Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement

by Albert Woodfox

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.

1

I was born in the “Negro” wing of Charity Hospital in New Orleans, the day after Mardi Gras, February 19, 1947.

Note

Outside there was poverty but inside our house my mom created an oasis for us. She always made enough money to buy us clothes, put food on the table, and pay Aunt Gussie rent. She cared a lot about making sure we had clothes that fit.

“Hey, he was throwing the beads to me.” I told her I wanted to give them to my mom. She looked at the man on the float, who was still pointing at me, then she ripped the beads apart and called me nigger. The pain I felt from that young white girl calling me nigger will be with me forever.

Early pain

that same social studies class I was taught that women like my mom, who worked in bars, were considered a disgrace to society. I had always detested the men my mom brought home but until I took this class I never judged her, it was just a way of life. I began to look down on her. I didn’t realize at that time that my mom didn’t have choices, that she worked in bars to take care of me and my brothers, and I was unforgiving. Deep down I never stopped loving my mom. But I hated her too. One of the greatest regrets of my life is that I allowed myself to believe that the strongest, most beautiful, and most powerful woman in my life didn’t matter.

ran, and were chased, even when we weren’t doing anything wrong. I got really good at jumping fences while being chased by police. If they caught us for any real or imagined crime they beat us with their fists and nightsticks or blackjacks, which we called flapjacks because they made a flapping sound when they hit us. They searched us looking for any money we had, pocketing what they found. For a while they let us go; when we got older they dragged us to juvenile hall. It never occurred to us to tell anyone they beat or robbed us. It was accepted. That was just the way life was at that time.

We accepte it

All I knew about by biological dad was that he abandoned my mom when she was pregnant with me.

His descriptions of his mother are touching

This was all part of the game. He and I both knew he wasn’t going to call my mom. He wasn’t going to get my ass at school the next day, or any day. It was like we were acting out roles, set in motion before time, without knowing why. He was probably parking cars at my age. Threads like this ran throughout my childhood. History was always repeating itself. These threads held us together, and kept us apart.

Playing roles

The judge told me I had a choice: I could do four years at the Houma city jail or two years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, with an option to transfer out to the minimum-security DeQuincy jail in 90 days if I was well behaved. 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.

Prison time is to be respected?

had to seem much more confident than I felt to keep guys from trying stupid shit with me. I couldn’t look weak. I couldn’t show any fear. So I faked it.

Avoid looking weak

It’s painful to remember how violent Angola was in those days. I don’t like to go into it.

I suspect prison is currently less violent

Having learned absolutely nothing in prison except how to become a better predator I picked up where I left off when I got home.

The pointlessness of prison

In prison, you never talk about your charge but you talk about everything else. Multiple times. Multiple ways. Multiple versions. What you (supposedly) did, what someone did to you, what you will do when you get out.

I wonder if this is still true

Writing about this time in my life is very difficult. I robbed people, scared them, threatened them, intimidated them. I stole from people who had almost nothing. My people. Black people. I broke into their homes and took possessions they worked hard for; took their wallets out of their pockets. I beat people up. I was a chauvinist pig. I took advantage of people, manipulated people. I never thought about the pain I caused. I never felt the fear or despair people had around me. When I look back on that time I see that the only real human connection I had in those years came from my visits with my mom and those hours I spent at her house and around my family, but at the time I didn’t think of it like that. Her house was nothing more than a rest stop for me. I only thought of myself.

I only thought of myself

Even the roughest, most hardened person usually responds when you see the dignity and humanity in him and ask him to see it for himself. “The guards will retaliate,” we said, “but we will always face that together.”

Note

Our victories were few, but each victory made up for the losses before it. It was an adrenaline rush to win. We had to deal with some prisoners who suddenly wanted to shake their bars about everything. They’d say, “Man, his cinnamon roll is bigger than mine” or “I only got one piece of bread and he got two.” I had to talk to those prisoners and make them understand that not every problem meant you have to go through the most extreme form of protest to get it resolved. Sometimes you can do other things. If a man got gassed, even if it was just pepper spray in his cell, it affected the whole tier because the gas would spread. There is no such thing as gassing one prisoner; whenever they gassed anyone we all felt it. Herman and I were only on the same tier in CCR for about a month when a freeman showed up at my cell door and told me to pack.

