Stephen sackur speaks to formerly jailed black panther, albert woodfox. Welcome to hardtalk, im stephen sackur. There are some human experiences which most of us find very hard to get our heads around. My guest today experienced the unimaginable torment of more than four decades in solitary confinement in a tiny cell in one of americas most notorious prisons. Albert woodfox was the victim of ingrained racism and brutality inside americas system of criminaljustice. He is now a free man. But what does freedom really mean after everything he has been through . Albert woodfox, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you. Here you are, in london as a free man. But given everything you have been through, is it possible for you to ever feel truly free . Yeah, i mean philosophically, mentally and emotionally i was free long before my physicalfreedom. And so that was a part of my survival technique. It allowed me to survive being in solitary confinement for such a long period of time. I wonder in terms of, literally in terms of muscle memory, whether the way your body is, whether your muscles remember four decades in shackles, whether you still have that feeling of being in an enclosed space, literally two by three metres or has that left your body . I still have claustrophobic attacks occasionally. And i guess several times i wake up and have been disorientated, because i am used to getting up and seeing bars and stuff and you wake up and you see a wall and a bedroom. For a brief moment i am disorientated. You had an awful long time to reflect on the course of your life and i want to take you right back to near the beginning. Growing up in louisiana as a young boy, you made choices and you made some very bad choices, i guess one could say now. Looking back, why did you make those choices . I was a Young African american kid growing up in the south of the United States. Racism was blatant, the opportunities from economic to political to social were almost non existent. And if you are denied access to society, if you are denied opportunities, the instinct to survive is probably the strongest instinct we have. It was almost predestined that i would turn to petty crime to survive. Id like to read to you a little passage from your extraordinarily frank and honest book, solitary, where you talk about being a youth growing up. I robbed people, iscared them, i threatened them, i intimidated them. I stole from people who had almost nothing. They were my people, black people. I broke into their homes and took their possessions. I was a chauvinist pig and i never thought about the pain i caused. Yes. I made terrible choices. There are things that i did that i will never be able to forgive myself for. And i will spend the rest of my life trying to atone for those things. But i was not a criminal. I thought i had to do criminal things to survive. And later on in life, because of the influence injoining the black Panther Party i began to understand how society functioned and understand what individual racism supported by institutional racism and the systemic application of racism, how that affected my life individually and as a member of the African American community. You talk about the black panthers and i guess it was inside the prison in new york where you first really came face to face with black men who were committed members of the Panther Movement. Were you already aware of them . Were you already drawn to that ideology, a sort of extremely strong black power ideology or was it meeting these people that changed your head . There is a question as to whether the influence of the black Panther Party awaken something already in me or whether the influence of the black Panther Party raised my level of consciousness to where i began to understand the forces around me, i began to understand that there were certain policies from the government on down to White America that determined pretty much the course of my life. The black panthers spoke a lot aboutjustice and equality for black people in the United States after centuries of discrimination and slavery, of course, but post slavery the discrimination continued. There were also some black panthers who were clearly explicitly committed to violence. Were you part of the movement that believed that violence was justified or not . You know, like any organisation, the organisation has a goal, a perimeter in which they function. There will be people in the organisation who will not adhere to that. We had people like that in the party but overall. What about you . Me, personally, no. My experience with the party was in prison. Herman and i formed the only recognised black Panther Party chapter in a prison. So a lot of the stuff that happened with the party in society, we were not exposed to it. I take your point because, really, your active involvement with the black panthers was all behind bars which takes us to angola. That notorious prison in louisiana where you ended up in 1971 when you walked through the gate into thatjail and you did not leave it for more than four decades. 44 years. Before we get to solitary, talk me through your First Impressions of what has long been regarded as the most brutal and perhaps most racist prison in the United States of america. That pretty much sums it up. Angola had been designated by various social organisations, including government organisations, as being the bloodiest and most violent prison in the United States at that time. Almost every day, prisoners either by security or by prisoner on prisoner crime someone was stabbed or bludgeoned or murdered so that was the type of environment that you were forced to survive in. And it was segregated. Yes. And the staff, from the governor on down but pretty much all of the staff were white. Yes. Is a matter of fact, in angola itself you had about 300 personnel in charge of about 5000 or 6000 prisoners. What was unique about angola is that it was a former slave plantation. It had been a plantation throughout the course of the slave period. And you still have families who work there, they go back generation after generation. And you, the black prisoners, were put to work in the fields. Mostly. Yes. There were a fewjanitorialjobs. Most of the plum jobs went to the white prisoners. Lets get to 1972. The murder of a young white prison guard. Did you do it . No. There is such an abundance of physical evidence that clearly. You know, says i was not involved in his murder. Physical evidence, they found a bloodied fingerprint in mr millers blood on the