is easily one of the best prison memoirs Ive ever read, This story is just infuriating, The writing is super strong and the conviction with which Woodfox tells his story is hard to comprehend given all he went through.
This stark prison memoir is painful to read, Basically, the author was framed for a murder while doing hard time in the supermax Angola prison in Louisiana for a lesser crime.
His new sentence was to serve life and thus begins his long travail to finding peace and justice, The memoir demonstrates how the practice of solitary confinement is "cruel and unusual punishment, " If you want to learn more about the black man's struggles in the U, S. prison system, Solitary is a good place to start, In beautifully poetic language that starkly contrasts the world he's describing, Woodfox awes and inspires, He illustrates the power of the human spirit, while illuminating the dire need for prison reform in the United States, Solitary is a brilliant blend of passion, terror and hope that everyone needs to experience,
Shelf Awareness starred review
A profound book about friendship told simply but not terselyIf the ending of this book does not leave you with tears pooling down in your clavicles, you are a stronger person than I am.
New York Times
A book that is wrenching Woodfoxs story makes for uncomfortable reading, which is as it should be.
Solitary should make every reader writhe with shame and ask: What am I going to do to help change this
Washington Post A real life horror story.
A man spendsyears in solitary for a crime he did not commit, mostly in the ex slave plantation of Angola prison in Louisiana.
I liken the U. S. penal system to tide pods, A concentration of the blatant racism, wage slavery, predatory capitalism, and the police state that exists in our larger society, That a man decided to protest his innocence, keep his dignity, help his fellow inmates ward off rape and mistreatment, could not go unpunished by prison authorities.
Incredibly, the Angola prison farm was run by the same family that owned it when it was a legal slave plantation, They ran it as if emancipation was but a small technicality, That family was finally ousted after Federal intervention, Albert Woodfox was a member of the first prison based chapter of the Black Panthers, For this crime he spent the majority of his life behind bars under going various levels of torture, That he did not succumb to insanity is something I cannot fathom, His humanity and the inhumanity of his torturers and the prison system is laid bare, The business of prisons is booming, That tRump reversed the Obama order to get the Federal government out of the business of modern slavery after onlyweeks in office, tells us of the power and monies at stake in this business.
If there is any desire to end the very worst of American society, then prison reform, abolishment of solitary confinement, and punishment for racist police tactics must be foremost in our agendas.
Read this horror story and become very very angry, Then join the fight. This is the story of the Angola, who spent decades in solitary confinement in a slave plantationturnedprison in Louisiana,
Beneath the word SOLITARY, I see the word SOLIDARITY, Solidarity between the three men who were moved by the black panther party in the late sixties to change their lives and the lives of those around them.
Solidarity in the struggle for survival and human rights against all odds, solidarity between these prisoners and their supporters on the outside who number in the hundreds of thousands.
This is companion reading to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow or Patrisse KhanCullors's When They Call You a Terrorist or any number of expository works about our American injustice machine and the lives it destroys.
There is no excuse for not knowing that the penal system doesn't rehabilitate people, and that justice is an actual impossibility in our justice system.
Our prison system is cruel and inhumane, This book is one of the best prison memoirs I've ever read exempting Mandela and Assata, Woodfox's book is not just about his experiences, but it is about the system in general and how it tried to diminish his dignity.
He reclaimed it by joining the Black Panthers and organizing his prison to fight rape and other degrading things that the guards allowed.
This book made me really depressed that we do this to other humans, Everyone should read this story, Incredible,moving, painful, heartbreaking, uplifting, eyeopening, and powerful all in one, It deserves more than five, When Albert Woodfox was incarcerated and sentenced to quite a stretch in jail, he didn't know what to think, really he was a teenager who'd got muddled up in basic criminal teenage stuff.
One of Woodfox's great strengths is his ability to express himself straightforwardly, without mucking up a line, As here:
The first time I was called a nigger by a white person I was around, I was waiting with dozens of other kids at the end of the Mardi Gras parade behind the Municipal Auditorium where the people on the floats, who were all white in those days, gave away whatever beads and trinkets they had left.
