For years the only system available to us to ask for medical treatment was this: a nurse or an EMT would come to the tier between one a.m. and three a.m. and call down the tier, “Sick call,” from the front gate, and anyone who wanted to see a doctor had to stand at attention at the bars of his cell door. They came in the middle of the night and not during the day because they didn’t give a shit about prisoner health or medical treatment. Coming at night was a way they could cut down on prisoners asking for medical care by staff.
After announcing sick call, the nurse or EMT would then walk down the tier and ask the prisoners about their symptoms, sometimes giving out over-the-counter medications on the spot. A lot of times arguments would break out, the prisoner saying things like, “You aren’t a doctor. I am in pain, I need to see a doctor.” We all knew an EMT or a nurse wasn’t qualified to do a proper examination through the bars of a cell.
Prisoners started filing lawsuits. The claim was “deliberate indifference” to serious medical needs, a violation of the 8th Amendment. A judge wouldn’t take that claim seriously unless the prisoner could demonstrate three things: that failure to treat his condition would inflict further significant injury or unnecessary pain; that there was deliberate indifference on the part of the prison, meaning that the failure to respond to a prisoner’s pain or medical need was purposeful; and that there was harm caused to the prisoner by that indifference. For prisoners at Angola that was no problem. After being flooded with lawsuits the federal courts got involved and came down on the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Angola was forced to come up with a process that would allow prisoners to see doctors.
At some point in the eighties we got a new system: sick call forms. These forms were handed out to prisoners who wanted to see a doctor. We checked off the symptoms we had from many listed on the form and there was a space where we could describe in our own words what the medical problem was. We folded the form and placed it between our bars and waited. The forms would be picked up and were, supposedly, read by a doctor who made an evaluation of which prisoners could come to the hospital and which were to be treated in their cells. If a prisoner was too sick to wait for all that, if he was throwing up, for example, or bleeding, he could declare himself an emergency and he’d be taken to the hospital, eventually.
A lot of prisoners who needed to see a doctor avoided the hospital because anyone who went—for any reason—could be written up for “malingering.” A prisoner could have visible signs of illness—be bowled over in pain, flushed with fever, spitting up blood, or have a rash that didn’t heal—and could still be accused of malingering. That happened to me in the summer of 1982. I got a rash around my waist that kept coming and going. I reported it on a sick call form and they brought me an ointment to put on the rash. Since it was summer, the heat, as usual, was unrelenting and the rash got worse. I used the ointment they gave me and wrapped toilet paper around me like a cummerbund. The rash flared up worse. When my skin started oozing pus I declared myself an emergency and after a couple of days I was taken to the hospital. They accused me of malingering, of doing something to cause the rash, because it kept coming and going. “How am I doing something that gives me a rash that goes completely around my waist?” I asked. I finally saw a doctor who scraped the scabs off me and gave me a prescription cream. Back in my cell I realized I might be having an allergic reaction to the elastic band inside my underwear. I put the medicated cream on the rash and wore my underwear inside out, rolling the elastic waistband down under my rash, and it finally cleared up. I got a write-up for going to the hospital.
If a prisoner had a life-or-death problem usually the whole tier had to take action. We’d shake the bars and holler until someone came. Once King was out on his hour and he noticed that our good friend and comrade Colonel Nyati Bolt, who had been ill for days, was lying under his bunk. The man had been to the hospital two or three times and been sent back to the tier with aspirin. Now he was under his bunk, he said, to “escape the pain from the light.” His head hurt so badly that the light hurt him through his closed eyes. King, at the risk of being beaten, refused to go back into his cell at the end of his hour until medical personnel came to the tier and took Bolt to the hospital. We later found out that Bolt was having a stroke. King may have saved his life.
For very serious illnesses, like cancer, prisoners were treated and kept at the hospital but often preferred to come back to CCR between treatments. Solitary confinement prisoners aren’t put in a regular ward in the hospital; they are locked in a room by themselves with only a bed, bench, toilet, and sink.
Years of cell confinement, lack of exercise, and low-quality food had taken their toll on my health. In my thirties, I was diagnosed with high blood pressure and put on medication. I was told to cut down on salt, a difficult task in prison when most food that can be purchased from the canteen—canned meat, chips, bottled hot peppers, instant soup—is filled with salt. I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t dwell on it. There was nothing I could do about it. For most health problems I self-medicated by running in the yard—sweating out colds and fevers, working out swollen knees and sore joints. I drank hot tea with a dab of Vicks VapoRub in it for sore throats.
If I had what I called a “sugar crash,” during which I felt faint or overly exhausted just sitting in my cell, I’d eat some candy. In my forties, I was at the hospital having a checkup when the doctor looked up from my chart and asked me, “How long have you had diabetes?” I’d never been told I had diabetes. I was put on pills, which regulated my blood sugar. Years later my mom would be diagnosed with diabetes. In my sixties, when my lawyers got me to a non-prison-doctor for the first time in 40 years, I was diagnosed with hepatitis C. I didn’t ever think about the sadness of it, or the pain of it, or the unfairness. My attitude about my health has always been: I’m alive, keep moving.
