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

Chapter 45
“Are You Still Sane?”
Social workers used to come around the tier and ask prisoners if we wanted
to talk to them. King, Herman, and I made polite conversation with these
people but never asked for help. We knew if we did that somewhere down the
line it would be used against us. A guard could threaten you with being
moved to the Treatment Unit (TU), the “mental ward.” Once you’re taken off
the tier to TU you could come back a zombie. The drug of choice for
prisoners in those days was Prolixin. I don’t know if they overmedicated
people, or if it was the nature of the drug, but Prolixin almost made men
immobile. It broke my heart to see men on this drug. It would take them
damn near an hour to walk from one end of the hall to another. They stopped
taking showers. Their cells became filthy.
Drugs like this were referred to as “chemical restraints.” They killed the
spirit. Every once in a while, when there was a security guard on duty who
brought his humanity to the job, I asked the guard to open my door and allow
me out of my cell to help one of these patients who was out of his cell for his
hour. I swept out and mopped the prisoner’s cell and gave him a shower. The
prisoner couldn’t do anything but stand there the whole time I washed him.
Mentally ill prisoners got no help at Angola. For many years, over the late
1990s and 2000s, CCR was housed within TU. We shared a dungeon and I
would see guards gas the mentally ill prisoners being held there because they
wouldn’t stop screaming or beating on bars. These men never should have
been in the dungeon to begin with. Sometimes security guards would go into
the cell and beat on them. I couldn’t see it but I heard the blows.
In preparation for our civil trial Herman, King, and I had to meet with
psychologists. The state wanted to show we had “adjusted” to the cells and
hoped to document that we were not really harmed by being locked down 23
hours a day for decades. For our side, George Kendall wanted to know the

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true impact of solitary confinement on us.
Talking about our mental state and emotions was not easy for any of us.
In 2003, Nick Trenticosta had asked us to meet with Stuart Grassian, a board-
certified psychiatrist and former faculty member at Harvard Medical School
who was an expert studying the impact of solitary confinement. Through his
extensive research Grassian has documented what he believes is a specific
psychiatric syndrome caused by solitary confinement, characterized by panic
attacks, 
paranoia, 
hallucinations, 
hypersensitivity, 
and 
difficulty
remembering, concentrating, and thinking. According to Grassian, even after
a brief stay in solitary confinement, “a person can descend into a mental
torpor—a ‘fog’—in which alertness, attention and concentration all become
impaired.” The inability “to achieve and maintain attention is experienced as
a kind of dissociative stupor. . . . The inability to shift attention results in a
kind of ‘tunnel vision’ in which the individual’s attention becomes stuck. . . .
[Prisoners in solitary can] find it difficult to maintain a normal pattern of
daytime alertness and nighttime sleep. Some find themselves incapable of
resisting their bed during the day—incapable of resisting the paralyzing effect
of their stupor—and yet incapable at night of any restful sleep. Difficulties
with thinking and concentration, obsessional thinking, depression, anxiety,
agitation, irritability and difficulty tolerating external stimuli [are common.]”
When I met with Grassian I felt vulnerable. I wasn’t used to sharing my
deepest feelings with anyone. But I knew the barbaric practice of solitary
confinement had to stop. “The only way to survive the cell is to adjust to the
painfulness of it,” I told him. I couldn’t answer all his questions, but I tried
my best. “When you leave, you go back to your life,” I said. “I go back to my
six-by-nine-foot cell and have just minutes to erect all these layers, put all
these defenses back.” Every time I had a visit I had to break down the layers
that I used to protect my sanity and my physical safety on the tier. When I
went back to the cell, I had to put all those layers back. I had to shut my
emotional system down. I buried my emotions, so that things that would
normally touch me or move me didn’t touch me or move me. And I only had
approximately five to ten minutes between the visiting room and the cell to
do it. “It is the most painful, agonizing thing I could imagine,” I said. “But I
have to do it in order to survive.”
Herman told Grassian he missed experiences like sitting under a willow
tree after working in the field to catch a breeze in the shade. He struggled to

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describe what confinement in a six-by-nine-foot cell felt like. Tears came to
his eyes. “Pain. How do you describe pain,”
 
Herman said, hands trembling,
Grassian wrote in his report. “When I start to feel the pain, it comes too much
—like a flood. I have to stop it. . . . You suppress so much.” King, who was
already out on the street, was also interviewed by Grassian. “Perhaps the
most common theme expressed by the three men during the interviews,”
Grassian wrote, “was that of sadness and loss, and the desperate need not to
feel those feelings, for fear of being overwhelmed by them.”
Several years later a psychologist hired by the state was sent to interview
me, Herman, and King. With this psychologist, I answered questions without
digging into my personal feelings. By the end of the second interview,
though, I was getting irritated at his line of questioning and his constant
insinuation that because I could have books in my cell and I could exercise
outside three times a week for an hour, year after year of being locked down
23 hours a day was tolerable for a human being and was somehow
acceptable. At the end of my second interview with him he asked me if there
was anything I wanted to ask him. “Do you think that watching TV and being
able to buy candy in the canteen makes a difference to somebody held for
almost 40 years in maximum-security isolation?” I asked. He didn’t respond.
“Do you think being able to make phone calls alleviates the pain of sitting in
a cell 23 hours a day, year after year? It doesn’t,” I told him. “If you can’t get
out of the cell nothing they give you makes a difference. The pressure of
being in the cell never goes away. The fight for sanity never goes away. You
want me to believe that I’m OK when you know I’m not OK. I can’t give you
specifics on how being in solitary has affected me but I can tell you without a
doubt it has affected me.”
George Kendall asked me on his next visit what I had said to the state’s
psychologist. He told me the state wanted to send a second psychologist to
interview me. Maybe the first psychologist dropped out because he had an
attack of conscience, I told him. Maybe he realized that being locked in a cell
for 23 hours a day year after year was cruel and unusual punishment. We
couldn’t know for sure. Herman and I didn’t want to meet with another
psychologist from the state. The state’s lawyers fought us on that but George
and his team prevailed.
George did need us to talk to another psychologist for our side, however,
so they could prepare for our civil trial. He set up meetings for us with Craig
Haney, a professor of psychology and researcher at the University of

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California, Santa Cruz, who was world renowned for studying the effects of
solitary confinement on prisoners. Haney’s research shows that only 15 days
in solitary confinement can create anxiety, withdrawal, irritability,
hallucinations, aggression, paranoia, rage, loss of control, a sense of
impending emotional breakdown, hypersensitivity, self-mutilation, and
thoughts of suicide.
Herman and I met with Haney on separate contact visits at Angola, and
he also talked to King. During one of my meetings with Haney I ordered food
in the visiting room. When my meal came the guards wouldn’t loosen the
chain on my handcuffs so I could eat. They would only remove the chain if I
went behind the screen, so Haney and I ended up meeting with the screen
between us. Haney was compassionate and knowledgeable about the impact
of solitary confinement, and I liked him, but once again I felt as though I
could only give enough to satisfy the purpose of the sessions, which was to
establish that I’d been affected by being in solitary for so long. I had to hold
on to everything else to stay sane. The fear that I might start screaming and
never stop was always with me. I don’t say that lightly. I described my
claustrophobic attacks and my problems with sleeping—the fact that I
couldn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time. I told Haney I talked to
myself all the time, that I had debates aloud with myself because there was
nobody else to talk to. When I told him about not being able to go to the
funerals of my mom and my sister, I cried. To get out of depression, I told
Haney, “I refind my core and what I believe in,” describing how I held on to
the principles, morals, dignity, and duty that I learned from the Black Panther