[Ppnews] Inside Angola Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation

[Political Prisoner News]

June 10, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/flaherty06102008.html

Inside Angola Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation


Organizing for Freedom

By JORDAN FLAHERTY

At the heart of Louisiana’s prison system sits 
the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, a former 
slave plantation where little has changed in the 
last several hundred years. Angola has been made 
notorious from books and films such as Dead Man 
Walking and The Farm: Life at Angola, as well as 
its legendary bi-annual prison rodeo and The 
Angolite, a prisoner-written magazine published 
within its walls. Visitors are often overwhelmed 
by its size – 18,000 acres that include a golf 
course (for use by prison staff and some guests), 
a radio station, and a massive farming operation 
that ranges from staples like soybeans and wheat 
to traditional Southern plantation crops like cotton.

Recent congressional attention has again brought 
Angola into the media limelight. The focus this 
time is on the prison’s practice of keeping some 
inmates in solitary confinement for decades, 
especially two of Angola’s most well-known 
residents – Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. 
Woodfox and Wallace are the remaining members of 
the Angola Three, political activists widely seen 
as having been interned in solitary confinement 
as punishment for their political activism.

Modern plantation

Norris Henderson, co-director of Safe 
Streets/Strong Communities, a grassroots criminal 
justice organization in New Orleans, spent twenty 
years at Angola – a relatively short time in a 
prison where 85 percent of its 5,100 prisoners 
are expected to die behind its walls. “Six 
hundred folks been there over 25 years,” he 
explains. “Lots of these guys been there over 35 
years. Think about that: a population that’s been 
there since the 1970s. Once you’re in this place, 
it’s almost like you ain’t going nowhere, that 
barring some miracle, you’re going to die there.”
Prisoners at Angola still do the same work that 
enslaved Africans did there when it was a slave 
plantation. “Angola is a plantation,” Henderson 
explains. “Eighteen-thousand acres of choice 
farmland. Even to this day, you could have 
machinery that can do all that work, but you 
still have prisoners doing it instead.” Not only 
do prisoners at Angola toil at the same work as 
enslaved Africans hundreds of years ago, but many 
of the white guards come from families that have 
lived on the grounds since the plantation days.

Nathaniel Anderson, a current inmate at Angola 
who has served nearly thirty years of a lifetime 
sentence, agrees. “People on the outside should 
know that Angola is still a plantation with every 
type and kind of slave conceivable,” he says.

Prison organizing

In 1971, the Black Panther Party was seen as a 
threat to this country’s power structure – not 
only in the inner cities, but even in the 
prisons. At Orleans Parish Prison, the New 
Orleans city jail, the entire jail population 
refused to cooperate for one day in solidarity 
with New Orleans Panthers who were on trial. “I 
was in the jail at the time of their trial,” 
Henderson tells me. “The power that came from 
those guys in the jail, the camaraderie
Word went 
out through the jail, because no one thought the 
Panthers were going to get a fair trial. We 
decided to do something. We said, ‘The least we 
can do is to say the day they are going to court, no one is going to court.’”

The action was successful, and inspired prisoners 
to do more. “People saw what happened and said, 
‘We shut down the whole system that day,’” he 
remembers. “That taught the guys that if we stick 
together we can accomplish a whole lot of things.”

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were inmates 
who had recently become members of the Black 
Panther Party, and as activists, they were seen 
as threats to the established order of the 
prison. They were organizing among the other 
prisoners, conducting political education, and 
mobilizing for civil disobedience to improve conditions.

Robert King Wilkerson, like many inmates, joined 
the Black Panther Party while already imprisoned 
at Orleans Parish Prison. He was transferred to 
Angola, and immediately placed in solitary 
confinement (known at Angola as Closed Cell 
Restriction or CCR) – confined alone in his cell 
with no human contact for 23 hours a day. He 
later found out he had been transferred to 
solitary because he was accused of an attack he 
could not have committed – it had happened at 
Angola before he had been moved there.

In March of 1972, not long after they began 
organizing for reform from within Angola, Wallace 
and Woodfox were accused of killing a 
correctional officer. They were also moved to 
solitary, where they remained for nearly 36 
years, until March of this year, when they were 
moved out four days after a congressional 
delegation led by Congressman John Conyers 
arranged a visit to the prison. Legal experts 
have said this is the longest time anyone in the 
US has spent in solitary. Amnesty International 
recently declared, “the prisoners' prolonged 
isolation breached international treaties which 
the US has ratified, including the International 
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture.”

Wilkerson, Wallace, and Woodfox became known 
internationally as the Angola Three – Black 
Panthers held in solitary confinement because of 
their political activism. Wilkerson remained in 
solitary for nearly 29 years, until he was 
exonerated and released from prison in 2001. 
Since his release, Wilkerson has been a tireless 
advocate for his friends still incarcerated. “I’m 
free of Angola,” he often says, “but Angola will never be free of me.”

