I’d heard about Wade. It was built as a “punishment prison” for the “worst of the worst” back in 1980. Angola officials told us our move wasn’t a punishment. But it was impossible to view the move as anything but a punishment. I’d now be a six-hour drive from New Orleans, the base of my support. It would be impossible for someone to drive from New Orleans to visit me and return on the same day. I knew I’d be very isolated at Wade.
The day we arrived the guards were immediately in our faces, speaking harshly and being unnecessarily rude. “You have five minutes to get that gum out of your mouth,” one of them yelled at a prisoner when we got out of the van. The man beside me looked at his hands, cuffed to his waist with a black box over them, obviously taking a second to figure out how to remove the gum from his mouth without his hands. The guard yelled at him again. Not all guards at Wade spoke in a rough and demeaning manner, but most corrections officers there had mastered the art of how to treat prisoners in the most degrading way possible. They did it because they could. Nobody was there to show them a different way. I also had the impression we were thrust on them without warning, that they were already overwhelmed and they aimed their anger and frustration at us.
It looked like they had emptied the cells of the new CCR tier the day before we got there. I could smell the disinfectant used to clean them. I had to tell the guards we were supposed to live under the same rules and have the same privileges that we had at CCR in Angola. The guards didn’t know anything about CCR rules and privileges. They told me their rules: At Wade, there were no contact visits. There was no microwave for prisoners to use. No ice. We got yard only three times a week and didn’t have the option to stay on the tier on yard days. That meant that if we didn’t go to the yard we had to go straight back into our cells after we showered. At Angola, there were five TVs on the tier; each TV was shared by three prisoners and could be programmed separately based on what those three prisoners wanted to watch. At Wade the four TVs were programmed together, so all prisoners on the tier had to watch the same program. That would mean getting 12 men to agree on TV programming every hour of the day. There was less TV time, which was a great loss to guys who arranged their whole day around what would be on television. By the time I left Angola, the TVs had a chip in them so the volume came through radios in the cells. At Wade the TVs were blasting at full volume; the noise was deafening. By the time I left Angola we could have a phone in our cells when we made a call. To use the phone at Wade we had to stand at the end of the tier, in restraints, by the glass wall of the control booth.
The cell door shut behind me. It was steel mesh instead of bars, so prisoners couldn’t pass anything through the doors or hold mirrors out to look down the tier. There was no space under the door to pass anything. The food slots had hinged flaps on them and could be locked from the outside. There were no slots in the cell doors to put restraints on our ankles or wrists, so every time we left the tier we’d have to hold our hands to the food slots to have handcuffs put on, then back away from the door as the guards opened it, face the back of our cells, and kneel on the floor so they could put leg irons on us. At 63, I had degenerative arthritis in my knees. I knew it would be painful for me to kneel on the concrete floor. I sat on my bunk. If I’d allowed myself to feel an emotional connection to my reality in that moment I would have gone insane. But I didn’t feel the highs and lows that people in society feel anymore. I lived in the middle of every emotion.
The next day the warden and his assistant, a lieutenant colonel who was in charge of the South Side, where I was housed, called me out. I was put in restraints and taken to see them in a small room. They started questioning me about being in CCR and Angola and I felt they were dancing around whatever they wanted to talk to me about so I interrupted them. “Look,” I said. “I assume you all called me out here trying to figure out my state of mind. Most rules don’t apply to me because I don’t participate in any prison games or bullshit. If your officers respect me, I’ll respect them. If your officers disrespect me, I will disrespect them. If you put your hand on me you’re going to have to kill me because I will fight you as hard as I can until I’m unconscious or dead. Other than that, you won’t know I’m here.” They looked at one another. The warden said, “We’re glad to hear you aren’t going to be a problem.”
As I was being led back to my tier, I knew I was going to be a problem. Prisoners at Wade were treated like shit. We didn’t have the CCR privileges that we were supposed to have under the state’s own rules. As soon as my possessions were delivered I got out my writing materials and wrote to the warden, listing the privileges we had at CCR and asking when we could expect to have them, starting with contact visits.
The only privilege the warden turned over quickly was contact visits; we got those in a couple of weeks. For everything else, it took three to six months of pushing just to get an abbreviated version of what we had at Angola. The other prisoners worked with me. We all knew what they were doing was wrong. Acting by consensus I got petitions signed, wrote to the warden, filed ARPs. Throughout, guards routinely cursed at us and spoke to us disrespectfully, all of it unprovoked and uncalled for. Even on the walk from our cell to the shower we’d be harassed. Guards would call out to us, “Hurry up. Get in the shower, keep moving.” If there was a sporting event on TV and prisoners on the tier cheered too loudly a guard would yell, “Get down on the fucking noise before I come down and put some of you motherfuckers in the dungeon.”
