Cruel And Unusual - A story of humanity (review)
Imagine if you were confined to your bedroom for twenty-three hours a day, with no window to the outside world, how long would you last? A few days? A week? Probably would go a little stir crazy, but you could probably entertain yourself with your mobile or at least watch television. But what if you had no entertainment. Just the room, with a bucket for your toilet breaks. It's still your bedroom, but you can only leave for one hour a day. How would you feel? Could you survive a month? How about a year? This is one of many questions posed in Vadim Jean’s follow up to the documentary In The Land Of The Free, the excellent Cruel And Unusual.
Cruel And Unusual revisits the story of Albert Woodfox, Robert King and Herman Wallace, the Angola Three, three black men who were subjected to, between them, over one hundred years of solitary confinement.
By their own admission, none of the three men could have claimed to be model citizens in their youth. They grew up in fifties America, with all the hardships black Americans faced, getting into to petty crime and subject to indiscriminate police racism. All three were incarcerated by the time they were in their twenties. Woodfox and Wallace both ended up in Angola prison, King moving to the prison some time later.
Angola prison was a hell hole. A feral place, where the bases instincts were almost encouraged. Rapes and violence were widespread and - as it is in the present - there was a large black prison population. Woodfox and Wallace had both found direction and purpose in the Black Panther movement. Once in Angola, they helped to bring more order to the prison, organising petitions and hunger strikes in an attempt to reduce the jungle-esque nature of the prison.
Angola prison was over populated and under staffed. Such a situation was always going to be a recipe for incident. One evening a young prison guard, Brent Miller, was violently and repeatedly stabbed, resulting in his death. Of the four inmates believed to be involved in the murder, one took a deal for a lesser crime, one was given an alibi by an officer, Woodfox and Wallace, two of the four suspects, were convicted on the witness testimony of another prisoner, Hezekiah Brown, a convicted rapist, who said he had seen the four men burst into the dorm and stab Miller.
Brown was promised a pardon for his testimony. Brown was also a known snitch, making it highly unlikely that any inmate, let alone four of them, would commit such a crime in front of him.
With both men now convicted of murder, the state considered them a danger to the other prisoners, thus began the longest stays in solitary confinement of any prisoner anywhere in the world. Wallace was in solitary up until shortly before his death in 2013, making up forty years of confinement. Woodfox, who was released in early 2016, spent forty-two years in solitary confinement.
Robert King, who had not even been in Angola at the time of the murder, was guilty by association. Another member of the radical Black Panthers, he, upon transfer to Angola, found himself put in solitary. He would stay in solitary for twenty-nine years, until his release for agreeing to a lesser charge in 2001.
Cruel and Unusual does not only highlight the injustice toward the Angola Three, it also shines a light on the absence of justice afford Brent Miller, a callow, young, prison officer, who barely lived long enough to become jaded by the system. It asks how in a supposedly modern and progressive society, can a situation like the one these men found themselves in, come about? How is it that these same men, in their seventh decade of life, can be still fighting the same oppressions they faced as cocky, vital, fresh-faced youths? How come the notion of solitary confinement is still very real, even though tenets enshrined in the American constitution oppose it?
Aside from the questions asked, there is also the story of people fighting for a cause bigger than themselves, the endeavour of the human spirit, the triumphant of good people refusing to be cowed, the faith of the weak when all seems lost and the beauty of seeing that even under the harshest, most cruel circumstances, a purpose truly believed will maintain the spirit and the mind. A beautiful film.