door. They never pursued beyond blaming it on me and the other guys who were charged. They did not match any of the people who worked the crime scene. So it raises the obvious question, why were you targeted by the authorities . The prison staff, administrative and security, they were aware that herman and i were members of the black panthers. Herman wallace, your friend, a fellow black panther. And you were explicit in the prison. You organised other prisoners. You formed an antirape squad to try and control the Sexual Assault and abuse inside your wing of the prison. So you were not hiding your black panther loyalty. No. And to be honest with lasted longer than we thought because there was an internal conflict in the new. Doc secretary, department of corrections, so mr miller was murdered in that environment. So you are convicted of a crime that you insist, always insisted you simply did not commit. But the fact is you were hauled off to that special part of the prison for the solitary confinement prisoners. And life in a cell of two metres by three metres began. And i think everyone watching and listening to this will not be able to get their head around what you then experienced for 43 years and ten months. So try and capture it for me. Well, its kind of hard to find words to imagine the horror of being confined to a nine foot long, six foot wide cell. The actual space itself is much smaller because you have metal beds attached to the wall that take up a great part of the cell. A metal table and chair on the other wall and a toilet bowl sink combination in back so you have a narrow path in which to manoeuvre up and down the cell. So although the cell is six feet wide and nine feet long, the actual space is much smaller. Try to stay in your bedroom for 23 hours. Go in your backyard, draw a box, nine feet by six feet and stay in there for 23 hours. Now multiply that1 million times. To add to that, you know there was absolutely nothing you can do to change the situation you are in. And add to that the attitude and behaviour of the guards who are responsible for you. That was a huge element in the, lets use the word, torture that was imposed upon you. Now they refer to them as correction officers but at that time they were known as free men. And you add to that you had an inmate guard system and these guys were brutal. What you mean by brutal . They used physical violence against other prisoners. They beat them, they gassed them, they had pretty much the same power and authority as the free men, as they were referred to, who work there. And they never hesitated to use the power they had. If i may say so, as you has said since, you and herman, your great friend who was locked up in solitary in the same place as you, me and herman, we did not put up with all the racist comments. If they talked trash to us, we talked trash back to them just as bad. I forced myself to learn how to not give into the fear. I would not let fear rule me. As a result, you got the pain and the brutality even worse. We were seeing a lot. They referred to us troublemakers and ringleaders. And had no idea of the Political Foundation or the philosophy, that motivated us to fight against injustice and inhumanity. A horrible physical condition, the lack of clothing, lack of adequate food. If i asked you right now, looking back, what was the worst thing, the thing that really got closest to breaking you . That would be my mothers death. Other than that, with all i went through and all that happened to me, i never came close to being broken. When i lost my mom in 1994 to cancer there was a policy in to go home for the funeral and in African American families it is important to say that final goodbye. It usually occurs at the wake or the funeral. But because they had singled me out as a troublemaker, i was denied that. So i had to carry that burden for 27 years. Fortunately before my mother passed away my life changed tremendously. A transformation from criminal to political and social activist had occurred and i was in the process of educating and re educating myself to try and raise my level of conscience and so i was able to thank her for the things that she values and what she tried to instill in me and to tell her she was my first hero. You did an awful lot of reading in prison and became something of a legal expert. You looked at so many legal books. You launched so many appeals and you did, actually, deliver change to the prison regime while you were there. And thanks also to people working outside on your behalf, various appeals against the conviction and, finally, in 2016 you did not get the exoneration you were looking for, but you got the offer of a plea deal. Its called an alford plea. A plea does not admit guilt but it admits that the state has enough evidence to bring you to trial. You had always said i will walk out of here when i am declared an innocent man and you were not. I still have problems with that. There are times when i feel very angry and there are times when i am disappointed that i took the plea deal. Because for my whole life i taught men to fight, to stand for what was right and, you know, i tried to do it by not just words but example. So in the final analysis, you know, i accepted a plea deal. And there were many factors involved but i think the one factor is a conversation i had with my brother. He said that he was visiting with my daughter and she broke down crying. He asked what was wrong and she said why dont i have a daddy . Ahd he said you have a daddy, and he has accomplished things in the prison system, you would be very proud of him. And she said no, i dont know what it is to call him daddy and get a response, i dont know what it is for him to hold me in his arms and comfort me when im troubled. I dont know if ill ever experience that. And that was kind of the Tipping Point of the mental and emotional battle i was waging with myself. And you do have that now. You can hug your daughter and your grandchildren and your great grandchildren. You can do all that. But you were released and now live as a free man in a United States of america where there is still clear Racial Injustice at the heart of the criminal justice system. One only has to look at the statistics on rates of incarceration, one only has to look at what happens to too many young black people, particularly young black men in their experiences with the police in different parts of your country. How does that make you feel after everything you have been through . When i was released from prison it