<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div id="container" class="container font-size5">
<div style="display: block;" id="reader-header" class="header"> <b><font
size="-2"><a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/29/albert-woodfox-43-years-solitary-confinement-wish-i-was-back"
id="reader-domain" class="domain"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/29/albert-woodfox-43-years-solitary-confinement-wish-i-was-back">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/29/albert-woodfox-43-years-solitary-confinement-wish-i-was-back</a></a></font></b>
<h1 id="reader-title">43 years in solitary: 'There are moments I
wish I was back there'</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Ed Pilkington - April
29, 2016<br>
</div>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div style="display: block;" id="moz-reader-content">
<div
xml:base="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/29/albert-woodfox-43-years-solitary-confinement-wish-i-was-back"
id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div data-test-id="article-review-body"
itemprop="articleBody" class="content__article-body
from-content-api js-article__body">
<figure data-alt="apps" class="element element-embed
element--thumbnail">
</figure>
<p> Before walking out of jail a free man in February,
Albert Woodfox spent 43 years almost without pause in an
isolation cell, becoming the longest standing solitary
confinement prisoner in America. He had no view of the
sky from inside his 6ft by 9ft concrete box, no human
contact, and taking a walk meant pacing from one end of
the cell to the other and back again.</p>
<p>A few days ago he found himself on a beach in
Galveston, Texas, in the company of a friend. He stood
marvelling at all the beachgoers under a cloudless sky,
and stared out over the Gulf of Mexico as it stretched
far out to the horizon.</p>
<p>“You could hear the tide and the water coming in,” he
says. “It was so strange, walking on the beach and all
these people and kids running around.”</p>
<p>Of all the terrifying details of Woodfox’s four decades
of solitary incarceration – the absence of human touch,
<a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive"
data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body
link"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/20/albert-woodfox-angola-3-first-interview-trump-confinement">the
panic attacks and bouts of claustrophobia</a>, the way
they chained him even during the one hour a day he was
allowed outside the cell – perhaps the most chilling
aspect of all is what he says now. Two months after the
state of Louisiana <a class="u-underline
in-body-link--immersive" data-component="in-body-link"
data-link-name="in body link"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/19/albert-woodfox-released-louisiana-jail-43-years-solitary-confinement">set
him free</a> on his 69th birthday, he says he
sometimes wishes he was back in that cell.</p>
<p>“Oh yeah! Yeah!” he says passionately when asked
whether he sometimes misses his life in lockdown. “You
know, human beings are territorial, they feel more
comfortable in areas they are secure. In a cell you have
a routine, you pretty much know what is going to happen,
when it’s going to happen, but in society it’s
difficult, it’s looser. So there are moments when, yeah,
I wish I was back in the security of a cell.”</p>
<p>He pauses, then adds: “I mean, it does that to you.”</p>
<p>The “it” to which he is referring is the “closed cell
restriction”, or CCR, into which Woodfox was put in
1972, and where he remained for all but a few months
until his release on 19 February. He survived about
15,000 days of isolation – a form of captivity that the
<a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive"
data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body
link"
href="https://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40097">United
Nations has denounced</a> as torture and that
scientific studies have shown is capable of inflicting
severe psychological damage on individuals in less than
a week.</p>
<p>As a member of the “Angola Three” – former Black
Panther activists who were all subject to decades of
solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola
prison – Woodfox was put into CCR ostensibly for the
murder of a prison guard, for which he has always
insisted he was framed. His conviction was twice
overturned by a federal court on the grounds that it was
unconstitutional, and he walked out of custody an
innocent man.<br>
</p>
<p>His lawyer, George Kendall, of Squire Patton Boggs LLP,
fought for years to get him out of isolation, which
Kendall called “extreme and cruel punishment”.</p>
<p>In an interview with the Guardian, Woodfox says he is
finding the transition from being cooped up alone in a
cell to being free more difficult than he had
anticipated. “Everything is new, no matter how small or
large,” he says. </p>
<p>The weirdest sensation is feeling profoundly
uncomfortable in a crowd. “I’m not accustomed to people
moving around me and it makes me nervous. Being in a
cell on my own, I only had to protect myself from attack
in front of the cell as I knew there was no one behind
me. Now I’m in society, and I have to remind myself that
the chances of being attacked are very small and would
usually depend on my own actions.”</p>
<figure data-alt="6x9"
data-canonical-url="https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/sixbynine/index.html"
data-interactive="https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/iframe-wrapper/0.1/boot.js"
