Free Woodfox and Wallace

April 17 marks the 33rd consecutive year that Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, members of the Angola 3, have been held in solitary confinement at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Their case has been championed by Ramsey Clark, Workers World Party and others since the 1998 retrial of Woodfox.

Political prisoners Herman Wallace (left) and Albert Woodfox.

The Angola 3 are former Black Panthers. Robert King Wilkerson, the third member, was released from prison in 2001 after 29 years of solitary confinement. Wallace and Woodfox were falsely convict ed of murdering a white prison guard in 1972. During that time, Loui s iana State was widely known as the “bloodiest prison in America.”

Despite demonstrable and growing evidence of their innocence, Louisiana’s racist and conservative courts have so far refused to consider their appeals. The state’s elected judges run for office on tough-on-crime, pro-death penalty platforms like other politicians. Because Woodfox and Wallace are politicized Black men who refuse to acquiesce to their own oppression, the Louisiana penal system hopes to torture them until they die.

The prison itself is a former slave plantation, named “Angola” after the national origin of kidnapped African slaves brought to the U.S. After the Civil War, the Angola plantation became a prison and is still operated on the plantation model. Eighty percent of the 5,000 prisoners there are African American and 80 percent are serving sentences that will keep them there until they die. Most of them spend their days in the fields, working for pennies an hour to harvest produce that the state sells at a profit. Louisiana incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other state.

Woodfox and Wallace both have criminal post-conviction appeals pending, which the state is dragging through the courts at a painfully slow pace. The ACLU has filed a civil challenge on their behalf citing cruel and unusual punishment and lack of due process. Supporters hope that successful litigation could set a legal precedent for limits on confinement in solitary and super-max conditions. A recent magistrate’s ruling on this civil case accurately states, “The present matter, of course, involves confinements of nearly 33 years, durations so far beyond the pale that this Court has not found anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence.”

Drummer is the West Coast organizer of the National Coalition to Free the Angola 3.