Albert Woodfox's Forty Years in Solitary Confinement | Hacker News Reader

Albert Woodfox's Forty Years in Solitary Confinement

newyorker.com

102 points_g2lm60 comments

"The vindictiveness of the state is perhaps best illustrated in its treatment of Woodfox’s co-defendant, Herman Wallace. When Wallace’s conviction was also overturned on discrimination grounds in 2013, the judge in his case ordered his release, in view of the fact that Wallace was dying of liver cancer and had only days to live. Wallace was released on a Monday, and died on a Friday. He’d had three and a half days of freedom. Two days before he died, the prosecution reindicted him."

I don't understand why people would do this.

Perhaps there some kind of incentive such as bonus, promotion, political points for a high conviction rate? So they go for the low hanging fruit.

Well imagine having the mind of a typical prosecutor. I bet the thinking is something like "f* it, I'm not going to live forever, who can I prosecute next".

This kind of abuse reminds me of Carmen Ortiz.

I'm more and more convinced that this is a cultural problem in the US. The idea of "serving out justice" seems to override any compassion for people.

People always talk about throwing bankers in jail for the crisis, but why would you wish all this suffering on anyone? Denying freedom for someone for years. Especially considering the multitude of studies showing that extended incarceration _does not work as a deterrent_.

We should be ashamed, a country with this sort of penal system cannot declare itself to be a bastion of civil rights.

Agreed. Even the most liberal thinkers routinely call for people they don't approve of to be thrown in jail. I think it's important to challenge this type of thinking. Reserve jail for those times when there is no other way to protect innocents from violent offenders.

> Even the most liberal thinkers routinely call for people they don't approve of to be thrown in jail.

Evidence or argument to support this? It seems false by definition.

Argument. :)

Tautologically, you're right. Liberal is people who wouldn't do this, therefore...

But, of people who would self-identify as liberal how many are in fact closet authoritarians? Lots!

I'm thinking of bloggers I subscribe to who are often characterised as Social Justice Warriors - people who are extremely liberal. Very often these people will call for Bush, Cheney et al. to be jailed for war crimes. They tend to want people perceived as financial beneficiaries of the "neo-liberal" orthodoxy (bankers etc.) to be jailed as white collar criminals too.

> [...] people who are extremely liberal.

In the American definition of the word.

Yes, always a source of confusion.

The "why haven't any bankers been thrown in jail" trope has been repeated fairly often on both sides of the aisle.

Now here, "Most liberal" might be just talking about people still within mainstream thinking. Though many talk about not throwing people in jail for things like Marijuana, few talk about reducing sentences for non-drug related crimes (and pretty much no discussion on reducing it for violent crimes as well).

It all hinges on whether or not you look at the justice system as an agent for revenge or one of correction and rehabilitation.

Very true. It's one of those topics where people don't even start with the same axioms and definitions, so the discussion goes nowhere.

Personally, I was on the other side of the fence, until the constant evidence of the extreme suffering a large segment of the population goes through in prison convinced me that we're accomplishing immense amounts of harm this way.

The bankers are the ones I think it would work for. They understand risk analysis and it's all slow, reasoned, crime. Not like crimes of passion.

Is locking people in cages really necessary to stop bank misbehavior though? I would prefer first trying things like: 1) closer oversight; 2) fines restructured as a percentage of wealth so that they actually deter even very wealthy people; 3) kicking people out of the sector (e.g. bans from working in finance). Cages seem like a really blunt and rather barbaric instrument to use for improving society.

Some punishments are designed to send a message [1], maybe bankers would change their behaviour too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Byng

Making an example out of someone to send a message to others is completely unjust for the person who is made an example.

Did they intend the crime? And their only defense is "The other guy was doing it too"? Oh well.

As long as we prosecute as many people in their position as possible it doesn't seem to be a problem if we miss some. It's only selective when we choose who to ignore.

Something like Aaron Schwartz where it wasn't a crime until someone who made the DA look like an idiot does it... Then it's clearly crossed the line.

> 2) fines restructured as a percentage of wealth so that they actually deter even very wealthy people

Or even just the possibility of piercing the veil of incorporation, ie let the employees take some risk on the downside, too.

Cages ought to be reserved for people who cannot be trusted to live amongst the populace -- violent criminals, habitual negligents (e.g., drunk drivers), thieves and con artists.

