Solitary

“The only time I really had contact with white people was when we went to the French Quarter or to the shopping district on Canal Street. The first time I felt that a white person could be a threat to me I was standing at a bus stop at the corner of Dumaine and Villere with my mom when two white police officers drove by in a patrol car. She put her hand on my shoulder protectively and moved me behind her.” 

Early in the book, Woodfox establishes the disorientation of growing up Black in white America, which later serves to underscore his exploration of institutional racism in the justice system. In his childhood, segregation ensured that his interactions with white people were marked by disrespect—such as not being allowed to enter a department store—or danger, as is the case with the passing police car. This quote also highlights an element of Woodfox’s relationship with his mother—that she did her best to protect him, but given the twin pressures of racism and poverty, was ultimately unable to keep him safe. 

“In sixth grade I attended a social studies class that taught me my place in the world. We had an African American teacher for a classroom of black children who lived in the same all-black neighborhood, using a netbook that only depicted what was happening in white America. The pictures and stories in the textbook had nothing to do with our reality. It wasn’t the first time I became aware that white people had it better. But it was the first time it began to dawn on me that everybody knew that white people had it better.” 

This quote foreshadows a realization Woodfox would have later on after encountering the Black Panther Party: Black people’s accomplishments were never discussed in American society. This quote establishes the extent of Woodfox’s transformation, from a youth who’d been taught he was worthless by society, to a man who appreciated his own inherent dignity and value thanks to the principles of the Black Panthers. The quote also serves as an example of the motif of books, and their power to not only inform and expand people’s horizons, but also to foreclose opportunities through misrepresentation or erasure.

“We never thought we were committing crimes. We thought we were outsmarting the world. But we watched out for police. Sometimes they’d come after us if they saw a group of black kids, no matter what we were doing.” 

The twin forces of racism and poverty had an effect on Woodfox, who stole and ran small scams to secure the things he could not afford. After he encounters the Black Panther Party, Woodfox comes to see poverty as intrinsically linked to racism, insofar as racism divides the majority and keeps them from rising up against those who hold a disproportionate share of the wealth in society. He also hints at the practice by law enforcement of targeting Black people because of their race, which he later notes was an issue with ‘vagrancy laws’ at the time, in which Black people could be arrested simply for not having an official job and continues to be an issue in the 21st century represented by police shootings, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the overrepresentation of Black people in the prison system. 

“The prison was surrounded by the Mississippi River on three sides and the Tunica Hills to the east. In 1869 the slave trader’s widow leased the land from four of his plantations to a former Confederate major who wanted to farm it. As part of a legal “convict-leasing” program established throughout the South after the Civil War, he “leased” prisoners from New Orleans and other city jails to work his farm. The convicts, many charged with minor crimes, were housed in former slave quarters and worked seven days a week. They were starved and beaten.” 

After the Civil War was over, the prison system allowed slavery to continue under a different guise via the 13th Amendment which allowed for slavery as punishment for a crime. When combined with the vagrancy laws—which made it possible for Black people to be arrested for simply being on the street—as well as a corrupt justice system in which Black people were routinely charged for crimes they didn’t commit, it is possible to see how the structure of the prison system effectively meant the continued enslavement of African Americans. The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is a particularly powerful example of this, as it once served as a plantation. 

“To protect your reputation, you had to carry yourself a certain way. If someone challenges you and you don’t fight you’ve lost your reputation; it’s gone. What’s good one day is not worth shit tomorrow. There were all kinds of dos and don’ts, a field of land mines.” 

This quote addresses the idea of keeping one’s word, an element of the book closely linked to theme of the importance of living by principles. In this quote, Woodfox describes his early experience in Angola and how his reputation as a fighter kept him safe in the highly violent environment of the prison. Only by maintaining this reputation was Woodfox able to escape assault by other inmates. Nonetheless, this quote also provides a different window into Woodfox’s character: that despite his reputation, he didn’t enjoy fighting. This foreshadows the non-violent principles of the Black Panther Party that he develop in later years, which hold that violence should only be used in response to an attack.

“One of the greatest hardships for me in the first few months I was at Angola was getting used to the sameness of every day. Our routine started when the whistle blew around five a.m. We got dressed, washed up, and stood in line to go to breakfast. Every unit was called to the dining hall separately. Oak Unit, where whites were housed, was always called first. Next, the three black units were called in rotating order.” 

