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The Angola Two

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They started out as the “Angola Four.”

The year was 1972. The Spring. The March breeze had given way to April’s swamp like humidity at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as “Angola.”

The sprawling 18,000-acre prison plantation’s two main crops, cotton and sugarcane, did not sit well with the increasing “black militancy” fomenting among the prison’s African-American inmates—most of whom had graduated out of New Orleans “housing projects” to the city’s notorious Parish Prison in the first leg of their journey to Angola. The prison had the well-deserved reputation of being “the bloodiest prison in America.”

A militant political stew had come to a quick boil in the nation’s prison system after the Attica Prison Riot that occurred the previous September—an uprising that left 33 inmates and 10 prison personnel dead in its wake. The riot found its seeds in the death of “black militant” writer/activist George Jackson who was killed during a bloody escape attempt from San Quentin Prison on August 21, 1971.

Attica was emblematic of prisons across the nation that had become cauldrons of violent political unrest as African-American inmates—interchangeably referred to as “black militants” or “Black Panthers”—began to demand better living conditions and more humane personal treatment.

That spring of ’72, I was a 27-year-old inmate housed on Louisiana death row waiting for an almost certain trip to the state’s electric chair. I kept up with the black militancy at a distance: television, books, magazines, and underground information channels. There were 46 of us on death row living in anticipation of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia—a decision that in June 1972 declared the death penalty nationwide to be unconstitutional as it was then being applied. Louisiana death row inmates were eventually resentenced to life imprisonment.

Twelve days after the start of the Attica riot, a U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge decided Sinclair v. Henderson—the first prisoners’ rights legal decision in Louisiana. Under the legal direction of a young civil rights attorney, Richard Hand, the lawsuit got the federal court to declare long term solitary cell confinement, such as death row, cruel and unusual punishment. The federal court decision also afforded procedural due process requirements in the prison’s disciplinary process: right to a rule book, right to a written disciplinary report, right to a disciplinary hearing, and right to appeal any adverse decision.

In 1971 that was landmark litigation. The “Sinclair Decision,” as it became known, would ultimately open the door to other “reforms” at Angola cementing my jailhouse lawyer reputation both in the prison community and the state’s judicial system. The decision also played a role in one of Angola’s most infamous incidents—the April 1972 killing of Angola prison guard Brent Miller.

In the months after the Attica riot, New Orleans Rep. Dorothy Mae Taylor, the first African-American elected to the Louisiana Legislature since Reconstruction, had become a “radical” voice in the state’s political system. The outspoken lawmaker set her reform sights on Angola. Her interest in Angola ignited the budding, though spirited “black militancy” at the prison. The prison white redneck security regime reacted by locking up scores of African-American inmates in a brutal maximum security unit known as “CCR” [Close Custody Restriction]. One of the three tiers in the unit was designated the “Panther Tier.”

That tier was located directly above death row. In compliance with the Sinclair Decision, prison officials had constructed an “exercise yard” outside the death row cellblocks. The yard was below the Panther Tier allowing communications between the militants and death row inmates.

Several of the militants wanted a copy of the 52-page legal memorandum Richard Hand had prepared in connection with my lawsuit. That memorandum had been declared “contraband” by prison officials because they believed the legal information in it posed a “threat to prison security.” They would only allow it in my possession because it was “legal mail.” I was warned not to share it with other inmates.

Nonetheless, I got a mimeograph copy made of the memorandum and smuggled it into the Panther Tier. Several of the militants used the memorandum as a guide to craft their own lawsuit challenging the conditions on the Panther Tier.

Fearing a second Sinclair Decision and continued prison involvement by Rep. Taylor, Warden C. Murray Henderson instructed his Deputy Warden Lloyd W. Hoyle to release all the militants off the Panther Tier. This action infuriated the prison’s white security staff.

I was hailed a hero by some of the released militants who sent me a lot of “right on, comrade” messages. Henderson and Hoyle, however, saw me in a different light. I was the “trouble-making motherfucker” who had backed them into a corner by distributing the “contraband” memorandum.

Then it happened.

A young white prison guard named Brent Miller was stabbed to death on April 17, 1972 in Pine One, an all-black dormitory on the prison’s Big Yard.

