Untitled

On April 18, 1972, they locked him in a six-by-nine-foot box. It became the longest solitary confinement in US history.

Albert Woodfox was twenty-five years old. The facility was the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. It sat on the grounds of a former plantation.

The warden’s order was twenty-three hours a day behind solid steel. One hour in a fenced concrete yard. No unmonitored communication.

The stated reason was his conviction for the death of a guard. The unstated reason was his organizing. He had recently started a chapter of the Black Panther Party inside the walls to protest the living conditions.

The first year usually broke a man's mind. The walls seemed to move inward. Woodfox found himself pacing the four steps from the toilet to the door until his feet went numb.

He filed appeals. They were denied. The administration’s policy was explicit: he would remain in "Closed Cell Restricted" indefinitely.

At the time, the United Nations considered any period of solitary confinement exceeding fifteen days to be a form of psychological torture. The Angola prison review board evaluated Woodfox's status every ninety days. For over four decades, the board checked the same box on the evaluation form, citing "original reason for lockdown" as the sole justification for his continued isolation.

The 1970s bled into the 1980s. Woodfox realized the state did not have to execute him to kill him. The isolation was an administrative mechanism designed to dissolve human identity.

So he built a mental architecture. He read math textbooks. He copied out legal codes. When they took his books away, he taught himself to read the shifting shadows on the wall to calculate the exact time of day.

He communicated through the air vents. He taught the men in the adjacent cells how to read. They shouted historical facts and legal precedents through the iron grates.

He wasn't always calm. In 1993, after a guard confiscated a meager stack of his letters, Woodfox lost control. He threw a cup of bodily waste at the cell bars. They revoked his yard time for a month.

In 1998, a judge overturned his conviction. The state immediately appealed and kept him in the cell. In 2008, another judge overturned it again. The state appealed again. He remained in the box.

On February 19, 2016, a federal judge ordered his immediate release. The state was barred from trying him a third time.

He was sixty-nine years old. He walked out of the prison gates on his own feet.

He had spent 43 years, 10 months, and one day in solitary. His mother had died while he was inside. His sister had died.

The state built a room to erase his mind. He used it to educate the men next door.

Albert Woodfox died in August 2022. He spent his final six years speaking to lawmakers about the psychology of isolation. The six-by-nine-foot cells at Angola are still there. The review board still meets every ninety days. They still use the same forms.

Albert Woodfox: the man who outlived the silence.

Source: Albert Woodfox, "Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement."

Verified via: The National Archives, NPR Legal Records.