If a bankster's danger to society can be remedied by banning him from his chosen profession, and justice served with a fine, it does seem like we could spare the cage.

The thing is, the banker (or other white-collar criminal) is the only one who planned it. They, more than the thugs imho, should be locked away because they're predators not just opportunists.

And maybe we could spare the cage... But after we get around to the mistakenly (cough) convicted black people, and poor people, and those with mental illness, etc, then we can worry about the poor-banker in his comfortable minimum-security cell.

Well that's a fine point you make -- predators vs. opportunists. And I need to be reminded that wealthy white-collar criminals don't often experience the same kind prison as does the common man.

Sure, but in that case just take their money away. At least then the punishment is in the same unit of measurement as the crime, and the risk can be compared better. Locking someone in a cell seems excessive (and excessively costly).

> At least then the punishment is in the same unit of measurement as the crime

No, not really. The crime inflicted homelessness, multiple jobs to feed your family, depression, broken marriages, suicide, etc.

If there's no downside to attempted theft, like they just lose the ill-gotten money and get to go home to a warm bed, we might as well be incentivizing it.

Besides, Jail isn't inherently costly - American for-profit prisons are intentionally wasteful. We don't need to spend a million-dollars a year per prisoner.

Regardless of whether you respect bankers or not - putting a rational human being in a cage is a fucking disgrace.

No, not really. It's putting the mentally ill and irrational ones in a cage that's a fucking disgrace.

The bankers know what they do.

The bankers know what they do.

Only if you believe in dualistic free will.

As I said elsewhere, when these comments come out in any general prison thread I support them. When they only come out when bankers are mentioned, I do not.

And, philosophical questions of free will tend to be a waste of time to consider. If you don't have free will then we also didn't really "choose" to execute you... Next.

Putting a rational human being in a cage makes them mentally ill and irrational. Well, at least we know this for sure about solitary.

One has to find a balance between compassion and justice. Some people obviously deserve more of one that the other, I guess this is what judges are for but they don't always do it right.

Locking someone up for a long time seems unusually cruel unless their crime involved punishing someone in a similar fashion over a similar amount of time. An eye for an eye seems to be more appropriate but impossible and immoral in its implementation.

Making some of those bankers live in poverty to me seems like a good punishment. Make them realise what it feels like to "lose it all", something they did basically inflict on thousands of people. Very hard to implement though.

I don't understand it either. But perhaps (and this is probably a stretch) it is to serve as a deterrent to the other inmates.

Given Angola's notorious reputation as, well, Angola, and the fact that these two allegedly murdered a prison guard--it isn't inconceivable that a vindictive move like this one was played by the state. The logic being, you kill one of our guards and we'll lock you up and throw away the key.

That seems reasonable - when guards are tried for kidnapping when it's discovered that their prison was holding an innocent.

That logic is all fine and good but that murder was in fact never proven in a fair trial which is the whole problem here.

Well, there's your problem: you're assuming prosecutors are people. ;)

That's a simplistic (if fun) jab, of course, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say that the system we have gives incentives for prosecutors to act rather inhumanely -- and tends to attract personalities who are driven by their own ambition or a faith in their own judgments when it comes to justice. There's a sense in which the prosecutor role we've created really isn't "people" in the same way businesses aren't "people."

I have a close friend who is a county prosecutor who after over a decade on the job has changed immensely as a person. I don't blame him, as his intentions for taking the job were incredibly pure (real talk, he could have easily taken a private sector job for 3x the pay) but some of the shit, and I do mean shit, he has to put up with seems absolutely unbearable.

He had to work child abuse cases for a little over 3 years, and to occasionally see some of the scummiest people on earth walk free for some of the most ridiculous things (technicalities, mishandled evidence, a rogue juror causing a mistrial putting the defendant back in contact with the kids, etc) will break the strongest of humans.

Fortunately he got moved to misdemeanors per his request a few years back, seems to be doing a lot better. Not trying to say all prosecutors are great people, but it's a ridiculously tough job.

If only prosecutors would be jailed for double the term of anyone we could prove they were unreasonable persecuting.

But unfortunately, they have literally zero consequences.

I get the jokiness of your quip, but you're really quite out of your depth here.

Can you please back up your bold statement that the system attracts personalities driven by their own ambition with some data or evidence?

I'm intimate with a number of prosecutors (including my partner), and I've not once come across a prosecutor who possesses such attributes of character. It's quite the opposite actually - most turn away higher paying law firm jobs to do what they believe is community service.

