News Angola 3 media coverage

Montreal Black History Month’s Fade to Black film series is screening director Ron Harpelle’s critically-acclaimed documentary film Hard Time about Robert Hillary King, former member of the Black Panther Party who spent 32 years – 29 of them in solitary confinement – in Louisiana’s Angola Prison for a crime he did not commit. King was released in February 2001 and has been campaigning against abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system ever since.

“To this day, I find it difficult to associate myself with my surroundings. My terrain, my geography is way off,” says Robert King. “It is off to the point where I get lost even when I am walking just around the corner from where I live.” King spent 29 years in solitary confinement, living in a box just 6ft by 9ft by 12ft.

The United States keeps as many as 80,000 prisoners in solitary confinement, sometimes for years or decades on end. Research suggests that this form of punishment can cause severe psychiatric and neurological damage to inmates, and evidence for its effectiveness in reducing crime or recidivism is scant.

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans will determine whether Albert Woodfox, the last remaining member of the Angola 3 behind bars, deserves a second retrial in the 1972 murder of prison guard Brent Miller.