On one of the floats the man tossing the trinkets was holding a real beautiful strand of pearlcolored beads, I thought theyd make a nice gift for my mom on her birthday, I called out to him, “Hey mister, hey mister,” and reached out my hand,
He pointed to me as he held the beads above his head and tossed them toward me, As the beads came close to me I reached up and a white girl standing next to me put her hand up and caught them at the same time I did.
I didnt let go. I gestured to the man on the float and told her, “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,
Also:
At night, we stood under a streetlight on the corner of Dumaine and Robertson and talked shit for hours, boasting about things we never did, describing girls we never knew.
It's a fair shake to a man who can describe aeons of time in a single line,
I cannot even get into the innards of what happened to Woodfox, but he does a great job at showing what went down in Angola, a big American jail, where he went in thes:
If you were raped at Angola, or what was called “turned out,” your life in prison was virtually over.
You became a “galboy,” a possession of your rapist, Youd be sold, pimped, used, and abused by your rapist and even some guards, Your only way out was to kill yourself or kill your rapist, If you killed your rapist youd be free of human bondage within the confines of the prison forever, but in exchange, youd most likely be convicted of murder, so youd have to spend the rest of your life at Angola.
Some orderlies, inmate guards, and freeman who worked at RC sold the names of young and weak new arrivals to sexual predators in the prison population.
I had to be much more confident than I felt to keep guys from trying stupid shit with me, I couldnt look weak. I couldnt show any fear, So I faked it. Luckily, I had a reputation as a fighter who never gave up, There were prisoners at Angola I had known on the street and who knew me or knew of me, Word spreads quickly in prison, Dudes gossiped and talked. Word was if you whip my ass today you have to whip it again tomorrow, You have to beat me every day for the rest of your life if necessary, That helped me a lot,
Just those two paragraphs put the fear of Bog in me,
This is quite the book to go well together with Shane Bauer's excellent exposé of the privatelyowned prisons in the USA that book is named "American Prison".
One of the greatest hardships for me the first few months I was at Angola was getting used to the sameness of every day.
The hardest job I ever had in my life was cutting sugarcane, Angolas main crop, Cutting cane was so brutal that prisoners would pay somebody to break their hands, legs, or ankles, or they would cut themselves during cane season, to get out of doing it.
There were oldtimers at Angola who made good money breaking prisoners bones so men could get out of work,
And that's just the start,
Woodfox's political being starts becoming awakened due to meeting persons who taught him of The Black Panthers, and what they wanted to teach and learn.
This changed matters inside:
We practiced martial arts together on the tier, We read aloud. We held math classes, spelling classes, We talked about what was going on in the world, Every Friday we passed out a spelling or math test, We encouraged debates and conversation, We told each man he had a say, “Stand up for yourself,” we told them, “for your own selfesteem, for your own dignity, ” 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, ”
Where the book goes slightly notgood, is where Woodfox goes deeply into his own case while I see how the details are important to him, I personally feel the book should have been edited tighter my mind had a hard time staying focused on all of the minutiae, the majority of which I will not be taking with me to my grave.
In a larger context, sure, I can see how that all pans out by showing how the government/state/prison/DAs wanted to grind Woodfox down to stop appealing for justice.
Woodfox is really paying back to reading, what reading did for him:
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 wouldnt have been allowed to get through the mail.
Books we never could have afforded to buy, Books we had never heard of, Herman, King, and I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and raceGeorge Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleavers Soul on Ice, J.
A. Rogerss From Superman to Man, We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, antiimperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world.
There's so much good in this book, I hope it gets spread everywhere, Solitary
I bought this book on the recommendation of my daughter, I can only describe my response to this book as one where I burned with cold fury throughout, Reading books like this might not be good for my blood pressure, but the price I pay to know this story is a small one compared to the price Mr.
Woodfox and the other Angolapaid as political prisoners in that socalled bastion of democracy the United States, Imagine, around the time I was reading this book about the torture of these three men I was reading an article about the U.
S. withdrawingmillion dollars in aid to Egypt over human rights abuses, The profundity of the hypocrisy of the United States is unbounded, I recommend everyone read this book,
To prepare for writing this review I spent some time and measured out an area in my house with the dimensionsfeet byfeet.
I needed to get an idea, a picture in my mind, of what was allotted to these men for overdecades, I tried to imagine that space with a bed, a commode and a sink, Then I tried to imagine spending a day in that space, I suggest you try it, Of course there was no way I could really imagine it, Even if I confined myself to that rectangle for one day and brought in a pail for waste, and took all my meals there, I wouldnt even be able to imagine what Mr.
Woodfox and the other Angolawent through,
Before reading this book I had already read a number of others involving human rights violations and immoral conduct of people in the U.
S. legal system. As Mr. Woodfox explains, “The FBI spent millions of dollars to infiltrate the Black Panther Party, create divisiveness and mistrust among its members, murder and incarcerate its leaders, hamper fundraising for community programs and lawyers, and leak false information to the press and law enforcement authorities, all to destroy the party.
to charge them with crimes they didnt commit and to keep Panthers in jail, separating them from the party and disrupting chains of leadership and communication within the organization.
”
Throughout the telling of this story three things stood out to me, One, the stark reality of life as a political prisoner in the United States, Two, that while going through life day to day we can be completely unaware of the inhumanity being visited upon our fellow human beings by the criminal legal system.
Three, the representation of the worst humanity has to offer juxtaposed against the best humanity has to offer,
At the beginning of his journey Mr, Woodfox describes many of his criminal exploits that landed him in trouble, But anyone who believed that the policing system in New Orleans, Louisiana in thes represented fairness and impartiality is not just naive, they are willing to turn a blind eye to the institutionalized racism in America at that time particularly in the South.
He explains that in his youth, “We couldnt have articulated racism if we tried, We didnt understand the depths of it, the sophistication of it, We only absorbed the misery of it, ” p. While describing a number of racist practices of law enforcement from the police, to prosecutors to judges Mr, Woodfox makes it clear that the system was stacked against Black men, Eventually, while incarcerated in New York City, he met members of the Black Panthers, learned their ten point program, and adopted a disciplined life too late to keep him out of prison.
It was while in prison that he really began to have an impact on his fellow inmates, That was when trouble really began for Mr, Woodfox because he was able to organize and teach the principles of the Black Panthers and begin to change his environment to one where everyone presented a unified front to stop rape, drug abuse and inhumane treatment by the guards.
This became a problem for the prison mafia headed by the warden, Mr. Woodfox was framed for a murder he did not commit and this was the beginning of hisyears of solitary confinement a punishment defined as torture by the United Nations.
This is his story, but he was not the only one framed for a crime he did not commit see Geronimo Pratt.
So much of his case tells exactly how he was subjected to repeated and gross injustices in the “investigation” and trial of this case.
The extent of prosecutorial misconduct repeatedly over the entireyears of his struggle is grotesque, The fact that no one ever paid the price for that misconduct is another common feature of the criminal legal system, In addition, the extent of the FBI and the other policing organizations' ability and determination to imprison Black Panthers on false charges, or outright assassinate them, makes it clear that these men were indeed political prisoners.
To quote one of my favorite authors: “, we must make it impossible for those in power to pretend that they do not know the costs and consequences of what they do.
” Arundathi Roy in My Seditious Heart, There are a number of consequences of holding political prisoners, While the list is long, two of those are:the First Amendment of the U, S. Constitution is shown to be inapplicable to anyone who disagrees with gross violations of human rights andthe United States government has demonstrated that it is unashamedly hypocritical.
But those in power do know the human costs, the political costs and the costs in their own reputation by torturing its own citizens.
Mr. Woodfoxs case is just one example of many, If you allow the government to act as though there are “throw away people” among its citizenry you allow it to start down the road to fascism.
Reading this book will show you just how far along the
U, S. is on that road.
As I was reading the account of the Angola Three I was conscious of the dates throughout because I kept thinking how oblivious I was about what was happening.
While I was going to high school, Albert Woodfox was in solitary confinement, While I was going to college he was in solitary confinement, When I joined the Peace Corps, got married, raised children and my children went to college he was in solitary confinement, It is not just that he was in prison all that time solitary confinement was worse, What happened to him is far worse than injustice,
If that wasnt disturbing enough there was one point during his incarceration that he was subjected to illegal strip searches and body cavity searches, repeatedly throughout the day sometimes several times a day.