The prison’s redneck regime went crazy. They deputized dozens of local Ku Klux Klan farmers and brought them into the prison. Hundreds of African-American inmates, all designated with the “black militant” label, were locked up in various maximum security cellblocks with as many as five inmates to a cell. There were wholesale beatings and torture inflicted on the “militants” in an effort to find out who killed Miller, and why.

Within weeks four African-American inmates were named the killers: Herman “Hooks” Wallace, Albert Woodfox, Gilbert Montegut, and Charles “Noxzema Black” Jackson.

They quickly became known as “The Angola Four.” 

The prison’s security staff believed Miller’s killing happened for several reasons: Hoyle’s release of the militants from the Panther Tier, the Sinclair Decision, and Rep. Taylor’s activism. Several days after Miller’s killing, one of his brothers, who was also employed at the prison, threw Hoyle through an office plate glass window in the prison’s administration building disfiguring him for life. He would later win a large civil judgment against the state for the attack.

The “Angola Four” quickly dwindled.

Noxzema Black became a state witness against the others. Gilbert Montegut, who was mentally challenged, was found guilty of manslaughter and eventually released from Angola. Woodfox and Wallace were convicted and received life sentences. They would ultimately become “The Angola Two.”

In October 2013, a federal judge freed the 71-year-old terminally ill Wallace into hospice care in New Orleans where he died less than a week later. He had spent the previous 41 years in solitary confinement.  Woodfox was released nearly three years later in February 2016 after having his conviction reversed and ordered released by a federal court. He had spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement.

In 2001, after the publication of my prison memoir, “A Life in the Balance,” I was contacted by a New York supporter of The Angola Two. After reading the memoir, the supporter had a “gut feeling,” as he described it to me, that I had information about the Brent Miller killing.  I told him that I did have some information about the case (namely, the name of an African American inmate who told me in 1973 that he stabbed Miller to death and chronicled to me all the events leading up to the killing) but I did not know how valuable it would be to the Angola Two case.

The supporter arranged a meeting between me and Scott Fleming, an Oakland-based attorney representing The Angola Two. I described to Fleming the 1973 conversation I had with the close friend who gave me a detailed account of how and why the Brent Miller killing took place. The information exonerated Wallace and Woodfox. I had no way of verifying the veracity of the account. It was simply prison information I stored away in the recesses of my brain for 30 years.

Certain aspects of the information intrigued Fleming because it either corroborated or fit into a chronology of other information he had developed about the case. I provided him with a sworn affidavit to use as he saw fit in his effort to free “The Angola Two.”

There are times when each of us, including those in prison, must make choices that are not in our best interests. Our moral compass demands that we make those choices. I had no allegiance with The Angola Two. I had several conversations with Wallace in 1974 but nothing that made us “comrades.”

In 2001, with Scott Fleming at my doorstep, I was embroiled in an all out war with the Louisiana prison system—the impact of my memoir was sending backlash ripples throughout the system. The memoir war came on the heels of my exposure to an investigative, Peabody awarding winning journalist/friend about the relationship between the chief judge of a federal appeals court, a serial pedophile priest, and the corrections secretary of the Louisiana prison system. Those revelations had spawned two criminal investigations, a state legislative investigation, and a judicial ethics investigation—not to mention the national and international media attention it generated in other venues.

The last thing I needed at that juncture was to become involved in the political war the state’s prison system was waging against The Angola Two. Fleming recognized the inherent danger of my position and assured me he would provide me with as much protection as he could. But he wanted the information I had. I gave it to him.

That’s the thing about choices. Make them and be prepared to accept their consequences. In that context, the two black lives of The Angola Two mattered more than my own self-interests.

Two months later I was denied parole for the fifth time. The politics of my case, the official hostility generated by my memoir, and the fallout from the judge/priest pedophilia disclosure all factored into the denial. Then a few weeks later an assistant warden whispered to me, “you should have stayed out of The Angola Two case.”

You don’t always get a chance to pick your battles in prison. Sometimes they get right up in your face and slap the fuck out of you, forcing you to respond back twice as hard.

But the battles leave indelible scars on the spirit, deep within the basin of the soul. There’s no denying it.

