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

Chapter 43
Torture at Camp J
In March 2002, U.S. Magistrate Judge Docia Dalby ruled that our civil suit
against cruel and unusual punishment could move forward. “Given the
natural limits on the length of human life, especially one in prison, it is
difficult to imagine a more atypical or extraordinary confinement,” she wrote.
Thirty years in solitary confinement, she continued, is “far beyond the pale.”
The retaliatory harassment against us started almost immediately. Prison
officials targeted Herman. A shakedown crew showed up at his cell early one
morning. They didn’t find any contraband. A different crew came at eight
p.m. the same day, searching his cell again, finding nothing. The next day,
while Herman was out on the yard, his cell was shaken down again: the third
time in two days. This time a guard “found” a handmade handcuff key, what
we call a “shim.” Herman was immediately placed in the dungeon. Four days
later he was brought before the disciplinary board. He denied having a shim
and asked if he could pay for a lie detector test to prove it. They refused to let
him take the test and sentenced him to Camp J for the six-month program, but
first he had to spend 30 days in the dungeon.
They put him in the dungeon at Camp J. Herman wrote to me saying it
seemed like prison officials were intentionally moving mentally ill prisoners
out of their normal housing—the Treatment Unit (TU)—to put them in the
dungeon with him. These prisoners, he wrote, “would scream, holler and talk
to themselves all through the day and night.” When one stopped, he said,
another started. “It was as if they were doing shifts to keep the noise going.”
Herman wrote to the Camp J warden about his concern that keeping the
mentally ill men in the dungeon was aggravating their conditions. He wrote
to supporters asking them to call the prison to complain. Eventually he got
word to us that Angola’s lead psychiatrist finally spoke up and moved the
prisoners back to their regular housing at TU.

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After his 30 days in the dungeon Herman was put at Level 1 in Camp J.
He wasn’t getting enough food and had no way to buy any because Camp J
prisoners could only buy food out of the canteen when they were on Level 3.
After 30 days at Level 1, when he was supposed to be moved to Level 2,
Herman was held back to do another 30 days at Level 1. I hated that they
were persecuting Herman and not me. We always thought they didn’t fuck
with both of us at the same time because they didn’t want what they were
doing to be obvious. In their minds they could have deniability. They also
knew that I knew what was going on at Camp J and they knew it affected me.
That spring, Scott Fleming met the UK-based human rights activist and
founder of The Body Shop, Anita Roddick, out in California. He told her
about us. She was shocked that we’d been in solitary confinement for 30
years and immediately wrote about us on her blog. “No major media outlet
has shown any interest at all,” she wrote. “I hereby challenge the media: tell
the story of the Angola Three. The truth might just set them free.” To my
surprise she wrote to me, asking to be put on my visitors list. In August 2002,
she came for a contact visit.
Very few people surprise me. Anita was like nobody I’d ever met before.
A highly successful, world-renowned business mogul, founder of The Body
Shop, and human rights activist was visiting me in a maximum-security
cellblock in Louisiana, and she couldn’t have been more at ease. She was
intelligent, funny, and irreverent, so I was comfortable with her. She was
humble, which impressed me. Her passion and enthusiasm for people and
human rights and prisoners’ rights were obvious. Her knowledge of social
justice issues was extensive; her sincerity was pure. We talked about
everything, no holds barred. She asked me, a man who had been in solitary
confinement for three decades, if I missed having sex. I told her yes. She
made me laugh. When we rose to say good-bye after that first visit we
hugged and she was smiling hard. “I was just thinking about the huge party
we’re going to have when you and Herman get out of here,” she said.
In September, she wrote about our visit on Counterpunch.org:
I know the question people will ask when they hear I’ve taken up the cause of the Angola Three:
Why me, why now, why 12,000 [miles] around the world to a remote prison to take up this case?
And I am reminded of a quote I read on the wall of an Indian bank years ago. It was Gandhi who
said, “Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the
following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and
ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.”