During this period, every time he left his cell, he was strip and cavity searched even though he was on complete lock down.
When he filed a lawsuit to stop the illegal searches he was victimized even further, In fact, every time he stood up for the rights of inmates, whether through a petition of grievances or through a lawsuit, he and the others who joined him were victimized.
Imagine the character required to know that filing a suit will result in even worse circumstances than one is enduring but for the sake of justice you file it anyway.
And then, the people in charge of the prison a link in the socalled “justice” system who knew they were breaking the law punish you for seeking justice.
During the day to day course of my life this was happening to my fellow human beings in the United States, I was oblivious.
What no person should have to endure Albert Woodfox endured, He has the dubious distinction of holding the record for solitary confinement in the U, S. almostyears. Yet through it all he never lost his fighting spirit, he built friendships, he advocated for others, he continued to seek justice.
He continued to seek justice long after it was clear that the system which tried and convicted him for a crime he did not commit had no concept whatsoever of the meaning of justice.
Upon his release he did not relax, He continued his advocacy for the abolition of solitary confinement, He met with and thanked, personally, many people who advocated for his freedom including the widow of the man he was wrongfully convicted of murdering in.
He truly aimed to be the best possible person in the face of the most egregious of systemic torture, While in solitary confinement each prisoner would come up for a periodic review, If you passed the review you were released, Over decades Mr. Woodfox witnessed many others come into the solitary confinement unit and be released, When he would go to the review board he was asked no questions, his records were not examined or considered and at times his denial of release was signed even before he appeared before the board.
He stopped going so he could use his time for better things like advocacy for other inmates because it became clear the prison officials had no intention of ending his confinement forhours a day and sometimes more.
Imagine, after all of that he could still look at his time in solitary and say, “Every day you start over, You look for the humanity in each individual, ”He concludes his story by saying, “Their main objective was to break my spirit, They did not break me, I have witnessed the horrors of mans cruelty to man, I did not lose my humanity, I bear the scars of beatings, loneliness, isolation, and persecution, I am also marked by every kindness, ”
Contrast Mr. Woodfox with the worst representatives of humanity, For example, he explained, “I was arrested for one chargearmed robberybut when the police arrested me they charged me with every unsolved robbery, theft, and rape charge they had.
We called that cleaning the books, It was a common practice by the police then and is now, Everybody knew about it. To the police it didnt matter if the DA was able to prosecute the charge or not, The police just wanted to wipe their books clean, The DAs office didnt mind they could use the additional charges to intimidate guys and pressure them to take plea deals instead of going to trial.
Innocent men took plea deals all the time and went to prison versus lying around in the parish jail for two or more years waiting for a trial.
”This and many other unjust practices were part and parcel of the socalled “justice” system he was placed in,
The people in the criminal legal system, knowing him to be innocent, framed him, brought unreliable witnesses to testify one “eyewitness” was proven to be legally blind, failed to investigate the crime, hid or “lost” evidence which would have cast doubt on his guilt, prosecutors failed to reveal the payments made to “eyewitnesses” for their testimony.
The prison officials, prosecutors, elected officials and trial judges engaged in repeated violations of Alfred Woodfoxs human, civil and constitutional rights, For all of their collective heinous conduct not one of them faced any consequences,
In fact everything that was done happened because Mr, Woodfox dared to stand up holding theprinciples of the Black Panthers and say, “You must treat me as a man, and my brethren as men.
” This is how White Supremacy works in the United States, For daring to insist on being treated humanely and with the same rights as any other citizen every weapon the system has is turned against you.
As James Baldwin said, “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, ”
If only things had changed since Mr, Woodfox went through these years of torture, but they have not, He says, “We need to admit to, confront, and change the racism in the American justice system that decides who is stopped by police, who is arrested, who is searched, who is charged, who is prosecuted, and who isnt, as well as look at who receives longer sentences and why and demand a fair and equal system.
Racism in police departments and in courtrooms is not a secret, Its been proved. Racism occurs at every level of the judicial process, from people of color being disproportionately stopped by police racial profiling to their being sentenced.
” Still. We still need to be doing this,
"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.
"Frederick Douglass
.