Solitary (ePub)

Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four
decades in solitary confinement—in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, 23 hours a
day, in notorious Angola prison in Louisiana—all for a crime he did not
commit. That Albert Woodfox survived was, in itself, a feat of extraordinary
endurance against the violence and deprivation he faced daily. That he was able
to emerge whole from his odyssey within America's prison and judicial systems
is a triumph of the human spirit, and makes his book a clarion call to reform
the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the U.S. and around the world.

Arrested often as a teenager in New Orleans, inspired behind bars in his
early twenties to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment
and code of living, Albert was serving a fifty-year sentence in Angola for armed
robbery when on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another
member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and immediately put in solitary
confinement by the warden. Without a shred of actual evidence against
them, their trial was a sham of justice that gave them life sentences in solitary.
Decades passed before Albert gained a lawyer of consequence; even so, sixteen
more years and multiple appeals were needed before he was finally released in
February 2016.

Remarkably self-aware that anger or bitterness would have destroyed him in
solitary confinement, sustained by the shared solidarity of two fellow Panthers,
Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3, as they
became known, resolved never to be broken by the grinding inhumanity and
corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. He survived
to give us Solitary, a chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves
the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds.