It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Washington Post
, 34 percent of the unarmed people
killed by police were black males.

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In 2016, according to the NAACP, African Americans were incarcerated
at more than five times the rate of whites. The imprisonment rate for African
American women was twice that of white women. Also according to the
NAACP, nationwide, African American children represented 32 percent of
all children who were arrested, 42 percent of all children who were detained,
and 52 percent of all children who ended up in criminal court. Though
African Americans and Latinos combined make up approximately 32 percent
of the U.S. population, they make up 52 percent of all incarcerated people.
Racism today isn’t as blatant as it was 44 years ago, but it is still here,
underground, coded. We have to make changes that are deeper, as a society.
Without roots, nothing can grow. The systemic hatred of a human being
based on his or her skin color or hair texture or cultural heritage or gender or
sexual preference is pointless. These are trivial things; we are more alike than
we are unlike. We will never advance as a species if we see each other as
enemies based on race. Frantz Fanon wrote, “Superiority? Inferiority? Why
not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” Can we
shift the focus of our insecurities, fears, and anger from other races and work
together to deal with the unfair distribution of wealth on this planet? Back in
the seventies Huey Newton wrote, “Youths are passed through schools that
don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left
stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”
This is happening right now in this country, in 2018, for all children of all
races.
I have hope for humankind. It is my hope that a new human being will
evolve so that needless pain and suffering, poverty, exploitation, racism, and
injustice will be things of the past. I am thrilled to see young people obeying
the call of their own humanity, even though it so often seems to come at a
terrible price. The year of my release, quarterback Colin Kaepernick “took a
knee” during the national anthem before National Football League games to
protest and bring awareness of the deaths of black people at the hands of
police and other social injustices. As his protest spread throughout the NFL,
critics subverted the message of the players, ignoring the reason for the
protest—to call attention to the very real problem of police violence against
black people—and severely criticizing Kaepernick and the other players who
took a knee during the national anthem for “not respecting the military” and
“not respecting the flag.” Kaepernick was slandered by presidential candidate
Donald Trump. He was abandoned by the NFL, exiled from the game he

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loved. Although he was considered one of the most gifted quarterbacks in the
league, no team would hire him the next year. He put his career on the line to
use his platform to speak for those who aren’t being heard. His efforts
weren’t in vain. Because of his actions, taking a knee has come to mean
something different now.
Another bright spot for me was to see how Black Lives Matter had
spread: to meet youth in London and Paris who told me they are part of the
Black Lives Matter movement in their countries, and to learn that the
movement had spread to Brazil, South Africa, and Australia, among other
places around the world. I can’t tell you how proud I was to meet Alicia
Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, at a panel discussion.
I was heartened to hear that, as a result of the civil lawsuit that Herman,
King, and I filed, there is now an oversight board that reevaluates decisions
made by the reclassification board at Angola. Prisoners call it the “Woodfox
board.” In early 2017, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and
Corrections partnered with the Vera Institute of Justice for a two-year study
of Louisiana’s prisons, with the objective of reducing the use of solitary
confinement. The Vera Institute program, called the Safe Alternatives to
Segregation Initiative, had already been rolled out in Nebraska, Oregon,
North Carolina, New York City, and New Jersey. I am encouraged by other
actions. In 2018 the New Orleans activist group VOTE (Voice of the
Experienced), formed by former prisoners, launched a “Stop Solitary”
campaign in conjunction with the ACLU and others to end solitary
confinement in Louisiana. The ACLU offers online tools and contacts for
activists in every state to participate in Stop Solitary campaigns. In May
2018, after more than 40 years as a punitive place of torture at Angola prison,
Camp J was closed. At its peak, Camp J held 400 prisoners in solitary cells
for longer than 23 hours a day. Prison officials cited the deterioration of the
building’s infrastructure as the reason for the closure rather than admit that
Camp J was a form of solitary confinement and brutal treatment. The
infrastructure at Camp J had been deteriorating for decades.
Herman wanted our suffering to be for something, not in vain. He hoped
knowing about his life, my life, and King’s life could somehow help change
the way prisoners are treated; the way security officers are trained; the way
biased police departments, DA offices, and courtrooms operate. When King
and I are in public, Herman is with us as we speak out against solitary

