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<font face="Verdana" size=2>June 10, 2008<br>
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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/flaherty06102008.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/flaherty06102008.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b><i>Inside Angola
Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation <br><br>
</i></font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
<b>Organizing for Freedom
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JORDAN
FLAHERTY <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">A</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>t the heart of Louisiana’s prison system sits
the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, a former slave plantation where
little has changed in the last several hundred years. Angola has been
made notorious from books and films such as <i>Dead Man Walking</i> and
<i>The Farm: Life at Angola</i>, as well as its legendary bi-annual
prison rodeo and <i>The Angolite</i>, a prisoner-written magazine
published within its walls. Visitors are often overwhelmed by its size –
18,000 acres that include a golf course (for use by prison staff and some
guests), a radio station, and a massive farming operation that ranges
from staples like soybeans and wheat to traditional Southern plantation
crops like cotton.<br><br>
Recent congressional attention has again brought Angola into the media
limelight. The focus this time is on the prison’s practice of keeping
some inmates in solitary confinement for decades, especially two of
Angola’s most well-known residents – Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox.
Woodfox and Wallace are the remaining members of the Angola Three,
political activists widely seen as having been interned in solitary
confinement as punishment for their political activism.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Modern
plantation</b> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Norris Henderson, co-director of Safe
Streets/Strong Communities, a grassroots criminal justice organization in
New Orleans, spent twenty years at Angola – a relatively short time in a
prison where 85 percent of its 5,100 prisoners are expected to die behind
its walls. “Six hundred folks been there over 25 years,” he explains.
“Lots of these guys been there over 35 years. Think about that: a
population that’s been there since the 1970s. Once you’re in this place,
it’s almost like you ain’t going nowhere, that barring some miracle,
you’re going to die there.” <br>
Prisoners at Angola still do the same work that enslaved Africans did
there when it was a slave plantation. “Angola is a plantation,” Henderson
explains. “Eighteen-thousand acres of choice farmland. Even to this day,
you could have machinery that can do all that work, but you still have
prisoners doing it instead.” Not only do prisoners at Angola toil at the
same work as enslaved Africans hundreds of years ago, but many of the
white guards come from families that have lived on the grounds since the
plantation days.<br><br>
Nathaniel Anderson, a current inmate at Angola who has served nearly
thirty years of a lifetime sentence, agrees. “People on the outside
should know that Angola is still a plantation with every type and kind of
slave conceivable,” he says. <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Prison
organizing</b> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>In 1971, the Black Panther Party was
seen as a threat to this country’s power structure – not only in the
inner cities, but even in the prisons. At Orleans Parish Prison, the New
Orleans city jail, the entire jail population refused to cooperate for
one day in solidarity with New Orleans Panthers who were on trial. “I was
in the jail at the time of their trial,” Henderson tells me. “The power
that came from those guys in the jail, the camaraderie…Word went out
through the jail, because no one thought the Panthers were going to get a
fair trial. We decided to do something. We said, ‘The least we can do is
to say the day they are going to court, no one is going to court.’”
<br><br>
The action was successful, and inspired prisoners to do more. “People saw
what happened and said, ‘We shut down the whole system that day,’” he
remembers. “That taught the guys that if we stick together we can
accomplish a whole lot of things.”<br><br>
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were inmates who had recently become
members of the Black Panther Party, and as activists, they were seen as
threats to the established order of the prison. They were organizing
among the other prisoners, conducting political education, and mobilizing
for civil disobedience to improve conditions. <br><br>
Robert King Wilkerson, like many inmates, joined the Black Panther Party
while already imprisoned at Orleans Parish Prison. He was transferred to
Angola, and immediately placed in solitary confinement (known at Angola
as Closed Cell Restriction or CCR) – confined alone in his cell with no
human contact for 23 hours a day. He later found out he had been
transferred to solitary because he was accused of an attack he could not
have committed – it had happened at Angola before he had been moved
there. <br><br>
In March of 1972, not long after they began organizing for reform from
within Angola, Wallace and Woodfox were accused of killing a correctional
officer. They were also moved to solitary, where they remained for nearly
36 years, until March of this year, when they were moved out four days
after a congressional delegation led by Congressman John Conyers arranged
a visit to the prison. Legal experts have said this is the longest time
anyone in the US has spent in solitary. Amnesty International recently
declared, “the prisoners' prolonged isolation breached international
treaties which the US has ratified, including the <i>International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights</i> and the <i>Convention against
Torture</i>.”<br><br>
Wilkerson, Wallace, and Woodfox became known internationally as the
Angola Three – Black Panthers held in solitary confinement because of
their political activism. Wilkerson remained in solitary for nearly 29
years, until he was exonerated and released from prison in 2001. Since
his release, Wilkerson has been a tireless advocate for his friends still
incarcerated. “I’m free of Angola,” he often says, “but Angola will never
be free of me.”<br><br>
This history of struggle and resistance brings a special urgency to the
case of the Angola Three. Kgalema Motlante, a leader of the African
National Congress, said in 2003 that the case of the Angola Three “has
the potential of laying bare, exposing the shortcomings, in the entire US
system.”<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Purchasing
testimony</b> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Wallace and Woodfox have the facts on
their side. Bloody fingerprints at the scene of the crime do not match
their prints. Witnesses against them have recanted, while witnesses with
nothing to gain have testified that they were nowhere near the crime.
