’t mind. I wanted to be with my comrades. Years later I would read the write-up he created:

  [Woodfox] then became very belligerent, and said, “You just as soon put me in Camp J because that’s what it’s going to come to because this shit isn’t over with yet.” He also stated “as fa
r as he was concerned, it wouldn’t be over as long as Wallace, King, and the other inmates put at Camp J for organizing the hunger strike remained locked up.” He said they only organized the peaceful demonstration, and there wasn’t anything wrong with that. He said again, “Just go ahead and lock me up at Camp J now, because that’s what you’re going to have to do anyway.”

  At Camp J, they put me on Herman’s tier at Gator Unit the first night and then moved me to Shark Unit. King was in Gar Unit.

  Camp J was referred to as a “punishment program,” but the way it was executed at Angola it was flat-out torture. King used to say the “program” was to receive prisoners and in six months return patients. There were three levels of deprivation in the program. Most prisoners entered at Level 2, at which we were in our cells 23 hours and 45 minutes a day; we got 15-minute showers once a day. We got no dessert on our trays, no salt or pepper. We couldn’t buy anything at the store except for hygiene products. We couldn’t have any of our own clothing, so we wore jumpsuits. We could have six books, including a Bible if we wanted one, and writing materials. We had an hour out on the yard three times a week.

  Camp J officers had no training; many of them were undisciplined and unethical, which led to brutal beatings and gassing of prisoners, especially mentally ill prisoners or prisoners who broke under the pressure of being confined to a cell more than 23 hours a day. Camp J was the most dreaded assignment for corrections officers at Angola. Guards were put there to be punished by administrative and security personnel with the authority to reassign them. The guards spent their days putting restraints on prisoners and taking them off. We were restrained on the way to the shower, unrestrained in the shower, and restrained for the short walk back to our cells. Multiply that by 15 prisoners on a tier. In the yard, they removed the leg shackles but we couldn’t really exercise because they kept our hands restrained to our waists, which made it difficult to run; if you fall you can’t brace yourself with your hands. Some guards who were too lazy to do their jobs would bribe prisoners with cigarettes—which were banned—to skip yard.

  If a prisoner survived Level 2 for three months without a write-up he was supposed to advance to Level 3, with new privileges, such as being able to have a radio, buy snacks at the canteen, have an hour a day in the hall, and wear his own clothes. After three months at Level 3 without a write-up he was supposed to be released back to his normal housing. At any time, though, and at the whim of almost any security officer and for any reason, he could get a write-up and be sent back to Level 2, or worse, Level 1, and have to start over. Level 1 was the harshest level and lasted 30 days. Meals consisted of a “loaf” of food made from whatever was being served to other prisoners, mixed together. Prisoners on Level 1 had no yard time and fewer possessions. Men on Level 1 had to wear paper gowns so they couldn’t hang themselves. The insecurity of anyone’s situation at any time in Camp J amounted to severe psychological torture. There were tiers where guards enforced total silence. A prisoner could be moved back a level for talking or for sharing food. From any level, a prisoner can be put in the dungeon at Camp J for 10 to 30 days. In the dungeon the clock stops. Those days don’t count toward time in the program. The worst cell at Camp J was called “the booth” and was situated inside its own individual room. It was total and complete isolation.

  Anyone who “acted out” at Level 1 or in the dungeon was put in four-point restraints, handcuffed to a bed at the ankles and wrists, which forced a prisoner to lie in his own urine and feces. Anyone who struggled and banged his head had a football helmet put on him by a security officer. I was never put in four-point restraints but I saw it in the dungeon when I walked by the other cells on my way to the shower.

  With “good behavior” prisoners were supposed to be able to work their way out of Camp J in about six months. But as with all prisons, what’s written down on paper is not what happens. A guard could have a bad day and take it out on a prisoner, or just be cruel; some of the officers regularly messed with prisoners to get them to react so they had an excuse to move the prisoner back a level, or they’d accuse someone of doing something they knew he didn’t do to fuck with his head. Prisoners were exposed to harassment, mind games, provocation, beatings, and the constant threat of being put back a level. The threat of never being allowed to leave the program, of always losing ground, amounted to severe psychological torture. The overwhelming majority of prisoners left Camp J broken men.