Eventually we got ice. The day they put a microwave at the end of our tier it was such a novelty that security guards from all over the prison came to look at it. One of the guards said, “I never thought I’d live to see the day they’d have a microwave on a tier at David Wade.” We couldn’t use the microwave ourselves; we had to pass whatever we wanted heated into the guard center at the end of the tier and then get it passed back to us.
Some things the prison officials wouldn’t change, no matter how much I protested and fought them. They refused to give us a shower curtain. The shower was directly across from the control center. We had to stand buck naked in the shower in full view of where the guards sat, including female guards. Wade was also not as clean as Angola. There were more insects and rodents at Wade; they sprayed insecticide only in the halls, not in the cells. They didn’t pass out brooms or mops as often. When medical personnel needed to do lab work or other tests, they came to get us in the middle of the night—anytime from one to three in the morning. We had less access to legal material. This didn’t affect me directly, because I was lucky enough to have lawyers who helped me. But it was a big loss for the other prisoners at CCR in Wade.
We finally got Wade to agree to let us stay on the tier if we wanted, instead of going out on the yard for our hour, but they put a line down the hall in yellow tape, one-third out from the wall, and told us we had to stay on that one-third side of the tier when we were out on our hour and not cross the line. That was a pain in the ass. It was hard to exercise or give things to people on the tier from the other side of the yellow line. If I was heating up a cup of coffee for someone in the cell or handing him a book I had to keep my toes behind the yellow line and lean over it. They used the yellow line as punishment for the whole tier because one of the prisoners programmed a porn channel on the DirecTV using the remote and security failed to catch it for a few hours. To punish everyone for the actions of a few, or even of just one prisoner, is the policy at every prison. We were always forced to live at the level of the lowest common denominator. That philosophy would eventually ruin our contact visits at Wade. When we first got contact visits we didn’t have to wear restraints. Then a prisoner apparently threatened another prisoner, saying he was going to beat him and his family in the visiting room. After that we were all forced to wear shackles and handcuffs during our visits. That was Wade’s solution to the problem.
Some months after I arrived the warden, Jerry Goodwin, called me out of the cell. I was taken to the room where the review board met. “
I’ve got something I want to talk to you about,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s OK with me. Either way, I’m telling you now, this conversation never happened. I will deny it ever took place.” He paused. “Now, if you still want to hear it, tell me.” “Well, yeah,” I said, “What?” He said, “I talked with Buddy Caldwell at one of the budget meetings and he told me to tell you to be smart, and if you wanted to give testimony against Herman Wallace, you’d better make a deal now.” I told him I’d think about it. As soon as I got back to my tier I called George Kendall to tell him to visit me so that I could tell him what Warden Goodwin said. Nothing came of it. There was nothing we could do. Caldwell’s offer came from a third party, which gave him deniability.
Soon after that I was reading when a crew of workers came onto the tier and started oiling and hammering the hinges on the rusty metal flaps that covered the food slots. I asked the guard on duty what they were doing and was told they were ordered to start locking the food slots in CCR after every meal. When they were done they locked all the flaps and left the tier. When a meal came the flaps were unlocked and the tray was passed to us. After we ate the trays were picked up and the flaps were locked again. We couldn’t pass a book, a newspaper, or anything else when someone was out on his hour with the flaps locked. We couldn’t open the flap to see the face of the person talking to us from the tier. There was no penological reason for it. It wasn’t happening on any other cellblock. This was a punitive action created for CCR at David Wade Correctional Center. It added to our isolation. It made the cell seem more confining and it took time to adjust to that. I wrote to the warden to protest the action. When I told my lawyers about it they got involved. It took more than six months, but with my attorneys’ help we got them to keep the food slots unlocked.
I was still getting claustrophobic attacks but that was nothing new. It always started the same way. I felt that the air around me was pressing down on me and the cell was getting smaller and smaller. If it was late at night or early in the morning and everyone was locked in his cell I would get naked. I couldn’t stand the feel of clothes on me; my T-shirt and underwear felt five times too small. If the guard came down the tier for a count I would sit on the toilet until he passed, because I didn’t want him to know. We were pushing this image, like Herman’s poem, of men of steel. We hid weaknesses from security. Sometimes listening to opera helped. If I could find it on the radio I would sit on my bunk, close my eyes, and imagine the walls moving back to their normal distance from me. Most of the time there was no opera on the radio. Walking off the attacks usually worked better anyway. I paced the cell, back and forth. When it was summertime there would be a trail of sweat underneath me that formed a stripe down the middle of my cell floor, from one end to the other.
2011–2016
I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give.
—Frantz Fanon
Chapter 48
Torture
In April 2011, the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3 and the ACLU National Prison Project held a congressional briefing on the abuses of solitary confinement, at the request of Congressmen John Conyers, Cedric Richmond, and Robert “Bobby” Scott. Tory Pegram co-organized the program and moderated the panel discussion with Robert King; Laura Rovner, an associate professor of law in the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver College of Law; David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project; and Michael Randle, program manager for the Judge Nancy R. McDonnell Community Based Correctional Facility. There was a screening of a documentary about us called In the Land of the Free, directed by Vadim Jean and produced by the Mob Film Company, released the year before. (That film would be updated with new information and interviews and renamed Cruel and Unusual years later.) King and our attorney Carine Williams spoke after the film was shown.