This history of struggle and resistance brings a 
special urgency to the case of the Angola Three. 
Kgalema Motlante, a leader of the African 
National Congress, said in 2003 that the case of 
the Angola Three “has the potential of laying 
bare, exposing the shortcomings, in the entire US system.”

Purchasing testimony

Wallace and Woodfox have the facts on their side. 
Bloody fingerprints at the scene of the crime do 
not match their prints. Witnesses against them 
have recanted, while witnesses with nothing to 
gain have testified that they were nowhere near 
the crime. There is evidence of prosecutorial 
misconduct, such as purchasing inmate testimony 
and not disclosing it to the defense. Even the 
widow of the slain guard has spoken out on their 
behalf. Most recently, their case has received 
attention from Representative Conyers, head of 
the House Judiciary Committee, and Cedric 
Richmond, chair of the Louisiana House Judiciary 
Committee, who has scheduled hearings on the issue to begin this month.

But this is more than the story of innocent men 
railroaded by a system. The story of the Panthers 
at Angola is both inspiring and shocking. It is a 
struggle for justice while in the hardest of situations.

“They swam against the current in Blood Alley,” 
says Nathaniel Anderson, a current inmate at 
Angola who has been inspired by Wallace and 
Woodfox’s legacy. “For men to actually have the 
audacity to organize for the protection of young 
brothers who were being victimized ruthlessly was an extreme act of rebellion.”

Like many prisoners during that time, Norris 
Henderson was introduced to organizing by Black 
Panthers in prison, and later became a leader of 
prison activism during his time at Angola. The 
efforts of Wilkerson, Woodfox, Wallace, and other 
Panthers in prison were vital to bringing 
improvements in conditions, stopping sexual 
assault, and building alliances among different 
groups of prisoners. “They were part of the 
Panther Movement,” Henderson tells me. “This was 
at the height of the Black power movement, we 
were understanding that we all got each other. In 
the night-time there would be open talk, guys in 
the jail talking, giving history lessons, 
discussing why we find ourselves in the situation 
we find ourselves. They started educating folks 
around how we could treat each other. The Nation 
of Islam was growing in the prison at the same 
time. You had these different folk bringing 
knowledge. You had folks who were hustlers that 
then were listening and learning. Everybody was coming into consciousness.”

Insatiable machine

The US has the largest incarcerated population in 
the world – twenty-five percent of the world’s 
prisoners are here. If Louisiana, which has the 
largest percentage imprisoned of any US state, 
were a country, it would have by far the world’s 
largest percentage of its population locked up, 
at one out of every 45 people. Nationwide, more 
than seven million people are in US jails, on 
probation, or on parole, and African Americans 
are incarcerated at nearly ten times the rate of 
whites. Our criminal justice system has become an 
insatiable machine – even when crime rates go 
down, the prison population keeps rising.

The efforts of the Angola Three and other 
politically conscious prisoners represented a 
fundamental challenge to this system. The 
organizing of Wallace, Woodfox, and Wilkerson, 
though cut short by their move to solitary, had 
an effect that continues to this day.

Prison activism, and outside support for 
activists behind bars, can be tremendously 
powerful, says Henderson. “In the early 1970s 
people started realizing we’re all in this 
situation together. First, at Angola, we pushed 
for a reform to get a law library. That was one 
of the first conditions to change. Then, we got 
the library; guys became aware of what their 
rights were. We started to push to improve the 
quality of food, and to get better medical care. 
Once they started pushing the envelope, a whole 
bunch of things started to change. Angola was 
real violent then, you had inmate violence and 
rape. The people running the prison system 
benefit from people being ignorant. But we 
educated ourselves. Eventually, you had guys in prison proposing legislation.”

This was a time of reforms and grassroots 
struggles happening in prisons across the US. 
Uprisings such as the Attica Rebellion were 
resulting in real change. Today, many of the 
gains from those victories have been overturned, 
and prisoners have even less recourse to change 
than ever before. “Another major difference,” 
Henderson explains, is that “you had federal 
oversight over the prisons at that time, someone 
you could complain to, and say my rights are 
being violated. Today, we’ve lost that right.”

Working for criminal justice is work that 
benefits us all, says Henderson. “Most folks in 
prison are going to come out of prison,” he 
states. “We should invest in the quality of that 
person. We should start investing in the redemption of people.”

After decades of efforts by their lawyers and by 
activists, Wallace and Woodfox have been released 
from solitary, but the struggle 
continues.  Wallace and Woodfox remain behind 
bars, punished for standing up against a system 
that has grown even larger and more deadly. And 
the abuse does not end there. “There are hundreds 
more guys who have been in [solitary] a long time 
too,” Henderson adds. “This is like the first step in a thousand-mile journey.”

Jordan Flaherty is an editor of 
<http://www.leftturn.org>Left Turn Magazine, and 
a journalist based in New Orleans.  Most 
recently, his writing can be seen in the 
anthology 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904859844/counterpunchmaga>Red 
State Rebels, released this month by AK 
Press.  He can be reached at 
<mailto:neworleans at leftturn.org>neworleans at leftturn.org.




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