Life in Solitary Confinement: 12,775 Days Alone

Around midday today, Central Time, two men in Angola Prison in Louisiana will quietly mark the moment, 35 years ago exactly, when the bars of solitary confinement cells closed behind them. They will likely spend the moment in their 6 by 9 concrete cells reading, or writing letters to their hundreds of supporters around the world. And most of America and the rest of the world will still have never heard of them, or that in the United States of America, it is still possible to spend a life sentence in solitary confinement without interruption and without any real means of appeal. Americans shamefully imagine such things happen offshore in places like Guantanamo, or in totalitarian countries half a world away. Not here, though. Certainly not here.

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox are those men, who along with Robert King, are known as the Angola Three. (King established his innocence and was released in 2001 after almost 30 years in solitary.) Collectively, the three of them have spent 100 years in solitary confinement. Wallace asked this week, "Where is the justice?"

It was also on this day in 1972, that Brent Miller, a young, white, newlywed prison guard, was discovered in a pool of his own blood, stabbed 32 times. Brent Miller was a popular, athletic, handsome local boy who dreamed of leaving Angola with his young wife as soon as he could get a job in the nearby paper mill or up in Oklahoma. He never got a chance.

And based on long-lost evidence uncovered by a new team of attorneys and investigators over the past year and a half, it is clear Miller hasn't received justice, either. Woodfox and Wallace were placed in solitary and under suspicion of the murder the day it happened, and were later convicted of Miller's murder following trials highlighted by key testimony by inmate witnesses who were promised items such as cigarettes and the warden's recommendation of a pardon for their testimony. One of the state's inmate eyewitness was a legally blind certified sociopath. Another inmate repeatedly confessed to the murder to his fellow inmates and assured them that the prison administration knew he was guilty, but wanted to make examples of Woodfox and Wallace, known activists and Black Panthers.

But this anniversary, unlike the 34 preceding it, has a tinge of hope to it. Wallace and Woodfox, convicted separately of Miller's murder by all-white juries, have finally begun to attract some measurable attention.

Two very important legal cases are wending their way through the courts on this anniversary. The criminal case addresses the now publicly documented payoffs of the state's key witness in the murder trials. The other tackles a legal issue that could reverberate across the country -- is indefinite solitary confinement a violation of the constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment?

By what few and murky laws exist, prisoners assigned to solitary should receive access to due process by which they can appeal their placement in solitary. For the Angola Three, the biweekly "hearings," during which they may use their clean records of good behavior to argue for their release back into the general population, long ago devolved into farce. Wallace reports that for decades now, he has been led into the room for his hearings, has not not permitted to present his arguments, and has been simply handed a piece of paper, already filled out, stating that the prison administration has denied his appeal and that he will stay in solitary because of the "nature of the original offense." The appeals boards do not pretend anymore that there is anything meaningful in the charade. The same fiction plays out for Woodfox and did for King during his years on the solitary block.

At least once, according to Wallace, current warden Burl Cain offered to release Woodfox and Wallace back into the general population if they renounced their political views and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. (The megalomaniacal Cain is to media attention what a lobotomized moth is to an incandescent bulb; he wrote a book and has done hundreds of interviews about his "reformist" approach to penology, which involves converting prisoners to Christianity and holding the hands of those being executed so that his face would be the last they'd see before Christ's.)