There is evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, such as purchasing inmate
testimony and not disclosing it to the defense. Even the widow of the
slain guard has spoken out on their behalf. Most recently, their case has
received attention from Representative Conyers, head of the House
Judiciary Committee, and Cedric Richmond, chair of the Louisiana House
Judiciary Committee, who has scheduled hearings on the issue to begin
this month.<br><br>
But this is more than the story of innocent men railroaded by a system.
The story of the Panthers at Angola is both inspiring and shocking. It is
a struggle for justice while in the hardest of situations.<br><br>
“They swam against the current in Blood Alley,” says Nathaniel Anderson,
a current inmate at Angola who has been inspired by Wallace and Woodfox’s
legacy. “For men to actually have the audacity to organize for the
protection of young brothers who were being victimized ruthlessly was an
extreme act of rebellion.”<br><br>
Like many prisoners during that time, Norris Henderson was introduced to
organizing by Black Panthers in prison, and later became a leader of
prison activism during his time at Angola. The efforts of Wilkerson,
Woodfox, Wallace, and other Panthers in prison were vital to bringing
improvements in conditions, stopping sexual assault, and building
alliances among different groups of prisoners. “They were part of the
Panther Movement,” Henderson tells me. “This was at the height of the
Black power movement, we were understanding that we all got each other.
In the night-time there would be open talk, guys in the jail talking,
giving history lessons, discussing why we find ourselves in the situation
we find ourselves. They started educating folks around how we could treat
each other. The Nation of Islam was growing in the prison at the same
time. You had these different folk bringing knowledge. You had folks who
were hustlers that then were listening and learning. Everybody was coming
into consciousness.”<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Insatiable
machine</b> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>The US has the largest incarcerated
population in the world – twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners
are here. If Louisiana, which has the largest percentage imprisoned of
any US state, were a country, it would have by far the world’s largest
percentage of its population locked up, at one out of every 45 people.
Nationwide, more than seven million people are in US jails, on probation,
or on parole, and African Americans are incarcerated at nearly ten times
the rate of whites. Our criminal justice system has become an insatiable
machine – even when crime rates go down, the prison population keeps
rising.<br><br>
The efforts of the Angola Three and other politically conscious prisoners
represented a fundamental challenge to this system. The organizing of
Wallace, Woodfox, and Wilkerson, though cut short by their move to
solitary, had an effect that continues to this day. <br><br>
Prison activism, and outside support for activists behind bars, can be
tremendously powerful, says Henderson. “In the early 1970s people started
realizing we’re all in this situation together. First, at Angola, we
pushed for a reform to get a law library. That was one of the first
conditions to change. Then, we got the library; guys became aware of what
their rights were. We started to push to improve the quality of food, and
to get better medical care. Once they started pushing the envelope, a
whole bunch of things started to change. Angola was real violent then,
you had inmate violence and rape. The people running the prison system
benefit from people being ignorant. But we educated ourselves.
Eventually, you had guys in prison proposing legislation.”<br><br>
This was a time of reforms and grassroots struggles happening in prisons
across the US. Uprisings such as the Attica Rebellion were resulting in
real change. Today, many of the gains from those victories have been
overturned, and prisoners have even less recourse to change than ever
before. “Another major difference,” Henderson explains, is that “you had
federal oversight over the prisons at that time, someone you could
complain to, and say my rights are being violated. Today, we’ve lost that
right.”<br><br>
Working for criminal justice is work that benefits us all, says
Henderson. “Most folks in prison are going to come out of prison,” he
states. “We should invest in the quality of that person. We should start
investing in the redemption of people.”<br><br>
After decades of efforts by their lawyers and by activists, Wallace and
Woodfox have been released from solitary, but the struggle
continues. Wallace and Woodfox remain behind bars, punished for
standing up against a system that has grown even larger and more deadly.
And the abuse does not end there. “There are hundreds more guys who have
been in [solitary] a long time too,” Henderson adds. “This is like the
first step in a thousand-mile journey.”<br><br>
<b>Jordan Flaherty</b> is an editor of
<a href="http://www.leftturn.org">Left Turn Magazine</a>, and a
journalist based in New Orleans. Most recently, his writing can be
seen in the anthology
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904859844/counterpunchmaga">
Red State Rebels</a>, released this month by AK Press. He can be
reached at
<a href="mailto:neworleans@leftturn.org">neworleans@leftturn.org</a>.<br>
<br>
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