Two years before my 2006 release from the Louisiana prison system, my wife saw and knew what battle scar tissue had done to my soul.

“It’s time for you to get on the back of the wagon and let me drive it the rest of the way home,’ she said to me one day as she held my hand during a visit.

And she did – like a warrior giant.

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That white boy called Mark

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Prison is an ugly place. Its physical structures are designed to reinforce a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness.

Casual cruelty is a fixture in these ugly places. It occurs on a daily basis among the kept and too often between the keeper and the kept.

The medical cage was cruel. It was nothing more than an inmate holding pen located one floor below the basement in the New Orleans Charity Hospital before the hospital was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. It would accommodate about two dozen shackled inmates who had been transported to the hospital from prisons across the state for medical treatment not available in the prison setting. Inmates waited for hours manacled in the cage to “see the doctor.”

The medical cage was filthy, which personified the entire hospital. The sub-basement area reeked from odors of filth, infection, and disease. The floor of the medical cage was seldom, if ever, mopped. Dirt and grime were etched both into the floor and walls – a common characteristic of inmate holding pens. A urinal was located in the common area of the cage while a toilet was encased in a separate screened cage. Inmates needing to use the toilet were locked in the screened cage before their restraints were removed. The smell of human defecation often filled the medical cage, overwhelming all the other odors.

The inmates in the medical cage were the most sick in the state’s prison system. They were infected with cancers that needed chemotherapy and radiation; weakened and debilitated by heart disease; or handicapped with paralysis, severed limbs, or physical deformities. As their vital organs failed, they were assigned to “go to Charity for treatment.” By the time they arrived, most had become “dead men walking.”

Diseased inmates were handled and processed like hazardous waste. Each inmate had a medical horror story that generally began in the prison health care delivery system and was perpetuated by the Charity Hospital system.

It was in these system that I learned about a white boy called Mark.

I was sitting in the medical cage six months before the Katrina destroyed the facility. It was December 2004. I was waiting for an EMT – a test ordered to determine the strength of my muscles. I suffered from a severe case of ptosis – a condition so acute that I was legally blind. I had to tape my eyes open each day so I could see. Preliminary diagnosis at Charity led doctors to believe I suffered from either myasthenia gravis or Kearns Sayre Syndrome. I hoped not. I did not want to die old, weak, and crippled in prison. I would have preferred a knife in the back. There was no dignity dying old and wretched in a prison infirmary.

Sitting a few feet from me was the skeletal of what was once a man – forever bound to a wheel chair. His skinny body, nothing more than flesh over bone, was balled up into a grotesque knot in the chair. He peered at the outside world from under a soiled prison jacket that covered his entire body. His eyes were sunken into darkened holes, but amazingly his brain still functioned with clarity.

“They don’t know what I have,” he said. “I’ve begged them to cut off my right leg. It hurts so bad – the pain never stops, always throbbing, just throbbing pain. The leg’s useless now. Cut it off – stop the pain. I’ve begged them. Instead, they put me in diapers and strapped a bag on me for my piss. Just cut off the leg – give me some relief. I asked them what’s wrong with me. They say, ‘you tell us.’ They don’t even know what’s happening to me. At least they could cut off the leg.”

I was a prison reporter, much like the old “crime beat” reporters. My brain was my recorder. It was always ready to click on; to record and preserve some prison moment that would otherwise go unnoticed.

“A Buick Roadmaster was the finest car ever made,” the skeleton voice said. “My father owned one, a 1955 Roadmaster. That’s when a car really was a car – made of steel and heavy metal. The cars today are fiber glass junk – nothing but fiber glass. You can wreck one with a foot. They are as useless as my legs. But a Roadmaster – that was one fine automobile. It would take you anywhere in this country, without complaint.”

The man’s brain was still alive. It processed information and recalled memories. Now it was trapped in the shell of a body. I could only imagine the fear and pain he must have endured watching the physical body shrivel up, life gradually wasting away from its limb. Many times that brain must have recoiled in utter disbelief, horror, and, finally, hopelessness.

