Solitary

This week I’ve seen two stories about the ‘Angola Three’, and in particular Herman Wallace, who has just been released after 41 years in solitary confinement, after a judge ruled he didn’t get a fair trial. In 1972.  (Bizarrely, the reason it wasn’t a fair trial is because women were excluded from the jury, in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment.) Oh yeah, and he’s only got weeks to live, as he’s got advanced liver cancer.

The first story was in Reuters, ‘Dying ‘Angola Three’ inmate freed after 41 years in solitary confinement‘. The BBC picked up the story too, and has also had a couple of supporting pieces, one about what solitary confinement does to a prisoner, and one asking how people survive solitary confinement at all.

It makes for interesting reading, as well as a pretty damning indictment of America’s methods of jailing and punishing people, some of which I still feel hails from that Puritan background of the original settlers.

Honestly though, you can’t really imagine being in that kind of situation, of hardly having any human contact for 41 years. It’s hard to conceive of a lifetime (near as dammit my lifetime, anyway) with minimal human contact and interaction, being confined to a 9′ x 6′ cell for at least 23 hours a day. Even more so when it’s for a crime that they say they didn’t commit (and for which there’s no evidence to say they did) But that’s what these men have lived through.  The final one of the three, Albert Woodfox, is still there, still in solitary confinement. He’s been there since 1972, and there’s no end in sight.

I’ve sometimes wondered how I would handle solitude and solitary life – in some ways I’m quite close to it anyway, not needing or wanting much in the way of physical interaction. But that’s on my own terms, and it’s my own choice. If I want to go out and interact, I can do. Most of my contact with friends is via t’internet, Twitter, Facebook, mobile phone and the like. It’s still interaction, just not on a physical level in general.

How would I handle it if that solitude were enforced? If it was in a cell with a locked door? Honestly, I don’t know. And I really wouldn’t fancy finding out.

[Updated : Herman Wallace died, less than a week after being released.]