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confinement. He’s with us as we educate people about political prisoners in
America. One of our biggest concerns is that people do not realize that there
are political prisoners in the United States, men who were set up by
COINTELPRO and similar illicit actions decades ago and are still in prison:
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur, Jamil Abdullah Al-
Amin, Leonard Peltier, and many others, all repeatedly denied parole, denied
release, denied justice.
Herman is with us as we call for people to come together and speak as
one voice to demand congressional hearings on the clause in the 13th
Amendment that legalizes slavery within prison walls. He’s with us when we
ask people to understand that there are wrongful convictions in this country.
We were the tip of the iceberg. Bias, prejudice, racism, laziness, and an
aggressive “need to win” mentality on the part of district attorneys’ offices
and others haunt our “halls of justice.” One hundred and thirty-nine
wrongfully convicted people were exonerated and released from prison in
2017, according to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE). On average,
each was incarcerated for a little over ten and a half years. Government
officials—defined as police, prosecutors or other government agents—abused
their authority in more than half of the cases.
Herman is with us when we speak out about criminal justice issues that
have an impact on the poor. In just one example, bail for poor people today is
as much of a problem as it was when I was in the Tombs back in 1970.
Excessive bail for petty crimes keeps people locked in public and private
prisons. It’s a business. The overwhelming majority of people held in city
and county jails have not been convicted of a crime; many of them simply
can’t afford bail. Too often the families of people in jail have to choose
between paying bail or buying groceries. The cost to these human beings who
can’t make bail cannot be calculated: people lose their jobs; their children are
taken by social services. That’s just one example.
Herman is with us when we talk about abolishing solitary confinement.
People have to see solitary for what it is, morally reprehensible. Solitary
confinement is immoral. There are still more than 80,000 men, women, and
children in solitary confinement in prisons across the United States,
according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That figure doesn’t include
county jails, juvenile facilities, or immigrant detention centers. “We have
abused the practice of solitary confinement to the point where it has become
modern-day torture,” Rep. Cedric Richmond said in 2015. “Too many

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prisoners, including the seriously mentally ill and juveniles, are locked away
for 23 hours a day often with little to no due process and at steep cost to the
taxpayer. . . . Instead of being reserved for the worst of the worst, solitary
confinement is too often being overused for ‘administrative’ reasons to avoid
providing treatment for the mentally ill and rehabilitation for those who will
return to society.”
In May 2018, King and I spoke at the University of California, Santa
Cruz at a conference on the psychological and physical effects of solitary
confinement. Craig Haney, the psychologist who had met with us several
times in preparation for our civil trial, brought together the world’s experts in
the field to develop principles that would limit the use of solitary
confinement based on the scientific evidence that shows the devastating
physical and mental effects of isolation and loneliness. There was strong
support at the conference for the United Nations’ “Nelson Mandela Rules,”
which would prohibit solitary confinement for juveniles, pregnant women,
the mentally ill, the elderly, and the physically infirm and limit solitary
confinement to no more than 15 continuous days for anyone else. King and I
asked those assembled to go one step further, calling for an absolute ban on
solitary confinement, for everyone.
We need to admit to, confront, and change the racism in the American justice
system that decides who is stopped by police, who is arrested, who is
searched, who is charged, who is prosecuted, and who isn’t, as well as look at
who receives longer sentences and why and demand a fair and equal system.
Racism in police departments and in courtrooms is not a secret. It’s been
proved. Racism occurs at every level of the judicial process, from people of
color being disproportionately stopped by police (racial profiling) to their
being sentenced.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission found that between 2012 and 2016 (the
length of the study), black men got sentences 19.1 percent longer than white
men for the same federal crimes. 
A 2014 study
 published by the University of
Michigan Law School found that, all else held equal, black arrestees were 75
percent more likely to face a charge by prosecutors with a mandatory
minimum sentence than white arrestees, for the same crime.
In 2018, black people in Manhattan were 15 times more likely to be
arrested for low-level marijuana charges than whites, according to a