Chapter 29
The Shakedown and the Sham
of the Reclass Board
Shakedowns are always part of prison. When we first got to CCR in the seventies they shook down our cells almost every day—sometimes five or six times a day—as a form of harassment. Back then freemen knew if they disrespected our possessions we’d eventually get into physical altercations with them and it gave them an excuse to gas or physically beat us. Until we won our lawsuit against strip searches in 1978, a shakedown always started with prisoners being forced to strip out of all our clothing and go through the humiliating act of raising genitals, lifting feet, opening mouth, bending over and spreading cheeks for visual inspection; then we got dressed and were put in restraints, taken out of our cells, and forced to stand against the opposite wall. After our lawsuit they couldn’t strip-search us before a shakedown, but we were always put in restraints and had to go into the hall to stand against the wall.
In the eighties, there were two types of shakedown crews. One crew worked all over the prison and did shakedowns all day, every day, looking for drugs, weapons, or other forms of serious contraband; they usually didn’t bother with minor violations like having too many Styrofoam cups, magazines, or books. The in-house shakedown crews looking for minor violations worked at CCR. The policy in CCR was to shake down two cells every day on each shift—four shakedowns a day on each tier. So each of us had a cell shakedown at least once every four days, sometimes more. The sergeant could order an “extra” shakedown at any time.
The way we—and our possessions—were treated during a shakedown depended on the security guards doing it. Some came into the cell like an invasion, going through our personal belongings, reading our personal mail. They would flip the mattress, throw our possessions on the floor, and walk on our things. They were allowed to open legal mail but they weren’t supposed to take it out and read it. Some made us stand facing the wall while the shakedown crew tore our cells apart behind us. That was horrible because you couldn’t see what they were doing, you could only hear it.
A lot of prisoners would argue with the guards, then they’d be written up for “defi
ance” or “threatening an officer” and be taken to the dungeon. I had learned not to let them provoke me to that point. The only time I spoke was when they started reading my legal mail. I’d say, “You can’t read my legal mail, you know that.” I never showed any emotion on my face. Killing them, beating them up, spitting on them, cussing them out—all of that was going through my mind. If, in that moment, any of us could have gotten our hands on them without restraints, there is no telling what might have happened.
Then there were the guards we called “robocops,” the ones who weren’t cruel but who followed the rules to the letter. We were only supposed to have six pairs of underwear, six T-shirts, and six pairs of socks. Anything over that the robocop threw into the hall. Whatever he said we weren’t supposed to have—extra newspapers, envelopes, postage stamps, magazines—went into the hall. An extra sheet or blanket (we were officially allowed to have only one of each) would be thrown into the hall. All of it would be swept into a pile and swept off the tier by the orderlies who went through the piles and took whatever they could for themselves.
Other guards had a kinder attitude and let you keep an extra pair of socks; they wouldn’t drop your photos on the floor or empty your lockers. Some didn’t even do the shakedown but just checked off in the book that they did. They would put you in restraints in the hall and come into your cell and sit on your bunk and flip through a magazine for 10 or 15 minutes and leave. Almost every prisoner had what we called a “shot book,” a spiral-bound notebook that had pictures of women cut out of magazines glued into it: movie stars wearing thong bikinis or models in underwear and nude pictures from porn magazines. These books were passed around and traded all over CCR. Some prisoners made or bought shot books just to have one on hand for when the freeman came in to shake down the cell. They left it on their bunk during a shakedown in hopes the guard would sit on the bed and look at it and forget about doing the shakedown.
Most of the time, though, during a shakedown my cell was ransacked. All the contents of my boxes—letters, photographs, toiletries—were scattered; all my books were spread all over the floor and my bunk. It took hours to put everything back together again. I “reshelved” all my books on the floor in a row against the wall. I folded and put my clothes away along with my photograph albums, writing materials, mail, and paperwork into two steel boxes under my bed. To keep the insects out I usually put things like toothpaste and food in empty bleach bottles I’d cut in half. Sometimes the shakedown crew would throw the bleach containers into the hall along with the Coke can I used to heat water for ramen noodles or hot cocoa. Sometimes they left those things.
When the federal government took over running Angola in the seventies as a result of the Hayes Williams lawsuit, one of the concessions the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections had to make in the consent decree was to create a way to review prisoner housing at Angola. For prisoners housed in segregation, the lockdown review board—which we called the “reclassification,” or “reclass,” board—was supposed to review each prisoner’s housing assignment every 90 days to determine if he still needed to be locked down, or if he could be released into the general population. The reason given on paper for locking down me and Herman in CCR was, “Original reason for lockdown.” Prisoners always had the option to attend these hearings, and for years I went to them, even though it was immediately clear to me there was no way a prisoner could “work” his way out of CCR. There were no guidelines established that if followed by prisoners, would require the reclass board to move them to less-restricted housing. Prisoners were simply moved around at the whim of the officials in charge. If officials needed a cell in CCR, they moved a CCR prisoner into a dorm in the main prison, and someone new moved into his cell. We saw men who were behavioral problems, men who had recent write-ups for violence against prisoners, and men who had just been in the dungeon get out of CCR in this way. We saw a prisoner who pulled a knife on the warden get released from CCR. Herman, King, and I—with no behavioral problems and few write-ups—would never be released.