“You know that crazy white boy Mark at WCI,” the skeleton voice said. “You know what he did? He castrated himself! Cut his nuts out with a razor blade. He’s a crazy motherfucker. He tried to hang himself, but it didn’t work. He was in lockdown. He kept asking the freeman for a razor blade. Freeman said, ‘bitch, you ain’t gonna do shit, you just fakin’ yoah ass off.’ So the free man finally gave Mark a razor blade – and, you know, that crazy motherfucker cut his balls out. I mean he cut the whole sack off. Then he cut his throat and then he cut himself all over. There was blood everywhere in that cellblock – it took them hours to clean it all up.”

What would make a man sever his own testicles before cutting his throat?

Prison cellblocks are bastions of human madness. They are designed to punish misbehavior and confine mental health problems. The worst prison guards are assigned to supervise these cellblocks, known in the Louisiana prison system as “extended lockdown.” The guards that supervised the state’s lockdown system when I was there were brutal, ignorant, mean-spirited, sadistic, and quite often homosexual predators. They relished their positions of absolute power that allowed them to torment, harass, and agitate the inmates held captive in those man-made cages.

Extended lockdown inmates overwhelmingly suffered from a litany of mental health disorders, including retardation. The “block” was a place where they could get lost in the noise, disease, and deprivation imposed by this punitive system. Throwing feces and urine on each other was a natural dispute resolution mechanism. Every aspect of life in extended lockdown was restricted – hygiene, sleep, food, reading, writing, and faith. Something as simple as a roll of toilet tissue or a sharpened pencil became a precious commodity.

The mind and body deteriorates in that lockdown world, consumed by the monotony and the continual activity of punishment. Most lockdown inmates do not have the love of family to keep them alive with hope. They slowly suffocate from human neglect. Madness becomes preferable to reality; suicide a natural choice over life. The brutal realities of daily life in a cell can so depletes one of hope and purpose that it can force the mind to accept the hand severing the testicles.

“His balls were as useless as my legs,” the skeleton voice continued. “God, I wish I could cut off my leg. My right leg hurts so bad – and these white-coat motherfuckers don’t even know what’s wrong with me.”

Silence suddenly stilled the holding pen. Each man was quietly assessing his own life situation.

A prayer formed on my lips: “God, please do not let me die such a death.” The prayer was consumed by the silence of the moment.

“What did they do to the free man who gave Mark that razor blade?” another voice asked.

“Nothing. The bitch is still working the ‘block.’ You know they gonna protect their own. Everybody knows he gave Mark that razor blade. I mean, who really cares?”

The mixture of anger and defeat in that voice explained the kind of hopelessness that provoked Mark’s self-mutilated suicide. Life in a cellblock is so hopeless with utter despair that it can warp rational thought and cripple the heart with primitive rage. Suicide becomes a natural selection, much like choosing the best apple in the bunch.

I can only assume that is what happened to the white boy called Mark. He felt as useless as skeleton’s legs.

These are the stories my prison reporter mind recalls. They visit me every so often, a reminder of what was and a reminder of how lucky life now is.

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Kevin Coleman

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In 2001, Coleman was an inmate housed at the David Wade Correctional Center located in North Louisiana. The African American inmate was killed by a prison security one hot July morning that year.

“This is why we love our jobs,” the tall, lanky prison Colonel shouted as he stormed up and down the disciplinary cellblock tier.

“This is why we love our jobs,” the Colonel repeated as he stopped and menacingly stared into each cell at the sullen inmates, daring each to challenge his authority.

None did.

The Colonel was leading a “cell extraction team” that morning. The team was comprised of other ranking security personnel at the prison. The team had just “extracted” Coleman from his cell.

Armed with an electronic “stun shield”—a device that administers a 50,000-volt electrical charge—the extraction team had hit Coleman with three charges. The team then beat, kicked and stomped him into a submissive, fetal position before dragging him out of the cell. One of the lower ranking guards—probably trying to impress his supervisors—then jumped up and down on Coleman’s head while another guard used a water hose to wash away the feces produced by the electrical charges.

As the Colonel continued to walk up and down the tier, the two lower ranking guards continued to kick and beat Coleman’s unconscious body. This extraction process was called “non-lethal force”—a process that too often allows some out-of-control guards to inflict as much pain and physical damage to the inmate as possible.