According to Woodfox, the monotony of life in prison was one of the most difficult elements of the experience; this quote, which speaks to his experience in the general prison population, foreshadows the experience he would have later in solitary confinement when he would be held in his cell 23 hours a day. Nonetheless, Woodfox would come to see inner change and transformation as an essential part of human life, which he is able to cultivate through self-education, despite the unchanging conditions of his prison cell. This quote also highlights a defining element of Woodfox’s early life, both in and out of prison: the segregation of Black and white populations.

“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.” 

Woodfox talks about how his crimes were motivated by a need to procure basic necessities, but his description of the crimes he committed after his first release from Angola is different. These crimes harmed people who were already marginalized. Woodfox’s admission of shame over these actions is a testament to the inner change he experienced over the course of his life, in which he came to appreciate the importance of unity, and acted, while in prison, to protect vulnerable people, both directly—by protecting them from rape—and indirectly, by working to end solitary confinement.

“I thought of the most violent and depraved prisoners I’d encountered at Angola and in New York. I couldn’t bring myself to hate them. Uneducated, they were surrounded by racism and corruption in prison, threatened by, and often the victims of, violence and beatings because of their race, forced to live in filth, worked to death, and barely fed. Treated like animals they became subhuman.”

Woodfox describes a pivotal moment in his life: the encounter he had with members of the Black Panther Party while in pre-trial detention in New York. This encounter shifted Woodfox’s perspective, prompting him to see the structural racism that had informed his own development, and created conditions like the violent environment Woodfox had encountered at Angola. The realization of this would shape the rest of Woodfox’s life, and would see him taking on a leadership role in educating other prisoners on how racism and corruption had influenced their lives. 

“The Black Panther Party wasn’t a violent organization. If you check the history you will see that whatever violence Panthers were involved in was a response to being attacked first.” 

Though the Black Panther Party was formed to prevent violence—namely, police brutality in Black communities—it was despised and feared by many people in white America, who held that the Panthers advocated racial hatred and violence towards white people. In this quote, Woodfox challenges those assumptions and notes that much of the violence attributed to the party was in fact committed by infiltrators from the FBI, which launched a concentrated effort to discredit and disunify the Black Panther Party throughout the 1960s and 70s. The quote mirrors Woodfox’s own approach to violence, inspired by the party’s principles, which was to respond to challenges or threats by other prisoners with education and compassion and to only respond with violence when absolutely necessary. 

“On the outside, nothing had changed from the day I had escaped the courthouse 20 months earlier. I was a black man with a long prison sentence ahead of me. Inside, however, everything had changed. I had morals, principles, and values I never had before. Looking out the window of the plane, I saw into the window of my soul. In the past, I had done wrong. Now I would do right. I would never be a criminal again.”

This quote highlights how Woodfox had had his eyes opened by his encounter with the Black Panther Party, who taught him about institutional racism and systemic injustice. Learning about these factors would not only inspire Woodfox to change his behavior, but it would also lead to him viewing himself as a political prisoner, rather than a criminal. The quote also echoes Woodfox’s commitment to inner growth, which meant that even as his circumstances—being stuck in solitary confinement—did not change, his ongoing moral and intellectual development took him far beyond prison walls.

“In retrospect, when word came down the line that a prison guard had been killed that day, I should have known right away what was about to happen, but I didn’t. Slowly the line began moving towards the clothing room, where Hayden Dees was questioning prisoners one by one with local law enforcement.”

Even though Woodfox was nowhere near the site of the murder of prison guard Brent Miller in 1972, he was nonetheless charged and convicted with the killing. This quote describes the day of the murder, which happened amidst an increasing push for prison reform at Angola. Moreover, Woodfox describes Angola at the time as a violent place in which inmates were routinely disrespected and abused, giving them a multitude of reasons to strike out. These factors laid the groundwork for the murder to take place, and for Woodfox’s wrongful conviction. This quote also alludes to an important dynamic at Angola at the time of the murder: tensions between the warden, C. Murray Henderson, and the prison’s head of security, Hayden Dees, who was from one of the families who had run Angola for many generations and was part of the old boys’ club that characterized the justice system in Louisiana. Yet while Henderson and Dees disagreed on many things, Woodfox writes they were in agreement that no Black inmate could be permitted to challenge conditions at the prison. 

“Any act of resistance ended the same way: four or five of them would come into the cell and jump us. It’s a hell of a feeling to stand when you know you’re going to be beaten; you know there will be pain but your moral principles won’t let you back down. I was always scared shitless. Sometimes my knees would shake and buckle. I forced myself to learn how not to give in to fear.” 

