Around midday today [April 17th], Central Time, two men in Angola Prison in Louisiana will quietly mark the moment, 35 years ago exactly, when the bars of solitary confinement cells closed behind them. They will likely spend the moment in their 6 by 9 concrete cells reading, or writing letters to their hundreds of supporters around the world. And most of America and the rest of the world will still have never heard of them, or that in the United States of America, it is still possible to spend a life sentence in solitary confinement without interruption and without any real means of appeal. Americans shamefully imagine such things happen offshore in places like Guantanamo, or in totalitarian countries half a world away. Not here, though. Certainly not here.
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox are those men, who along with Robert King, are known as the Angola Three. (King established his innocence and was released in 2001 after almost 30 years in solitary.) Collectively, the three of them have spent 100 years in solitary confinement. Wallace asked this week, “Where is the justice?”
Two very important legal cases are wending their way through the courts on this anniversary. The criminal case addresses the now publicly documented payoffs of the state’s key witness in the murder trials. The other tackles a legal issue that could reverberate across the country — is indefinite solitary confinement a violation of the constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment?
At least once, according to Wallace, current warden Burl Cain offered to release Woodfox and Wallace back into the general population if they renounced their political views and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. (The megalomaniacal Cain is to media attention what a lobotomized moth is to an incandescent bulb; he wrote a book and has done hundreds of interviews about his “reformist” approach to penology, which involves converting prisoners to Christianity and holding the hands of those being executed so that his face would be the last they’d see before Christ’s.)
Nifong, Cain… We really know how to pick ’em to run our “justice” system, don’t we?
“The pain and suffering are everywhere, constantly with you.” The deterant here is don’t commit crime. I don’t feel sorry for prisoners.
The three men were put into solitary after being convicted of murdering a guard.
There is doubt that they did it, and more doubt about the fairness of the trial – but try to recall that there is a victim here who can’t speak for himself.
We don’t have a “Justice” system for a majority of the public. Getting caught up in what passes for our legal system is a pleasant as getting a arm caught in manufacturing machinery, and almost as damaging.
The U.S. is a fascist theocratic police state, end of story.
Next!
What do you want?
You can read it in between the lines of hundreds of threads on this blog and in countless other forums. We give lip service to the notion of justice and talk in the abstract about being innocent until proven guilty and all that warm and fuzzy stuff, but when a crime is committed the public clamours for vengeance and the governments panders to them. It’s a sick society we have and this very group is just as guilty of it.
Crimes don’t even need to be serious. One particular member of this community wanted to use SWAT teams against bicyclists who were essentially committing mass traffic violations.
And this isn’t so much a police problem (although, the police have problems). A crime is committed. A cop sizes up the situation, makes an arrest and charges are pressed. This probably shouldn’t be a very subjective process. But in court, now it is up to the system to look at who and why… circumstance… past history… all the mitigating factors… and apply a just solution with however much harshness or leniency an individual situation may warrant.
But we impose mandatory minimums and pass laws that make absolute issues of things that are shaded in gray. We hungry to feed our self-righteous indignance by focusing on blame and anger and the extraction of vengence rather than addressing the actual humans involved and seeking to understand. And from this process, we learn nothing that helps us to prevent future crimes, ensuring that the future is more bleak than hopeful.
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and what’s with the sudden moderation? It used to be so easy to post here. It’s getting to be more of a chore…
Okay… I don’t get it. Post #3 went up in a split second, but when I post from home now I get moderated.
Will someone just tell me what the secret is to being able to post at work and at home with ease.
I mean, I know I post stuff that might be rude at times, but jeeze, you know I’m not spamming you by now, right?
Okay… I don’t get it. Post #3 went up in a split second, but when I post from home now I get moderated.
Whatever piece of the blog software that handles cookies is FUBAR.
How is it legal for them to be treated differently than the general prison population for their political and religious views?
OhForTheLoveOf – Dvorak uses WP Plugins that, while effective at stopping spam, are well known for their false positive rate. Not sure why he decided to use them, as there are better solutions out there for WP…
[Uncle Dave: FYI, John is in the process of completely readjusting, and if that doesn’t work, replacing the spam catching system we use here. It’s something of a nightmare right now. We editors are periodically checking the logs for valid comments to recover but they are buried in hundreds of spam comments and the tools to view and recover are clumsy at best. One problem is that it recently stopped me from posting comments from my work computer to any story which is why I’m adding this onto Gregory’s comment.
Please be patient.]
This story should be a lesson for those that think that capital punishment is crueler and less “moral” than life imprisonment. There are worse fates than death.
#7
I agree, and those who keep on yapping about the “good ole days” forgot that there’s always something lurking behind the rainbow.