Once the physical abuse was over, the extraction team dragged Coleman’s limp body into a cell equipped with a “restraint chair.” This torture device completely immobilizes the inmate. His head, arms, legs, and chest are tightly restrained by leather straps. The “chair,” as it is known in the prison lexicon, is supposed to be used only in extreme circumstances when an inmate is in an uncontrollable state of violence posing a serious risk to himself or others.

Kevin Coleman was found dead in the restraint chair the following day from what prison officials described as an “apparent heart attack.” Based on the detailed information that had been given to me by inmate witnesses, I suspect Coleman was dead or near complete respiratory failure when he was strapped in the chair. The three electrical charges were enough to stop his heart, not to mention the brutal beating that was more than enough to kill a mule.

There is no doubt that Coleman was a problem, even a dangerous inmate. He had been transferred from a parish jail to the Wade facility because jail officials could no longer deal with him. The paranoid schizophrenic inmate immediately became a disciplinary problem at the Wade facility, accumulating a record of disruptive and assaultive behavior. He had attacked guards and other inmates alike, refusing to cooperate with prison authority at any level and refusing to acclimate to the prison peer pressure system. Large doses of psychotropic medications could not quiet the demons that tormented him.

On the day of the cell extraction, Coleman was scheduled for a hearing in a local courtroom on an assault charge against a prison guard. He refused to put on an orange jumpsuit given to him by the security escort team assigned to take him to court. All inmates were required to wear “jumps” to the local courthouse – a practice that reflected the racism, hostility, and contempt the local officials harbored against inmates in general.

No one will ever truly know who, or what, precipitated the confrontation that morning between Coleman and the “trip officers.” Those officers were a privileged, and corrupt, group—arrogant, quick to curse and humiliate inmates being escorted to court. They would routinely lie to “get an inmate” with a disciplinary report if he refused to cooperate with their way of handling “court trips.”

Whatever motivated him that fateful morning Coleman refused to put on the jumpsuit as he instructed to do by the trip officers. Wade officials said every non-lethal measure available was used to get Coleman to cooperate and put on the jumpsuit. It was only after these non-lethal efforts failed, they said, that the cell extraction team entered the inmate’s cell with the electronic stun shield. Prison officials said only one electrical charge was inflicted, and that Coleman was still fighting and resisting after it was administered. At that point, officials said, a decision was made to put Coleman in the restraint chair.

Inmate witnesses, however, vehemently disputed that official account. They said Coleman was “hit three times” with the stun shield, brutally beaten inside his cell, and dragged out of the cell where the beating continued before he was placed in the restraint chair.

I gave my wife the details I had about Coleman’s death. She alerted the Associated Press in New Orleans about the death. They ran a story about the death that would have otherwise gone unnoticed by the public.

Wade officials rushed to do “damage control” by putting their official “spin” on Coleman’s death. They contacted officials with the American Correctional Association – a group with whom the Louisiana corrections system maintained an incestuous relationship through the ACA accreditation process – who defended the use of the restraint chair.

The local sheriff’s department said it would “investigate” the matter. That was like the fox, feathers hanging out its mouth, saying it would investigate the disappearance of the hen. Detectives interviewed several inmate witnesses who were then quickly transferred to other state penal facilities on trumped up disciplinary charges.

Kevin Coleman’s death ultimately melted away into an official black hole.

There are scores of Coleman-like deaths each year in the nation’s prison system. They are official murders that rarely garner media attention. Coleman’s death would have gone unrecorded had my wife not called the Associated Press. That media attention at least forced Wade officials to explain, or cover up, what happened.

No one should face death like Coleman faced it. His death would be “murder” in any society – except in prison disciplinary units, military torture chambers, and renegade police interrogation rooms.

There are situations in prison when force, both lethal and non-lethal, are necessary to control a violent situation, but a mentally disturbed inmate refusing to put on a jumpsuit is not one of those situations.

Official crimes are committed routinely in the world of prison – and there is no official accountability for them. No one was, or ever will be, held accountable for Kevin Coleman’s death.

And, indeed, that as why the tall, lanky Colonel loved his job.

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A Pandemic fear.