To me this injustice has occured on behalf of corrections facilities management. Very sad.

Does the term 'conviction rate' ever get used?

In what context do you mean?

In the context of your communications with the prosecutors you are familiar with.

No. I think that gets thrown around more at the legislator level - it's certainly not a KPI or anything.

Interesting, wikipedia has an entry on conviction rate and it specifically mentions 'prosecutor':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate

Sure. But as I said, it's a descriptor used in reporting- not a target for those in the trenches

I think I know what you're getting at, but the problem here is that prosecutors have some discretion.

The chain of thought that goes

  I only prosecute worthy cases

  => I picked those cases because these people are guilty,
      and need to be convicted for the good of society 

  => my conviction rate is exactly the same as my 
     'I made a better world' rate.

must be very tempting. Wrong, but tempting.

It's a "damned if i do damned if i don't" situation.

If the conviction rate is low, people on the Internet say that the prosecutor is just harassing innocent people.

If the conviction rate is high, people on the Internet say that the judges rubber-stamp whatever the prosecutor throws at them.

I've never seen anyone say "sounds about right" when any conviction rate was posted.

[Edit: Killed the last sentence, as per site guidelines]

Exactly. So how about 'if you are concentrating on the conviction rate then you're doing it wrong'?

It's like the story about communist strategies for optimizing production, making a metric by which you measure performance in some hard to quantify domain is going to give you an industry optimizing for that metric which will have a ton of un-intended consequences.

The goal of a prosecutor should not be to aim for a certain conviction rate (either high, low or anything inbetween) and the goal of a justice system should not be related to any such metrics either.

The right way to go about this would be to establish guilt or innocence without regards to any metrics and with a relative disregard for the cost of such an operation because the number of criminals is low compared to the number of non-criminals and should err on the side of caution.

>Can you please back up your bold statement that the system attracts personalities driven by their own ambition with some data or evidence?

You mean besides obvious empirical observation of the system's history in the past 50 years or so?

<off-topic> Can we have a HN rule stopping people from posting paywalled content? This is getting really annoying apparently I ran out of my quota for visiting newyorker.com pages this month. I know how to overcome it, but that's a website I normally wouldn't visit from some other website than HN and this feels annoying. This is like the new DRM.

Most paywalls are trivially easy to bypass.

You've run out of your free quote, but other people have not (or they have paid for the content) so why should they be denied content?

Good content needs to be paid for somehow.

This report is characteristic especially when considered in contrast to the (overly?) thoughtful justification of the sentence given by a German court in the recent case around the killing of a Turkish girl named Tugce.

This report is also characteristic when considered in context of the killing spree in Charleston.

USA is a country of institutionalized hatred. Hatred seems to have become a central aspect of the national identity and culture.

> USA is a country of institutionalized hatred.

Maybe, but which countries are not?

Germany for example

Most of europe?

Don't get me wrong there still is institutionalized hatred here but at a scale 2-3 order of magnitude under the US.

Reminds me of this: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law

What a stupid loophole in the law

Instead of focussing on the abstract "state", why not recognize that almost every eligible voter in America decided what the state should do by voting either democrat, republican or nothing.

Fuck that state.

I feel like this comment is gonna get crushed, but this is the attitude people need to have. This sort of thing should not be tolerated at all by those paying for it to happen, and the only way it's going to change is if people get mad enough to do something.

Amen, it's not as if this is the only wrong (or even right) conviction leading to torture at the hands of the state that has occurred recently in the US, either. What is interesting about this one is that it is a frame-up by prison authorities rather than the police, which is far more commonly reported. Regular people walking down the street or sitting in their homes with absolutely no connection to an alleged crime have been frequently improperly given life sentences. In the probably small subset that has been eventually discovered and overturned, no apology or compensation is usually ever received from the state.

Just last month there was an exhibition in Paris at the excellent Jeau de Paume gallery featuring a video exploring this phenomenon in the US by artist Taryn Simon, who actually tracked down numerous people who had been falsely imprisoned for her 2003 project The Innocents. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taryn_Simon and https://books.google.com/books?id=RRoiDl9rJtoC&printsec=fron....

I don't know how people can just passively stay in the US these days, wouldn't it be better to leave?

    First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Socialist.

    Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

That poem by Martin Niemöller always strikes me as such a powerful wakeup call.

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