Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement

by Albert Woodfox

It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism, African Americans are born socially dead and spend the rest of their lives fighting to live.

Many people wrote to me in prison over the years, asking me how I survived four decades in a single cell, locked down 23 hours a day. I turned my cell into a university, I wrote to them, a hall of debate, a law school.

I turned my attention to the street. There, I quickly learned everyone had one choice: to be a rabbit or a wolf. I chose to be a wolf.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

I’d seen guys in my neighborhood come back from Angola throughout my childhood. They were given the highest respect. I thought it would be an honor to go there. I chose Angola.

Originally one of six slave-breeding plantations owned by the American slave trader Isaac Franklin, Angola was spread out over 18,000 acres of farmland when I got to it.

To protect your reputation, you had to carry yourself a certain way. If someone challenges you and you don’t fight you’ve lost your reputation; it’s gone.

In prison, you are part of a human herd. In the human herd survival of the fittest is all there is. You become instinctive, not intellectual. Therein lies the secret to the master’s control.

It was a common practice then—and is to this day—for the DA’s office to keep prisoners with weak, or even nonexistent, cases in prison to “sweat” the prisoner, hoping he’d plead guilty.

At any prison there is always a pecking order. The strong rule over the weak, the smart over the strong.

The Panthers explained to us that institutionalized racism was the foundation for all-white police departments, all-white juries, all-white banks, all-white universities, and other all-white institutions in America.

[If] any white man in the world says “Give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one. —James Baldwin

“The nature of a panther is that he never attacks,” said Huey Newton. “But if anyone attacks him or backs him into a corner, the panther comes up to wipe that aggressor or that attacker out.”

When Panthers raised a clenched fist, it was for unity. If you raise an open hand your fingers are separate, you are vulnerable. When you close those fingers and your hand comes together into a fist you have a symbol of power and unity.

At various times party members referred to police, politicians, DAs, and judges as “pigs.” I did too. It comes from George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, in which one of the characters, a pig, is a corrupt, power-hungry opportunist who turns against his followers and betrays the principles of democracy.

The Panthers had told me to agitate. To educate. I started thinking about how to talk to prisoners about the conditions we were living in.

On the outside, nothing had changed from the day I had escaped the courthouse 20 months earlier. I was a black man with a long prison sentence ahead of me. Inside, however, everything had changed. I had morals, principles, and values I never had before.

In the past, I had done wrong. Now I would do right. I would never be a criminal again.

At the daily meetings Malik tore books into sections to give each of us a part to read so we could then report back to the others what we had learned. We had debates and talked about society and the world.

We believed that being in prison we were at the forefront of social struggle and it was our responsibility to respond to the issues.

The Panthers told me, “Don’t forget the party. Don’t forget what the party stands for. Don’t forget the 10-Point Program and the principles of the party. Educate. Agitate. Be strong. Stay strong.”

Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—

Our survival depended on understanding what the authorities were attempting to do to us, and sharing that understanding with each other. —Nelson Mandela

Angola was the same. But I was different. I came with orders to start a chapter of the Black Panther Party. I was told to resist, educate, agitate. When I joined the party, I dedicated my life to social struggle.

I told them they had to reeducate themselves, that we had to come together and work together. I told them they had to stop raping and stabbing each other. “They want you to fight among yourselves so you don’t resist,” I said. “You deserve better than what you’re getting.”

Over time I realized that my own personal conduct—the way I behaved—was almost more important than anything I said.

I forced myself to learn how not to give in to fear. That was one of my greatest achievements in those years. I didn’t let fear rule me.

They thought they would stop our organizing by separating us but all they did was spread our influence. Wherever they put us, we started over, organizing our tiers. Pooling resources. Educating prisoners. Setting examples by our own conduct.

Education and looking outward, beyond the prison. If we were going to avoid becoming vegetables, we had to keep learning and keep our minds focused on the world outside Angola.

During this time, we started teaching ourselves the law. We knew getting the shit kicked out of us over and over wasn’t changing anything. We would never be able to match them physically.

For more than 100 years state and federal judges refused to adjudicate prisoner abuses at all in their courts because legally, according to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, prisoners are slaves of the state.

But I also became something they didn’t want or expect—self-educated. I could lose myself in a book. Reading was a bright spot for me. Reading was my salvation.

they kept us locked down because of our political beliefs. They knew through our actions over many years at CCR that we weren’t regular prisoners, that we were different. We constantly wanted to change our environment. We were able to unify prisoners. We believed in the principles of the Black Panther Party.

In prison, you have to question everything around you. Prison teaches you that most acts of kindness have strings attached; something in return will be expected at some point and what is expected might be conduct you find appalling, a violation of your moral code and system of values.

Nelson Mandela wrote that the challenge for every prisoner is “how to survive prison intact, how to emerge from prison undiminished, how to conserve and even replenish one’s beliefs.”

We wanted the other prisoners to see that our struggle for dignity was more important than our own safety and our own freedom and our own lives. We had to be strong so the prison administration could not break us.

I knew that my life was the result of a conscious choice I made every minute of the day. A choice to make myself better. A choice to make things better for others. I made a choice not to break. I made a choice to change my environment.

There is no oversight of prosecutorial conduct in this country, even though reckless and irresponsible actions by prosecutors, who are out not for justice or truth but only for their own careers and to win, have enormous lifelong consequences on people’s lives that can never be undone.

It hurt me to see organizers of Black Lives Matter painted as being racists. It hurt me to see black people needing to state the obvious: that we mattered. I thought of the black sanitation workers who went on strike in Memphis in 1968; black workers wore placards that read I AM A MAN. Fifty years later, and the humanity of a black person is still in dispute?

Under capitalism there is division in labor and division among the workers themselves because they are taught to look out for the individual and not for their fellow workers.

“Mr. Woodfox has remained in the extraordinary conditions of solitary confinement for approximately forty years now, and yet today there is no valid conviction holding him in prison, let alone solitary confinement.

Can we shift the focus of our insecurities, fears, and anger from other races and work together to deal with the unfair distribution of wealth on this planet?

Huey Newton wrote, “Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”

The legal definition of “slavery” is “the state of one person being forced to work under the control of another.” The U.S. prisons are contracted by a range of government entities and private corporations to make their products.

When the goal of a prison is to make a profit, human beings suffer. Corners are cut; rules are devised to keep people in prison longer; there is no incentive to rehabilitate prisoners.

RAND research has shown that every dollar invested in correctional education creates a return of four to five dollars in the reduction of future criminal justice costs.