Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement

by Albert Woodfox

Mentally ill prisoners got no help at Angola. For many years, over the late 1990s and 2000s, CCR was housed within TU. We shared a dungeon and I would see guards gas the mentally ill prisoners being held there because they wouldn’t stop screaming or beating on bars.

Haney’s research shows that only 15 days in solitary confinement can create anxiety, withdrawal, irritability, hallucinations, aggression, paranoia, rage, loss of control, a sense of impending emotional breakdown, hypersensitivity, self-mutilation, and thoughts of suicide.

Maybe his murder always felt unresolved for her. In the year after Miller’s death, Rogers sought damages from the state since her husband had lost his life at his workplace. The state responded by maligning Miller, saying it was his fault he got killed because he should have been in the guard booth, not in a prisoner dorm.

Outside the courtroom, Buddy Caldwell painted me as a monster. He told the press I was a convicted rapist and a serial sex offender—all lies.

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.

A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.”

The letter called for an investigation of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections for its “abysmal history of protecting the rights of its prisoners,” of which the “tragic story of the Angola 3 is a case in point.”

We mourn for the family of Brent Miller and the many other victims of murder who will never be able to find closure for the loss of their loved ones due to the unjust criminal justice system in this country. We mourn for the loss of the families of those unjustly accused who suffer the loss of their loved ones as well.

Capitalism can’t be “fixed” or made to be fair or just; it must be destroyed. The very nature of a capitalistic economy prevents unity and fosters class struggle.

In the eight years he was in office, this self-serving demagogue acted as if he was obsessed with finding justice for Brent Miller, and yet he refused to test the bloody fingerprint left at the scene of Brent Miller’s killing against the fingerprints of all the prisoners on the walk that morning.

Louisiana and Oregon are the only two states in America where defendants can be convicted by fewer than 12 jurors, a system created to marginalize the votes of black jurors when courts were first required by law to allow blacks on juries.

Back in the seventies 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 cost to these human beings who can’t make bail cannot be calculated: people lose their jobs; their children are taken by social services.

It’s legal slavery to exploit prisoners in this way. Under the 13th Amendment prisoners are slaves of the state and are treated as such.

Private prisons—prisons run by corporations in order to make a profit, are dangerous. 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.

In his autobiography, From the Bottom of the Heap, King wrote, “My soul still cries from all that I witnessed and endured. It mourns continuously.” The agony and pain from all we saw and experienced will never leave us, it will always be part of us.