In adjusting to day-to-day life in the cell as the months and years passed, every aspect of survival was a battle. Being able to read in that environment, with the noise. Recognizing the signs of when a prisoner was going to act out, when I would need to defend myself or stop something from happening before it happened. Doing calisthenics every day within the confines of the cell. I became living proof that we can survive the worst to change ourselves and our world, no matter where we are. Behind our resistance on the tiers, Herman, King, and I knew that only education would save us. It still amazes me that the three of us came to the same conclusion sitting in our cells on different tiers. 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.

At first, we held our trays through the bars with one hand and fed ourselves with the other hand, then King had the idea to make slings from strips of T-shirt or other fabric that we could hang from our bars and rest our trays on while we ate. Someone put cardboard in his sling to make a little shelf and then we all did that. Some guys elaborately decorated their cardboard.

Strange eating practices as punishment

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. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of.

My proudest achievement in all my years in solitary was teaching a man how to read. His name was Charles. We called him Goldy because his mouth was full of gold teeth. He was a few cells down from me on D tier. I could tell he couldn’t read but was trying to hide it. I knew the signs because my mom did the same things to hide the fact she couldn’t read. One day I told him about my mom, about her accomplishments. I told him she couldn’t read or write and asked him if he could. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” I said. He told me he never learned to read because he didn’t go to school. “When I was coming up we didn’t have nothing,” he said. “We had to go and get it.” “If you want to learn,” I told him, “I can teach you, but it won’t work unless you really want to learn.” He told me he wanted to learn.

The first time I heard Goldy read a sentence out of a book I told him how proud I was of all he’d learned. He thanked me and I told him to thank himself. “Ninety-nine percent of your success was because you really wanted to read,” I said. Within a year he was reading at a high school level. The world was now open to him.

In addition, the strip search at Angola always happened with several security people present. Some of the freemen made derogatory, crude, and humiliating remarks during strip searches, commenting about your anus and the size and shape of your genitalia. It was a punishment I could not endure anymore.

They turned off the water in the sink for days at a time, so I was forced to drink water from the toilet. This was one of the most humiliating acts I ever endured while in solitary confinement. It taught me how strong my desire to survive was. I got so I could sit in one spot in the cell and feel the physical limitations of it yet know that my mind and emotions were unlimited. I knew I was unlimited.

All of us in CCR were dealing with strong, powerful emotions all the time, maybe the strongest that exist: the fear of losing control over yourself, the fear of losing your mind. Every day is the same. The only thing that changes is whatever change you can construct on your own. The only way you can survive in these cells is by adapting to the painfulness. The pressure of the cell changed most men. Some got depressed and went into themselves, isolated themselves, never speaking, never leaving their cells. Others talked constantly, were confused, irrational. When I saw that a man was about to break I’d talk to him, try to help him through it. I could feel what he was going through, even though I wasn’t going through it at that moment, because I’d experienced it myself. I made a strong effort to distract him. I occupied the headspace he was in so he wasn’t alone. It didn’t always work. I’d see men who’d lived for years with high moral principles and values suddenly become destructive, chaotic.

Some guards looked the other way when a rule was broken as long as there were no security risks. If something was wrong in your cell they give you a chance to straighten it out. Other guards took great pleasure in threatening you with a write-up. They’d walk by your cell and point toward you and say, “I got you.” Their intimidation didn’t work for a lot of us.

How the rules are enforced entrely at the discretion of individual staff

A lot of prisoners helped us for nothing because they’d heard about us and respected us.

My favorite time of day was two or three in the morning. Everybody was usually asleep. There was no one on the tier out on his hour. The TV volume was low. It was relatively peaceful and quiet. I could concentrate and focus. I liked to read during this time, or think. It was my time to deal with the pressure of being confined in a six-by-nine cell for 23 hours a day, to deal with my emotions and the thoughts deep inside me. I looked back on things that happened during the day and how I’d reacted. I might think about it and ask myself why I did this or why I did that. I almost always acted based on my gut instinct. Later, I found that usually my first instinct was right. I thought about what I saw on the news during

If a prisoner had a life-or-death problem usually the whole tier had to take action. We’d shake the bars and holler until someone came.