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Albert Woodfox is not weak, by any means. But he, like his compatriots Herman Wallace and
Robert [King], is worth my efforts and the efforts of all who believe that you must fight injustice
where you find it.
Anita’s husband, Gordon, asked Herman to put him on his list and went
to see him at Camp J. On her next visit to me, Anita told me we didn’t have
to worry about raising money for lawyers anymore. Our support committee,
which had been holding bake sales to try to help us financially, could focus
on publicity and political actions now. Anita came back several times,
sometimes with Brooke Shelby Biggs, a journalist who worked with Anita
and who got on Herman’s list; when Herman was not at Camp J, we could all
visit together. Anita and Gordon Roddick changed our lives, ramping up the
volume on our case immediately. When constant requests to the mainstream
press failed to expose our stories, Anita paid to place ads about us in national
magazines. She wrote about us on her blog and spoke about us and the abuses
of solitary confinement to the BBC and British newspapers, which were more
receptive than the mainstream American press. She talked about us wherever
she went.
On October 2, 2002, Scott filed my application for postconviction relief.
So much work had gone into it. I wondered how I could ever thank Scott. He
worked so hard and made so many personal sacrifices to get to this point.
About a week later Herman and I were sent programs for the 35th-
anniversary reunion of the Black Panther Party through the mail by a friend. I
got a note from the mail room telling me I wouldn’t be allowed to have it
because it was “gang related.” The note told me it was returned to sender.
The program sent to Herman, however, was delivered to his cell at Camp J.
Shortly afterward, a guard went into his cell and confiscated it. Herman
immediately wrote to the warden asking about rules concerning mail being
confiscated at Camp J. He never got a response. The next day several
lieutenants came to his cell door telling him to pack up all his property. He
had been at Camp J for six months so he thought they were taking him back
to CCR. Instead he was escorted to Cuda, the Camp J building that held the
dungeon, where all his possessions had been dumped and scattered across the
lobby floor. They walked him through the lobby as officers were
intentionally manhandling his property. He saw photographs of his family
members on the floor; guards kicked his toiletries across the room; all this
was “staged to provoke rage,” he wrote to a friend. “I chose to bite my tongue
and said nothing other than to ask the reason I was being placed in the

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dungeon. I was told I would find out sooner or later.” On October 28, after 17
days in the dungeon, Herman was taken to disciplinary court and learned he
was found guilty of having “racist and gang-related” material—the program
for the 35th-anniversary Black Panther Party event. They sentenced him to
three more months at Level 2, suspending the sentence for 90 days to prolong
his time there, and gave him 30 days of cell confinement. “It’s a torture of the
mind,” Herman wrote, “giving someone privileges and then finding a way to
snatch them from you. It’s to demean you. To control you.” They put him in
a cell with 24-hour cameras trained on him.
Two weeks later Herman was back in his regular Camp J cell when his
door opened at 6:20 a.m. and he was told to go to the front of the tier. He was
locked in the shower while his cell was shaken down again. Guards came and
took him out of the shower and put him in the dungeon. After two days, the
warden told him the shakedown crew found a screwdriver and a shim in his
cell. He was once again sentenced to Level 1. “My prison record has been an
exemplary one,” Herman wrote to a supporter. “I have never been charged
with having a handcuff key, shim or knife, ever . . . but now, at the age of 61,
I’m being accused of possessing contraband.” His cell was shaken down
weekly, he pointed out. “What sense would it make for me to leave such
dangerous contraband in my cell knowing the harm it could bring me?”
Herman started documenting the experiences of the other prisoners from
the Camp J dungeon, telling those who were willing to share their stories
publicly that he would make sure people in the outside world would know
about them. One prisoner told him he’d been held in four-point restraints for
13 days. Another was charged two dollars on three occasions for Mace used
against him. One was writing a letter to his mother in his cell one day when a
guard told him to remove the skullcap he had on, which he wore when he
recited his prayers. When he didn’t remove it right away he was gassed, and
during the gassing he fell onto his cell floor and went into a seizure. When he
regained consciousness, he was being beaten for not getting up when ordered,
while being unconscious. Another prisoner told Herman he was losing the
feeling in his arms after being forced for months to have his hands cuffed
behind his back whenever he left his cell. One prisoner told Herman he had
reached a point where he was afraid he might hurt himself. When he asked
authorities for help he was gassed. He wrote to Herman: “They are refusing
me mental and medical treatment so I’m cutting myself to get help.” The
prisoner unscrewed a lightbulb that night, broke it, and cut himself. “I won’t

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take it anymore—ever again,” he wrote to Herman. He was taken to the
hospital, his wounds were sewn up, and he was put back in his cell. The next
day the prisoner was taken to a disciplinary board hearing, where he was
moved back to Level 1 and given 30 days of cell confinement. He was told he
had to pay for his medical treatment, for ambulance transport, and for the
lightbulb he broke. After disciplinary court, he was put back in his cell and
the guard mistakenly left him wearing the jumpsuit he wore to the hearing.
The prisoner took off his jumpsuit and looped it around the top bar of his cell
door and tried to hang himself with it. An inmate “tier walker,” paid 20 cents
an hour to watch for suicidal behavior, saw him hanging, grabbed his legs
through the bars, and held him up while everyone on the tier screamed and
called for help. When the warden and a colonel arrived, they accused the tier
walker of giving the prisoner the jumpsuit he used to hang himself. “I’m
smack in the middle of this madness,” Herman wrote to a friend.
Herman managed to get the stories of the Camp J prisoners out to artist
Rigo 23, a longtime supporter and friend, and Rigo put these stories, along
with excerpts of Herman’s letters and interviews with the other prisoners,
into a booklet. “No one should have to put up with such cold barbarism as
you would find here,” Herman wrote to Anita Roddick in 2002, in a letter
that she posted online. “No one should allow it to go on; unfortunately, for
right now, it is still going on. Every day, more and more of our spirit reaches
out and looks out from behind these walls of shame.”
Angola warden Burl Cain, interviewed by the New Orleans