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If I should die before you wake,

Forgive

My every mistake

My every harsh word

My every disappointment

My every frailty

If I should die before you wake,

Remember

Our love began on the dark side of the mountain

We crawled through every ravine

We scaled every jagged cliff

And we reached the top together

Hand in hand

If I should die before you wake,

Know

That every moment spent with you gave me joy

That every breath I took was for and because of you

That you gave me courage in the darkness

That your every touch and grace gave my soul meaning

If I should die before you wake

Keep close

To your heart that each morning

I awaken you was precious

To the very fiber of your being

That you were my moral compass

To your soul

That my whole life was defined by your grace

If I should die before you wake

Take care

Of my boys

They were more than dogs to me

Their undying love and devotion gave life meaning

They gave me peace, protection, and purpose

They were friends in the foxhole

If I should die before you wake

Do not

Mourn for me because I will be fine

On the other side

Recall all our precious moments

The pleasures, the happiness, the gestures, the kindness

The wonderful love and life we shared

If I should die before you wake

Never

Put me in the ground

Cremate my remains

With your small hands throw them in the breeze

On our favorite cliff

And let the winds scatter them across the valley

We love

If I should die before you wake

Hold dear

To your heart that I will sit at the creek’s edge

Until you pass out of the tunnel of life

That you will cross the creek to me, I promise

And that, together, hand in hand

We will walk down the new path

God has given us

If I should die before you wake

I always loved you

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Systemic racism.

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It is a term we have heard a lot since the killing of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers last month.

But what does the term actually mean in real time?

Here is a real time personal experience I had with systemic racism.

In 1973, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as “Angola,” was under immense pressure from the U.S. Justice Department to integrate the prison. At the time Angola was known as “the bloodiest prison in America.” 

Irvin “Life” Breaux, a New Orleans African American inmate serving a life sentence, and myself were chosen by fellow inmates—and accepted by Justice Department and prison officials—to lead the integration of the prison, beginning with the “Big Yard” complex where most of the violence was taking place. We were given one week to integrate the Big Yard on a voluntary basis or face the forced integration of the prison by an armed National Guard if necessary.

 Life and I picked four other inmates, two white and two black, to help us with the one week grace period we had to complete the integration.

Although the overwhelming white, redneck guard staff opposed the integration process, the prison warden, at the encouragement of DOJ attorneys, gave me and Life unrestricted access to all the 60-man dormitories on the Big Yard. We met with the inmate population, cajoling, convincing, pressuring, negotiating with them, and even bribing white and black inmate power brokers to accept the integration deal we were proposing.

Life and I spent 18 to 20 hours a day in this negotiation process, sometimes in heated, near-violent confrontations. We had to quell rumors, allay paranoia, and constantly appeal to the power brokers’ vested interests. It was no easy task.

But our efforts paid off. We successfully integrated the Big Yard without a single fist fight, without one drop of blood being shed, and even with black and white power brokers coming together to make it work. It was one of the greatest achievements in my life.

But then systemic racism reared its ugly head.

The redneck guard staff, enraged by the unprecedented way we had integrated the prison, set me up by planting three tabs of LSD in my personal property. A redneck disciplinary tribunal placed me in solitary confinement where I spent the next two years. It was the only major disciplinary infraction I would receive during my 40-year confinement.

Several days after I was placed in solitary, Life was brutally stabbed to death by two brothers in a knife fight engineered and orchestrated by the same redneck staff that framed me.

Systemic racism led to the two setups.

I was placed in lockdown and Life was murdered. Life was killed because the redneck guards wanted to send a racist, violent message to the black inmate population: “you live only if we let you live.”

Years later as an award-winning co-editor of the prison newsmagazine, The Angolite, I was the recipient of the 1980 American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, the ABA’s highest honor, for an article I wrote about Life’s killing.

In real time, Life gave me one of the best friendships I’ve ever had; and in death he gave me the honor of being able to write about the horrible wrong done to him and for both of us to be nationally recognized for it.

Together, Life and I bridged systemic racism under the worst of conditions for a brief period and paid dearly for it—he so much more than I. Life to this day, with his indomitable will and incredible courage, remains a hero from the darkest period of my life.

I am alive and well in the Texas Hill Country because I am white while Life is buried in a lonely New Orleans cemetery because he was black.

That is systemic racism in real time.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author