class="element element-interactive interactive
element--showcase">
</figure>
<p>Now that he is no longer alone he has also had to learn
hard lessons about communal living. In the cell, he
explains, his actions only ever affected one person –
himself. Now his behaviour has ramifications for others.</p>
<p>“For 43 years the only person who was affected by what
I did was me. The most difficult thing for me now is to
remember that other people are affected by my actions,
whether intentional or unintentional. I’m having to
learn a new value system.”</p>
<p>When Woodfox <a class="u-underline
in-body-link--immersive" data-component="in-body-link"
data-link-name="in body link"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/20/albert-woodfox-angola-3-first-interview-trump-confinement">last
spoke to the Guardian</a>, a day after his release, he
described the panic attacks he had suffered in solitary,
which at times forced him to sleep night after night
sitting up. Since being released, those attacks have
become much less frequent, though he continues to deal
with them in time-honoured fashion.</p>
<p>At 3am one night recently when he was staying in the
guest room of his brother’s house in Houston, Texas, he
woke up in a panic, drenched in sweat. “I got up and
paced up and down the room for a couple of hours. I
suppose I could have gone out of the house and sat in
the back yard, but it never occurred to me that there
were other options. I just did what I had always done –
paced up and down.”</p>
<figure id="img-3"
data-media-id="584741c3aeb2e728113e7e40887444350943df22"
class="element element-image img--landscape
element--supporting fig--narrow-caption fig--has-shares
" data-component="image"
itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemscope=""
itemprop="associatedMedia image">
<a data-is-ajax="" data-link-name="Launch Article
Lightbox" class="article__img-container
js-gallerythumbs in-body-link--immersive"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/29/#img-3">
<div class="u-responsive-ratio">
<source media="(min-width: 1300px) and
(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-width: 1300px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)">
<source media="(min-width: 1300px)">
<source media="(min-width: 980px) and
(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-width: 980px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)">
<source media="(min-width: 980px)">
<source media="(min-width: 660px) and
(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-width: 660px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)">
<source media="(min-width: 660px)">
<source media="(min-width: 480px) and
(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-width: 480px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)">
<source media="(min-width: 480px)">
<source media="(min-width: 0px) and
(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-width: 0px) and (min-resolution: 120dpi)">
<source media="(min-width: 0px)"></div>
</a><figcaption itemprop="description" class="caption
caption--img caption caption--img"></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For years he told himself that if he ever got out of
prison he would use his freedom to campaign against
solitary confinement, to spare other people from going
through the torture he endured. Now he is out, he feels
that obligation all the more intensely, concerned as he
is about those he has left behind in the CCR cells of
Angola.</p>
<p>“The one thing that used to anger and frustrate me in
prison was that I felt I had no voice. So I’m dedicating
the rest of my life to being a voice for those still in
the hell of solitary confinement – I feel such a great
responsibility for them.”</p>
<p>He stays in touch with Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, who was
recently returned to a dormitory block in Angola having
spent more than 30 years in solitary. Woodfox also
spends a lot of time on the outside with <a
class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive"
data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body
link"
href="http://www.npr.org/2016/03/19/470828257/after-decades-in-solitary-last-of-the-angola-3-carry-on-their-struggle">Robert
King</a>, another member of the Angola Three, who was
freed in 2001. <br>
</p>
<p>No such happy reunion is to be had, however, with the
third element of the trio, <a class="u-underline
in-body-link--immersive" data-component="in-body-link"
data-link-name="in body link"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/us/herman-wallace-held-41-years-in-solitary-dies-at-71.html?_r=0">Herman
Wallace</a>, who died in 2013, two days after being
released from prison.</p>
<p>The most disturbing part of freedom, Woodfox says, has
been the dawning realisation since his release that in
America in 2016 there is very little sense of political
or social struggle. When he entered prison in the 1970s
the country was on fire with political debate; now, as
he puts it, “everybody seems to be ‘Me, me, me, me, me.’
It’s all about me, what I need and how I’m going to get
it.”</p>
<p>That public indifference has in turn, he believes,
allowed solitary confinement to flourish, to the extent
that 100,000 Americans are subjected to it each year. </p>
<p>“The people and the government and the courts have
turned their back on prisons, and that lets the wardens
and officers act as judge, jury and executioner,” he
says. “People don’t seem to be socially aware, that’s
why solitary confinement exists and why it’s so brutal.
Because nobody cares.”</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>