Severe limits on medical care

A lot of prisoners would argue with the guards, then they’d be written up for “defiance” or “threatening an officer” and be taken to the dungeon. I had learned not to let them provoke me to that point. The only time I spoke was when they started reading my legal mail. I’d say, “You can’t read my legal mail, you know that.” I never showed any emotion on my face. Killing them, beating them up, spitting on them, cussing them out—all of that was going through my mind. If, in that moment, any of us could have gotten our hands on them without restraints, there is no telling what might have happened.

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.” He wrote about how being kept with his comrades on Robben Island helped him survive. “For together our determination was reinforced,” he wrote. “We supported each other and gained strength from each other.” So it was for me, Herman, and King. We supported each other and gained strength from one another. Whenever I thought I could not take another step for myself, I found the strength to take that step for Herman and King. We had to be strong so we could keep our minds and spirits free while being locked up 23 hours a day. We had to be strong so we could show other prisoners that in the fight against oppression, there is no letting up, no backing down. 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 loved and cherished their friendship. I didn’t know how so much loyalty and devotion could exist between three men. We had been through so much brutality, so much pain and suffering that we had every right to be hard, bitter, and hateful toward almost everyone and everything in life. But instead, we did not allow prison to shape us. We defined ourselves.

Hilton Butler, the former captain who had gassed us repeatedly in the seventies, was the warden of Angola at that time. He was now forced to grant us contact visits. CCR had never had them before; now CCR prisoners were allowed to have one contact visit a month. The contact visit was completely different from sitting behind a steel mesh screen. We were taken to an open room with tables and chairs. They removed our handcuffs and leg irons. My first contact visit in 15 years was around Christmas that year. My mom came with my brother Michael, my sister Violetta, and her oldest daughter, Nelyauna. There was no natural flow at first. I didn’t feel comfortable. I had forgotten what it felt like to be physically close to people. I was used to talking with the partition between us. There was no hugging with the screen between you and a visitor. You couldn’t even really see the eyes of the person across from you clearly. It was a strain for me to stay within the flow of my first contact visit. When my mom put her hand on my leg it brought back a flood of memories. I became a kid again. I had to fight off crying. When they were getting ready to leave I had an intense wave of longing that went through me, a desire to leave with them. Everyone started to hug me and I didn’t know what to do. I’d always been able to kiss my mom through the screen, touch fingers with Michael and everybody, but hugging, for the first time in 15 years, was totally foreign to me. (Later, King would say he ...

“If there is no struggle there is no progress,” Frederick Douglass wrote. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power cedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Malcolm X wrote, “Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.”

By age 40 I had learned that to be human is to grow, to create, to contribute, and that fear stops growth. Fear retards the process of growing. Fear causes confusion and uncertainty. Fear kills one’s sense of self-worth. By eradicating fear on the tier, I learned that men can deal with each other better. They can get along. I wondered if in society, we could build a world in which we do not fear one another.

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.

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 the key for that what sometimes seem impossible in life.

Change meant growth. Now I was being asked to change again, to let my guard down. It always surprised me when I was asked for advice. “Instead of showing you how to build courage,” I wrote in response to someone asking me how to be brave, “I write to you to pay tribute to and salute your courage. I embrace your courage. I lie down every night loving your courage. When I am in need of purpose or focus I thank your courage. Courage is not an ongoing thing that you walk around feeling every day. Like anything in life, it comes and goes with the challenges we meet every day of our lives!”

Most guys only talked about what was going on in prison; they couldn’t see any further. King and I had wide-ranging conversations about philosophy and life, our political beliefs, world events, books we’d read, Supreme Court rulings, presidential elections, sports. We knew each other’s weaknesses and strengths, our habits and ways. When he got to my cell door we hugged through the bars.

know the question people will ask when they hear I’ve taken up the cause of the Angola Three: Why me, why now, why 12,000 [miles] around the world to a remote prison to take up this case? And I am reminded of a quote I read on the wall of an Indian bank years ago. It was Gandhi who said, “Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.” Albert Woodfox is not weak, by any means. But he, like his compatriots Herman Wallace and Robert [King], is worth my efforts and the efforts of all who believe that you must fight injustice where you find it.

didn’t expect anything more. I knew from experience the judicial system is not concerned with innocence or justice. (The state had already recognized I had a meritorious grand jury discrimination claim filed in 1973 but chose to ignore it.) An innocent man could be hanged and the court system would only rule on what kind of rope was used for the hanging. In legal terms this is called “due process.” But