Adolf would be proud…. Gott Mit Uns!
#8, a leprechaun with a gun?
And yet, none of you hacks ask what they did to get such a punishment.
Without facts you’re as dumb as those you rail against.
A worse story is a famous, sane man who is being held in an insane asylum in America for political reasons. His name is John Hinkley. Sure, he tried to kill president Reagan, but he legally should be free right now. They jury decided he might be insane, so instead of sending him to prison, he was sent to an insane asylum. He was quickly judged sane by a psychiatrist. He was not allowed out of the asylum anyway. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans dared let him off Scot free. Of course, if they had, he wouldn’t have survived long…..
Personally, I think that all prisoners should be locked up in solitary for at least half their sentence. How much money do we tax payers have to cough up to pay guards to babysit prisoners who do nothing all day expect keep the cons from exploiting each other, dealing drugs, running criminal enterprises, hangin’ with their fellow gang bangers.
And if you have a life sentence, then you get to spend that whole sentence all by yourself. What is the point of letting you hang out, socialize, and cause trouble?
The only thing you get is a bed and fed twice a day. Anything beyond that must be earned.
If you don’t like it, then don’t do the crime.
” if they renounced their political views and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.”
What’s the f****** between this and a Taliban ran state? Oh yeah, instead of being Muslimism, it’s Christianism.
Real big difference, indeed!!!
I am not even questioning if the solitary confinement is fair or unfair (I really don’t know what happenned, even though more than 30 years is at least very odd), but only the link between that confinement and their religion and political views… It is indeed a theocracy based fascism.
And yet, none of you hacks ask what they did to get such a punishment.
Murdered a prison guard. Tried and convicted.
The original post reports there is doubt they did it,, and there is some question of the fairness of the jury – fine.
But remember there is a victim here, who can’t speak for himself.
“If you don’t like it, then don’t do the crime.”
Or don’t have a name kinda sorta similar to someone who did the crime.
Or don’t have a name kinda sorta similar to someone who MIGHT do a crime, because he’s an evil Muslim.
Or don’t call your school five minutes before a bomb threat gets called in.
Or don’t publish anything critical of the Chimperor, that gets you on a “no fly list” and brands you a criminal.
#16, Ron
Debasing yourself with vengeance is something Larry the Fishbreath is good at. Uncivilized societies, Dictatorships, and Hitlerites (yup, I said it first) all excel at this.
As long as these (mostly) men are in jail they are unproductive. Current penal treatment only dehumanizes them more so they are much more likely to re-offend. Yup, you guessed right, it costs society much more to jail men like animals then to help them become productive citizens.
A worse story is a famous, sane man who is being held in an insane asylum in America for political reasons. His name is John Hinkley. Sure, he tried to kill president Reagan, but he legally should be free right now. They jury decided he might be insane, so instead of sending him to prison, he was sent to an insane asylum. He was quickly judged sane by a psychiatrist.
#15,
Your facts are a little hysterical. His Wikipedia page reports the prosecution found him sane, his defense not so much. He’s been out, unsupervised, several times, and currently has unsupervised home visits.
When you’re found not-guilty by reason of being loopy you get locked up until the head-bangers say you can go – ‘legally’ he’s there until that time.
What IS it with the commentators on this blog? You see some balanced opinion but also some terribly far left and right ones.
#20 – Not only that, most of the prisons are overfilled because of the damned black market maintenance agents, I mean drug law enforcement bureaucrats. They stuff the prisons with people who did no harm, leave the guards way overworked, and generally invite corruption into the whole system. You can’t rehabilitate when most of the prisoners didn’t really do anything wrong in the first place.
As for the “don’t do the crime” contingent, fer crissake, didn’t you notice “publicly documented payoffs of the state’s key witness in the murder trials”? Does that not throw a little sand into your mix of smug moral superiority and pointing of fingers at the prisoners?
The American Gulag???
Not a first in the good ole USA.
In the 19th century President Lincoln when confronted with the loss of tax money from the south, after the Confederate States of America was formed, gave orders to the military to lock up over 20000 political opponents.
Lincoln denied these nonviolent dissenters their right of free speech and suspended the privilege of Habeas Corpus, something only Congress in a time of war has the power to do.
Lincoln’s soldiers arrested civilians without any charges being filed, military commissions conducted trials if there were charges. These actions were ruled on by the Supreme Court and deemed unconstitutional. Lincoln ignored the ruling.
As far as I’m concerned, the government can do anything it wants to murderers.
The article says they are reading and writing letters. What else are you supposed to be able to do in prison? It doesn’t exactly seem like they are being kept in a dark dungeon.