That spring I got the news that my childhood friend Ernest Johnson had died from an illness. That was a shock because he was my age, 64. On June 2, 2011, former Panther Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt died of a heart attack. He was 63. There was no place in my cell to put these aching losses. I was still grieving for Althea Francois, a founding member of our support committee, who had died a year and a half before, after a long illness, on Christmas day. Althea, as a young member of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s, first visited me at Angola after I was accused of killing Brent Miller. In 1999, we reunited in the prison visiting room. A gentle but determined warrior, Althea was an activist in the black community her entire life. In the months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, she worked to establish the city’s Office of the Independent Police Monitor to uncover and expose the role of New Orleans police in post-Katrina killings. Herman and King were, of course, also devastated by Althea’s death. When the San Francisco Bay View newspaper asked King for a few words about her, he spoke of Althea’s giving nature, invoking a passage from the Bible, Matthew 25:35–36: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink . . . I was in prison and you came to visit me.” I was used to being separated from people I loved, but separation by death was different. Althea Francois, Ernest Johnson, Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, Anita Roddick, Michael Augustine, one of my very first supporters Opal Joyner, my sister Violetta Mable Augustine, my mom Ruby Mable. If I ever got out of prison, a part of me would always be looking for them.
I started getting swelling in my legs and ankles. As usual, I tried to run it off, but that didn’t help. At one point my ankles were so swollen the guards couldn’t put the leg irons on—they had to use two plastic restraints joined together for each of my ankles and attach the chain between my ankles to them. Eventually I saw a doctor and got a prescription for fluid pills and the swelling went down, but anytime my ankle restraints were too tight my ankles blew up like balloons.
I was still, after 39 years, being hassled about my books and mail. If I was sent anything that mentioned the Black Panther Party it was confiscated for “teaching racial hatred.” “Give me a break,” I wrote to Herman, describing the petty harassment. “I’m tired of this shit.” One of my supporters sent me the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and, luckily, it got through. I shared it with the prisoners on my tier, telling them what a powerful book it was. There were issues in the book we used to discuss in the 1970s.
I stayed in close touch with Herman at Hunt and Zulu at Angola through letters, writing often. Although, as I wrote to Hooks, “It’s hard to write to you and Zulu, what can I tell you about the beast’s belly. Both of you are living my hell.”
On October 18, 2011, the United Nations released a statement against solitary confinement:
A United Nations expert on torture today called on all countries to ban the solitary confinement of prisoners except in very exceptional circumstances and for as short a time as possible, with an absolute prohibition in the case of juveniles and people with mental disabilities.
“Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit (SHU) . . . whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by States as a punishment or extortion technique,” UN Special Rapporteur on torture Juan E. Méndez told the General Assembly’s third committee, which deals with social, humanitarian and cultural affairs, saying the practice could amount to torture.
“Solitary confinement is a harsh measure which is contrary to rehabilitation, the aim of the penitentiary system,” he stressed in presenting his first interim report on the practice, calling it global in nature and subject to widespread abuse.
Indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement in excess of 15 days should also be subject to an absolute prohibition, he added, citing scientific studies that have established that some lasting mental damage is caused after a few days of social isolation.
“Considering the severe mental pain or suffering solitary confinement may cause, it can amount to torture or c
ruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment when used as a punishment, during pretrial detention, indefinitely or for a prolonged period, for persons with mental disabilities or juveniles.”
Chapter 49
Forty Years
April 17, 2012, marked 40 years since Herman and I were first put in CCR. Our support committee and Amnesty International held our annual anniversary protest against solitary confinement; this year it was on the steps of the state capitol. Under a banner that read SOLITARY IS TORTURE, statements from me and Herman were read aloud, and several others spoke. “For me this day is bittersweet,” King said, “Bitter with a deep sadness that we have to mark this day, but sweet, seeing our years of effort and struggle culminating in this day. The tide is changing and the time for change is now. We have the wind at our back and we need to keep on moving.” “To be honest,” I had written, “I am not sure what damage has been done to me, but I do know that the feeling of pain allows me to know that I am alive. If I dwelled on the pain I have endured and stopped to think about how 40 years locked in a cage 23 hours a day has affected me, it would give insanity the victory it has sought for 40 years.”
Amnesty campaigners reached out to Governor Bobby Jindal to try to get a meeting. They wanted to hand him a petition demanding that Herman and I be released from solitary confinement; it had been signed by more than 67,000 people in 125 countries around the world. The governor refused to meet with Amnesty officials and King, referring them to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Secretary James M. Le Blanc denied that conditions in lockdown 23 hours a day were inhumane and said Herman and I were kept in CCR because we were a danger to prison employees, other inmates, and visitors.
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