This quote takes place after Woodfox has been moved into solitary confinement following the murder of Brent Miller, and, like many other prisoners, brutally beaten. Such violence was typical of guards at the time, Woodfox writes; thus, this quote describes not only the aftermath of Miller’s murder, but the entire culture of the prison. Nonetheless, Woodfox chose to stand up to the guards’ use of racist language, disrespectful orders and brutality, which sometimes meant the guards would respond violently, and when he says in this quote that his resistance was not an absence of fear, but the decision to act in spite of that fear.

“After about a month in CCR I was sitting on my bunk when I started sweating, and the walls of my cell started to move toward me at the same time. My clothes tightened around my body. I took off my shirt and pants but still felt like I was being squeezed, strangled. The ceiling was pressing down on me.” 

This quote sets up a problem that would plague Woodfox for much of his life, even after he was released from prison: claustrophobia. Even after he’d spent 10 years in solitary confinement, Woodfox writes that he still sometimes felt an overwhelming urge to get up and walk out of the cell. Decades later, after he’d been released and bought his own home, he describes still sometimes feeling the effects of claustrophobia, which serves to underscore the fact that solitary confinement does long-term harm to those who have experienced it. This quote is also an example of the vivid, novelistic style Woodfox uses throughout the book—in this case, to paint of an evocative picture of what it’s like to have a claustrophobic attack. 

“They thought they would stop our organizing by separating us but all they did was spread our influence. Wherever they put us, we started over, organizing our tiers. Pooling resources. Educating prisoners. Setting examples by our own conduct. In this way, we taught men the power of unity.” 

Woodfox describes how he, Herman Wallace, and Robert King acted together to organize prisoners to work together to demand better conditions—through tactics such as refusing food, refusing to go back in their cells when the free hour was over, or writing petitions of grievance—which would sometimes yield results, and which were more successful when done as a group than if one individual tried on their own. Insofar as they were successful, Woodfox, Wallace and King represented a threat to prison officials’ authority, and so they were often separated. However, they were not discouraged by these separations, and instead used them as a means of disseminating their tactics further. 

“For more than 100 years state and federal judges refused to adjudicate prisoner abuses at all in their courts because legally, according to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, prisoners are slaves of the state. The same amendment that abolished slavery in 1865—“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States”—includes the clause “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

After Woodfox’s wrongful conviction for the murder of Brent Miller, he began to teach himself the law, as a means of challenging his conviction and to challenge the conditions in which he was being held. Legal challenges to prison conditions had been made possible by lawsuits in the 1960s granting prisoners constitutional rights. Before then, the justice system treated prisoners as essentially without rights. In this way, this quote also highlights the book’s theme of the connection between slavery and the prison system, as much like enslaved people had been, prisoners were treated as subhuman, and therefore without human rights. 

“Herman was sentenced to life in prison and sent back to CCR, but not to my tier. By now we understood they would never put us on the same tier in CCR again. That year, and for decades, they tried to come between me and Herman. They tried to break our connection. What they didn’t realize was that with every action they took against us, the strong we became; the more united it made us.” 

This quote illustrates a tactic that prison officials would try to use to break Woodfox, and to limit his ability to organize other prisoners, keeping him apart from Herman Wallace (and from Robert King). As this quote shows, such tactics were unsuccessful, as Woodfox and Wallace shared an almost spiritual connection, built on trust, kindness, and loyalty, even when they spent long periods of time apart. This quote also foreshadows a way in which prison officials tried to come between Woodfox and Wallace in later years; by asking Woodfox to give testimony against Wallace for the murder of Brent Miller, in exchange for a deal. Woodfox refuses that offer, as he does Wallace’s offer to claim responsibility for the murder on his death bed—a sign of the unbreakable unity and loyalty they had with one another. 

“Our hunger strike lasted 45 days. The first meal served after we went off the hunger strike was breakfast. We stood at our cell doors as they were passing out the trays and I was about to reach my hand through the bars for my tray until I saw it was oatmeal. I hated oatmeal. After waiting for so long I could go a couple of hours more for lunch.” 

Refusing food was an important protest tactic for those in solitary confinement at Angola; in this case, prisoners were protesting the practice of sliding their food trays under their doors, rather than passing them through a slot, but Woodfox writes that they undertook so many hunger strikes, he’s lost count, a testament to how many issues existed with prison conditions and how determined he and other prisoners were to change them. This quote is also an example of his writing style, which is occasionally lighthearted, despite the grim circumstances Woodfox describes. 

“Fox!” he’d yell, at all hours of the night.

“What?” I answered.

“I can’t say this one,” he yelled.

“Spell it out,” I called back to him.