With this psychologist, I answered questions without digging into my personal feelings. By the end of the second interview, though, I was getting irritated at his line of questioning and his constant insinuation that because I could have books in my cell and I could exercise outside three times a week for an hour, year after year of being locked down 23 hours a day was tolerable for a human being and was somehow acceptable. At the end of my second interview with him he asked me if there was anything I wanted to ask him. “Do you think that watching TV and being able to buy candy in the canteen makes a difference to somebody held for almost 40 years in maximum-security isolation?” I asked. He didn’t respond. “Do you think being able to make phone calls alleviates the pain of sitting in a cell 23 hours a day, year after year? It doesn’t,” I told him. “If you can’t get out of the cell nothing they give you makes a difference. The pressure of being in the cell never goes away. The fight for sanity never goes away. You want me to believe that I’m OK when you know I’m not OK. I can’t give you specifics on how being in solitary has affected me but I can tell you without a doubt it has affected me.”

We had to make several requests to get a wheelchair for an inmate who weighed over 400 pounds and had difficulty walking. He couldn’t make it to and from the dining hall in the allotted time. First, we asked if we could bring him a tray of food so he wouldn’t miss his meals, and when authorities denied that we asked for a wheelchair. Eventually we got the wheelchair and took turns pushing him to the dining hall.

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.

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.

“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.”

Some sergeants and guards didn’t do the strip searches; they didn’t have the taste for it. Others acted as if it was their greatest pleasure to humiliate somebody. There were days when I was strip-searched as many six times, before and after I left my cell, even when I was only leaving my cell to walk to the guard booth—escorted and always within sight of at least one guard—to take a phone call from my lawyer. Having to bend over so a security officer can look at your anus gives you a terrible sense of being violated. It’s one of the most humiliating things that can be done to you. Even the courts recognized this. As the ruling on my original suit stated, “Visual body cavity searches were a humiliating procedure” and “should only be used rarely.” Some days I didn’t leave my cell at all, to avoid being strip-searched.

“Defendants now strip search Plaintiff Woodfox and inspect his anus … even though he is shackled in wrist, ankle and waist chains when outside of his cell; is under constant observation or escort; and typically has no contact with individuals other than correctional personnel. Defendants continue this practice despite the fact that they are on notice that these strip searches are unlawful and previously agreed via consent agreement not to conduct such strip searches.”

We gathered around Herman in his hospital bed before telling him. He was curled up in a ball and extremely weak. He had stopped taking food and fluids days before. I sat on one side of his hospital bed and could just reach him with my hands in the box. I put my hands on his arm. King sat opposite me on the other side of him. At first, when Carine told him that habeas relief had been granted, Herman thought she said I was the one who had won. He smiled and pointed to me, nodding his head. When we clarified that his conviction had been overturned, it took a moment for him to process. “Herman, this is your case,” Carine said. He looked at her and said, “My conviction?” It was extremely difficult for Herman to speak. Struggling, he said, “If he only knew,” pausing. “If Judge Jackson only knew what it was like in that cell,” he said. Carine

Herman had a dream once about leaving Angola. He described it in the film Herman’s House. “I get to the front gate,” he says, “and there’s a whole lot of people out there and, you ain’t going to believe this but”—Herman laughed—”I was dancing my way out. I was doing the jitterbug. And I was doing all kinds of crazy stupid-ass shit, you know. And people were just laughing and clapping until I walked out that gate. And … I look and there are all the brothers in the window waving and throwing a fist sign, you know.” Carine

Back in my cell, I was feeling out of balance. It was December. Most years run into the next when you are locked down 23 hours a day. A few years stand out for being worse than others. The year my mom died. The year I lost my sister. That year, 2013, was one of those years. Herman was gone. The degrading strip searches continued. I was being slandered in the press by the attorney general’s office—again. The state of Louisiana, which had already spent millions of dollars to defend my wrongful conviction and to keep me in prison, was now expending considerable resources to fight to restore my conviction—again. I was reminded of a valuable lesson I’d learned, and relearned, many times before. Whenever you don’t think you can take another step, the human spirit keeps going, even when you don’t want to.