In the early years, they kept us there out of hatred and for revenge. They had talked themselves into believing that Herman and I killed Brent Miller and that King was involved. (From the day King arrived at Angola, in May 1972, his file said he was in CCR because he was being “investigated” for the murder of Brent Miller, even though Miller was killed a month before King arrived at the prison.) Then, they kept us locked down because of our political beliefs. They knew through our actions over many years at CCR that we weren’t regular prisoners, that we were different. We constantly wanted to change our environment. We were able to unify prisoners. We believed in the principles of the Black Panther Party. Years later this was confirmed when warden Burl Cain made statements under oath that we were being held in CCR because of our “Pantherism.” In a 2008 deposition he said he wouldn’t let me out of CCR even if he believed I was innocent of killing Brent Miller. “I would still keep him in CCR,” he said. “I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them [Woodfox and Wallace]. He [Woodfox] has to stay in a cell while he is at Angola.”
The CCR lockdown review board was usually made up of a major or captain and a reclassification officer. Normally, the prisoner would stand before the officers in front of a table while his case was being reviewed. When I went before the board they didn’t even look up while they signed the paper indicating I was staying in CCR. I was never once asked a question at a reclass board. I never once had the impression that anyone ever opened my file. They’d be talking among themselves about hunting and fishing or some other subject and slide my signed paperwork keeping me in CCR to the corner of the table. Sometimes they’d be signing the paper while I was walking into the room. Once in a while the major on duty would say, “Why do you keep coming to the board, Woodfox? You know we can’t let you out.” Even the tier guards knew it was a waste of our time to go to the board meetings. They’d call down the tier to tell us the board was meeting and ask us if we wanted to go. If we said yes they’d say, “Why? You ain’t getting out.” At some point, I stopped going to the reclass board. It was a hassle to get all the restraints on just to stand before the table for a few seconds. After I quit going the tier sergeant would bring the signed paper keeping me in CCR and put it between the bars in my cell every 90 days.
We didn’t have the wars on the tier in the eighties that we had in the seventies. The inmate guards were long gone; there were black correctional officers hired; and, after a decade, many of the people working the tiers hadn’t known Brent Miller. A lot of guards, white and black, spent 12 hours a day on the tier and got to know prisoners and didn’t hate them. They worked at Angola to feed their families and pay their bills. They could see that Herman, King, and I weren’t bullies, we weren’t violent, we weren’t racist. We were polite. Many told us they were taught in the Department of Corrections training academy that we were examples of the “worst of the worst.” They were shocked when they got to know us. Some officers told me and Herman they thought we were innocent; they didn’t believe we killed Brent Miller.
There were always guards, however, who enjoyed the absolute power and control they had over another human being, guards whose whole life and identity were tied up in the way they acted out against prisoners. One of those guards once opened my cell door so another prisoner could jump me. This prisoner was a real bully and troublemaker and everybody knew he and I didn’t get along. One day when he was out on his hour he came and stood in front of my cell door. I got up and started to walk to the cell door. I knew something was about to happen or he wouldn’t be standing there. Then my door opened. He tried to come into my cell; we fought and I beat him up. I was written up for fighting and sent to the dungeon, even though I was obviously defending myself. I wrote to the
warden, asking him to investigate the guard who had opened my cell door. I never received a response. Years later the state tried to say this write-up showed how violent I was, to use it as an excuse for keeping me in CCR.
Chapter 30
Comrades
None of us thought we would live long in CCR. From the beginning, we thought they moved us there to kill us. We had come to terms with that. But we survived. A large part of my ability to stay true to revolutionary struggle was the example that Herman and King set. I never had to question their loyalty. Their actions spoke louder than words. One of my favorite sayings is “The mouth can say anything but the ass is proof.” When you put your ass behind what comes out of your mouth, that’s what counts. Herman and King were never hypocritical, never saying one thing and doing something else. They lived their lives putting their asses where their mouths were. Because of that I trusted them. It took me years to really know them as individuals, and in those years, gradually, grew very strong friendships and love.
Herman Wallace was raised in the 13th Ward of New Orleans, not far from where I grew up. Since he was six years older than me I never knew him on the street. Like all black men of my age in the South he became aware of racism early. “Everything was segregated, from outhouse toilets to indoor churches,” he once wrote. “You couldn’t look white men in the eye, you had to have your head down when you walked around, all socially designed to keep African Americans as an inferior people.” When he was eight years old he started shoplifting food to help feed his eight siblings. He pulled a wagon to the scrapyard in New Orleans when it was closed on Sundays to pick up all the loose pieces of copper and aluminum he could find from the yard. The following Saturday he pulled his wagon back to the scrapyard to sell those pieces, using the money to help his siblings. He would later write that he did his “ultimate best” to be there for his family. “I chopped the wood to keep the house warm and for cooking,” he wrote. “I washed clothes on a scrubbing board long before we got a washing machine. I ironed the family’s clothes, plaited my sisters’ hair before we went to school.” On the street, he protected his sisters.
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