He called out the letters

“Look at the key at the bottom of the page,” I yelled back. “What do you think it is?” And we went back and forth like that until he got it.” 

Woodfox narrates one of his proudest achievements: teaching another prisoner to read. Books played an essential role in Woodfox’s emotional and intellectual development and allowed him to grow beyond the confines of his small cell. In this characteristically expressive passage, Woodfox describes—using the technique of recreating dialogue, a tool he uses throughout the book—how he helped open up the world of another prisoner by teaching him to read, even though that prisoner was a few cells away from him. Sometimes that meant yelling back and forth, but ultimately, that prisoner was able to read out a sentence, and soon after that, was finishing books at a high school level. This quote also evokes the atmosphere of the prison, which was constantly noisy, despite the fact that inmates were physically separated from one another. 

“I often thought about myself in the free world: having dinner with my family, driving a car, going to the store, going on vacation. I fantasized about going to Yosemite National Park, which I’d seen in a National Geographic program on TV. It was a way to reinforce my belief that one day I would be free.” 

This quote points to an important theme in the book, that despite Woodfox’s body being trapped in a cell for more than four decades, his mind continued to grow and explore. In a similar way, this quote points to the belief that allowed Woodfox to continue fighting—the belief that he would one day be released. This is also foreshadowing what Woodfox would go on to do following release: true to form—as someone who made a point of keeping his word—he did many the things he had vowed he would, while in prison, including visiting his mother’s grave and going to Yosemite National Park. Finally, this quote points to what Woodfox would tell other prisoners—that it was important to stay focused on life outside prison.

“Most of the prisoners were so young it broke my heart. I listened to the, trying to understand them. I asked them why they were in prison. From what they described the techniques used on them by police and the criminal justice system were the same used in black and Latino communities in the sixties.” 

This quote takes place after Woodfox has been moved to another prison, awaiting his second murder trial. There, many of the prisoners he meets are Latinx, and in talking to them, he realizes police are still using the same techniques that had been used when Woodfox was first arrested, including long sentences for minor crimes, and charging minorities with a multitude of offenses so they feel pressured to accept plea deals. This foreshadows what Woodfox will conclude later in the book, that in the time he spent in prison, much remained unchanged in the justice system in the United States, and that racism, though more subtle after 44 years, is still a problem. 

“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.’” 

As Woodfox’s case, and the fight of the Angola 3, gained greater public attention, Woodfox and the others began receiving more correspondence from supporters; this quote is an example of the way in which Woodfox would respond, drawing on lessons he’d learned—in this case, the importance of courage—to encourage his interlocutor to value and respect themselves, which in turn echoes the lessons he tried to impart to other prisoners. This also speaks to Woodfox’s inner evolution, part of the ongoing willingness to change that he identifies as an essential part of any meaningful human life.

“When I met with Grassian I felt vulnerable. I wasn’t used to sharing my deepest feelings with anyone. But I knew the barbaric practice of solitary confinement had to stop. ‘The only way to survive the cell is to adjust to the painfulness of it,’ I told him. I couldn’t answer all of his questions, but I tried my best. ‘When you leave, you go back to your life,’ I said. ‘I go back to my six-by-nine-foot cell and have just minutes to erect all these layers, put all these defenses back.’”

In the latter half of the book, Woodfox lays out the damaging impact of solitary confinement, drawing on insights from his own life and research by mental health practitioners. In the passage from which this quote is drawn, Woodfox recounts his own memories of what he shared with psychiatrist Stuart Grassian and discusses Grassian’s identification of a psychiatric syndrome associated with solitary confinement characterized by hallucinations, panic attacks and dissociation. In outlining the mental health consequences, Woodfox is making a case for why solitary confinement is a form of torture.

“Angola routinely hired doctors with suspended licenses, a practice that is condemned by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American College of Correctional Physicians. Between 2011 and 2016, when the article was published, Ridgeway and Quandt wrote, “14 physicians have been employed by Angola. Twelve came to Angola after receiving disciplinary sanctions from the state medical board for misconduct.” 

Woodfox discusses the lack of physical and mental health care for prisoners at several points throughout the book, drawing on his own experience—how he received no treatment for chronic conditions like diabetes or was punished for seeking treatment for acute conditions like heatstroke and a serious rash. In Woodfox’s life, this negligence would have particularly devastating consequences, as Herman Wallace failed to get diagnosed for liver cancer until it was too late to be treated, leading to his premature death. This quote, which draws from a story that appeared in the publication In These Times, also hints at one of Woodfox’s traits: his devotion to the news, of which he was an avid consumer in prison and after his release.