took me about three weeks of being in society to realise that nothing had changed. So nothing had changed . Racism was still part of the very fibre of american society. And the brutality of racism had not changed in its application. It had just changed in how it was applied. But i am mindful that you walked out in the year that barack 0bama served his last year as president of the United States of america, the first black man to hold that position. Can you really say that nothing had changed in 44 years . A technicality. I was in prison when president 0bama was elected. My reality was that nothing would change. This is one man, we have a culture of racism and bigotry and White Supremacy that goes back to the founding of america. And one man cannotjust change that in eight years. Thats the longest period of time he would be allowed to be president. Will it change . I wonder what you say to your children and your great grandchildren because you speak as a man who all those years ago committed to the black Panther Movement to achieve what you regard as justice for black people in america. How do you think your grandchildren and great grandchildren should carry out that struggle . If you still see it as a struggle. I think its a social struggle. As a matter of fact it is one of the personal motivations for me. I dont want my Great Grandkids 30 years from now to be sitting here being interviewed on a stage talking to people about racism and institutional racism and systemic application of racism. As Martin Luther king said, i would rather that society that has evolved to the point where they are judged by content of character not the colour of their skin or their ethnicity or physical features or hair checks. Let me ask you this. A different sort of question but the same thing, are you proud of your country today . My country, yes. My government, no. And a last thought, and ifind this remarkable about you and the strength of your mind, you say that when you consider everything that had happened to you in your life, and i mean everything, you say i would not change one thing. All i went through made me the man i am today. Do you really mean that . That you would not, on reflection, take different decisions that would have avoided those 44 years in solitary confinement . No. No, i would not change a thing. Because for one thing, i didntjust survive solitary confinement, i prospered as a human being. I developed moral principles, values and a code of conduct. I self educated myself. All the things that society had denied me as a human being i was able to provide myself in a hostile and isolating environment. So, no, i wouldnt change anything. As painful as it has been as brutal as it has been the beatings, the gassings, forced to drink out of the toilet because they turned the water off while i was in the dungeon. All the things i went through, they helped build me and shape the man i am today and my mum used to always tell me to always be proud of what you look at in the mirror. And so far i think the way i have conducted myself and the way i have transformed myself and the way i have evolved, i am proud of what looks back at me. Albert woodfox, it has been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for being on hardtalk. Hello. When the weather makes news, its rarely a good thing. And after the extreme heat of thursday, the thunderstorms that followed caused a few problems. Its a new ukjuly record, the all time record avoided by a few tenths of a degree. Not sure that made any difference to this years unpleasantness of trying to get out and about in heat like this, where it has been so hot. Friday is going to be cooler and this weather front moving through will cool things further into the weekend but being for some of us heavy rain as we will see in a moment. Now, still a few thunderstorms perhaps effecting easternmost areas as friday begins. Theyre slightly pulling away out into the north sea. For many, friday is going to start dry. But, it is very warm and humid still across eastern parts in particular, some spots wont have gone below the low 20s. For many of us, friday will be a day of broken cloud and the chance of catching a shower. And still perhaps a few thundery ones popping up towards Eastern England. Remember that weather front . Its this area of cloud, and not a huge amount of rain on it so far, though thats going to change. And although its not as hot as where its been so exceptionally hot, theres still heat out there. Parts of Eastern England and northern scotland were getting near 30 celsius. Now, as we go on through friday evening and into the night, remember that weather front the area of rain along it will gradually expand and turn heavy through parts of northern, central and Eastern England, with parts of eastern scotland as well. And that is a sign of things to come for the weekend. Now that hangs around in places. And gradually, notjust by day, but by night as well, those temperatures are starting to come down. So this is the big picture for the weekend, dominated by this weather front. Now theres still something to play for on where exactly its going to be sitting, but it is across parts of eastern and scotland that will see that rain, and some of that is going to be heavy, potentially disruptive as well. We think particularly through parts of Northern England and southern scotland, the higher parts of the pennines into the north york moors, for example, could amass around about 100 millimetres of rain by the time its said and done. The driest weather over the weekend looks to be towards Northern Ireland, wales and the south west. This is our then saturday is shaping up, and look at these temperatures. Much, much more comfortable. And then as we look into sunday, what youll still have that weather front, again, it may not be exactly where its looking here, but through parts of scotland, northern and Eastern England, still keeping much of wales and the south west of Northern Ireland away from that. And bar the odd shower, it will be dry with a mix of cloud and sunshine. And again, those temperatures are much, much more comfortable. Thats your latest forecast. This is the briefing. Im victoria fritz. Our top story eu leaders reject Boris Johnsons brexit policy after his first speech to uk mps. Scores of migrants are feared drowned off the coast of libya. The un says it must be a turning point. From the streets to salvation. How gang members in el salvador are finding a new path in life. 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