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

party as we knew it were in ruins. Herman and I still didn’t know that; we
didn’t even know what COINTELPRO was.) Freemen came onto the tier to
taunt us, telling us we were going to die in the electric chair. They told us
we’d be put first in line for the chair, ahead of everyone else waiting for
execution.
The beatings of prisoners in retribution for Brent Miller’s death did not
stop with us. Prison administrators felt the need to reestablish control of the
prison and the way they chose to do it was through fear and by using
brutality. We heard through the grapevine that prisoners were beaten for days
and that prison officials allowed local deputies and farmers from outside the
prison to come in and “help.” Some men were dragged from their cells in the
middle of the night for “questioning.” A prisoner named Shelly Batiste wrote
an account of the abuse that he managed to get out of the prison. It was
published in the Black Panther newspaper:
Prisoners were beaten unmercifully . . . left to suffer from head and body injuries and acute burns
with no medical attention. We were all locked in 5' by 8' cells (in groups of four, five and six,
etc.). We are unable to sleep because there is only one mattress in each cell. The food is cold and
has been cut. We aren’t allowed to shower. . . . The guards have come to the dungeon several
nights, in consecutive order, dragged Brothers out of their cells, through arbitrary selection, for
looking like what they have called militant and then have beaten these Brothers unmercifully. One
Brother in Angola, Wayne, was so viciously beaten he had to be taken to a hospital in Baton
Rouge, and a guard checks his cell every hour to see if he is still living. The others who weren’t
beaten nearly to death were made to sit while 2, 3 or 4 pigs cut their hair in all directions, then

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made to crawl back in their cells. Their shock treatment consists of baseball bats, iron pipes, pick
handles, gas and mace sprayed in Brothers’ faces, so those who attempt to fight off the blows can’t
see. The Brothers who weren’t locked down, but continued to work in the fields are being worked
seven days a week; shots are being fired at them. They can’t get out of line, they’re beaten with
bats and forced to say they are “whores”; and after these sadistic accomplishments, they are forced
to finish working in a badly bruised condition.
The day Brent Miller was killed, Deputy Warden Lloyd Hoyle was
interviewed by the New Orleans 
Times-Picayune
and told a reporter there
was no explanation for the incident. On the morning of April 18, the paper
published his account. “The thing we’ve got to remember,” Hoyle said, “is
that we’ve got quite an adverse-type population up here. It could have been
any number of things.” Hoyle also said there was no information to link the
incident of the guard being burned in the shack on the 16th with Miller’s
murder.
Sometime that day or the next morning, Warden Henderson gave
reporters a different story. In the afternoon edition of the 
State-Times
newspaper on April 18—the day after Deputy Warden Hoyle told reporters
there “could have been a number of things” behind the guard’s murder—
Warden C. Murray Henderson was quoted as saying that “black militants”
murdered Brent Miller and that his “investigation” into Miller’s killing had
already turned up “four or five prime suspects.” (Going by the timing of this
published report Henderson blamed “black militants” before every black
prisoner on the walk had even been questioned. No white prisoners had been
interviewed at this time.) Henderson also told the paper that on the previous
Sunday, the day the guard was burned and the day before Miller was killed,
prison officials had “intercepted” a typewritten letter that was addressed to
the Baton Rouge