Research Paper On Solitary Albert Woodfox

I INTRODUCTION TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT It is somewhere around three a.m. in the morning. You wake up to an empty, cold room, no larger than 60 square feet, with nothing but four walls surrounding you. You are stripped, handcuffed and taken about 30 feet outside your cell where you are allowed a brief shower. For breakfast, you are served what is comparable to dog food and quickly return back into your room. For the next 23 hours of the day, you remain completely isolated from all human contact. As the days in solitary confinement pass by, this routine persists for a total of four and a half decades. While the scenario outlined above may sound a nightmare, this is a reality to thousands of United States prisoners held in long-term solitary

What is most damning about Woodfox’s case is not only the conditions that he endured but the fact that he is innocent. In 1972, a prison guard was found with 32 stab wounds in a “black dorm” of the Angola penitentiary, the largest maximum security prison in the United States at the time. Woodfox, who identified as part of an activist group known as the Black Panthers, was the first prisoner to be interrogated on Warden Burl Cain’s claims that he was a “racist” and murdered the guard as a political act. When Woodfox would not confess, Hezekiah Brown, an inmate incarcerated close to the murder scene, was taken into questioning and insisted that he knew nothing about the murder. As Woodfox recalls, Brown was dragged out of his bed around midnight days later, harshly interrogated and was promised freedom if he helped crack the case. Brown desperately named Woodfox and two other inmates as the murders. The convicted, collectively known as the Angola Three, were charged with the stabbing murder of Brent Miller despite the use of any physical evidence linking them to the crime. Albert Woodfox, now a free man at age 69, endured four decades of injustice, denounced as a form of torture. Personal accounts of his experience allow researchers

Within this framework, individuals are considered to make rational choices, equally capable of reason and therefore shall be deemed responsible for their actions and deterred through potential threat. Today, classical thinking is evident in sentencing via the “just deserts” approach. This approach to sentencing assures that someone who is found guilty of a crime must be punished for the crime. The just deserts approach rejects individual discretion and rehabilitation – insisting “justice must be