Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

INJUSTICE: ANGOLA THREE
From article by Billie Mizell (SEVEN magazine, April 2007)
and other sources
Angola Prison began life as a plantation in Louisiana and its name comes
from the former African homeland of the slaves who were forced to work
its fertile land. Two hundred years later, little has changed there. Three
quarters of Angola’s inmates are black and most of them work from dawn
to dusk in the soybean, cotton and wheat fields, performing backbreaking
labour under a sweltering sun. Around 85% of the inmates who enter
Angola will die there.
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Artwork: Rigo 23
The civil rights movement was late coming to the old plantation, but it
finally slipped past the razor wire and iron gates in the early 1970s through
two African-American prisoners: Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace.
Arriving on unrelated armed robbery convictions and both sentenced on
questionable evidence by all-white juries, they came to the prison having
already earned reputations as political activists.
Woodfox and Wallace were escorted into an institution once dubbed
‘the bloodiest prison in America’ by Peter Fenelon Collier’s investigative
publication ‘Collier’s Weekly’. Inside its walls, violence was so
commonplace that inmates slept with lunch trays or Bibles strapped to their
chests in case they were stabbed as they slept. Due to a serious shortage
of guards, ‘trusty’ inmates were permitted to carry guns and guard other
prisoners. Murders were nearly a daily occurance.
NOVEMBER 2016