Solitary

While the enslavement of African Americans ended with the Civil War, it continued, in a different way, through the prison system. The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—the setting for much of the book—is a particularly illuminating example of this because it once served as a plantation.

The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery except in cases where an individual had been convicted of a crime. This meant that, in the American South in which Albert Woodfox grew up, slavery continued under a different guise, as Black men charged with minor offenses—and sometimes, no offenses at all, apart from not having an official job—were forced to work, a practice known as “convict leasing.” In the case of Angola, which became a farm after the Civil War, prisoners lived in the same barracks where enslaved people had once slept and died by the hundreds due to harsh working conditions. At the start of the 20th century, Angola was purchased by the state and made into a prison, but many of the dynamics were the same: all the guards were white, and the majority of inmates were Black, and forced to work in difficult circumstances, such as cutting sugarcane, the prison’s most lucrative crop.