  When I got to Camp J after spending 30 days in the dungeon I was put on Level 2. By then we heard the CCR administration had restored all the privileges that had been taken away before our hunger strike. They waited to do it until we were off the tier so it wouldn’t look as if the hunger strike was effective. I forced myself to adjust quickly to being in a smaller cell and not having my possessions. In October, the weather got colder and since we didn’t have our own clothes when we went outside for yard we were handed unlaundered sweatshirts to wear. After being forced to wear a filthy sweatshirt a few times I filed an ARP on that and eventually won the case in court. The prison’s defense was they didn’t have enough sweatshirts to wash them between prisoner use. The judge ruled they had to get more sweatshirts so prisoners had clean ones to wear.

  When I made it to Level 3 I requested my radio out of storage. A guard came back and told me I couldn’t have it because it had a cassette player attached. Cassette tapes weren’t allowed at Camp J. I wasn’t asking for cassettes, I told him. “I don’t want to use the cassette player. I just want to use my own radio so I don’t have to buy one out of the canteen,” I said. Logic failed to convince him. I filed an ARP and was overruled. I had to buy what they called a “Camp J radio” out of the canteen, a tiny transistor made of see-through plastic that had terrible reception. Sometimes King and I were outside in our yard pen at the same time and we could call out to each other. For me that was a good yard day.

  Years later I was touched to receive a copy of a letter written by a man who had been in a cell next to me at Camp J for a while. Someone who heard about our case and lived in Baton Rouge wrote to him, asking him if he’d ever heard of me. He sent her an unsigned letter about meeting me. When I received a copy of his letter I remembered him from his time at Camp J, but not his name. He wrote that when I was put in the cell next to his he was a “very depressed and troubled” man. He wrote,

  The harshness, the evil and cruelty of prison life had begun to take its toll upon me. I became to trust no one as I seen everyone as my enemy. I found myself . . . with only two friends and their names were loneliness and pain. . . . One day a new prisoner was put in the cell next to me. I suddenly heard this voice saying “My name is Woodfox.” So I say to myself “Man, don’t I have enough problems already. Now I have a nut in the cell next to me.” Again I hear this voice saying to me, “My name is Woodfox and I am introducing myself to you.” This time I see [a] hand reaching out of the bars, in an effort to shake hands. . . . I was very skeptical about sticking my hand outside of those bars because I have seen guys whose hands hang outside the bars end up being sliced from a razor blade and some become stabbed from a homemade knife but for some unknown reason I found myself standing there, shaking Mr. Woodfox hand and the following day, he again spoke to me. And he also asked me, would I like something to read. . . . After closely observing this man, I began to see a man who has been confined to a cell for over 27 years. I also seen a man who has been condemned to die here in Angola. But yet I seen no hate within him. Nor did I see fear. But he did show that he was a man who were determined to become a better person. While realizing that he was living in a world where being better sometimes meant nothing. He showed that he was a man whose wisdom may very well be unlimited and whose strive for knowledge has become his faith. Seeing all of this and more, in Mr. Woodfox, is what inspired me to become a better person within myself. Through Mr. Woodfox I was reminded that a man who chooses not to seek knowledge is the same as a boy who choose not to become a man. I now realize that knowledge can be th
e key for that what sometimes seem impossible in life.

  Kathy Flynn Simino, an attorney who worked for a center in New Orleans that did appeals for indigent defendants, wrote the direct appeal for my conviction on the grounds that the state withheld exculpatory evidence—that Hezekiah Brown had been paid—which was called “Brady material,” after the 1963 Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland—and on the grounds that there were issues with the way the grand jury that indicted me was impaneled. When we took Anne Butler to court to get the tapes of her interviews with prison officials about the Miller killing before my trial, her testimony revealed that there may have been improprieties in selecting the grand jurors.

  Simino filed my direct appeal in 1999. I would have three chances with this appeal in state court. First it went back to my trial judge. If he denied me, it would go before the appellate court, and if that court denied me, I would go before the Louisiana Supreme Court. I knew my appeal would be denied on every level. State judges like to be seen as tough on crime. Institutional racism was rampant, and still is. After all that, I could submit what’s called a postconviction relief application (PCRA) in which we could include new evidence, which would take the same trajectory, starting with my trial judge. If denied, it would go to the state appeals court; if it was denied there, it would go before the Louisiana Supreme Court. Upon denial of my PCRA at the state supreme court level I would be able to go to federal court.

  2000–2010

  They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.

  —Mexican proverb used by the Zapatista movement

  Chapter 40