Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. Imagine spending 43 years of your life in shackles,

confined to a bare cell measuring some three metres by two. Only an hour of every 24 would you be

allowed to shuffle to an exercise area beyond your cell?

And then imagine being a black inmate of one of America's most notorious prisons

where brutality and racism were long-established norms.

And add, the sense of burning injustice, which comes with being convicted of murder,

which the evidence suggests you did not commit.

It is very hard to take in the bare facts of Albert Woodfox's experience in the Angola

prison in Louisiana. He was released in February 2016, having spent 43 years and 10 months in solitary confinement. He went in as both a hardened

criminal and a fervent supporter of the sometimes violent Black Panther movement. He emerged,

committed to peaceful activism in pursuit of racial equality and justice. He lived as a free man in the U.S. for six years

before his death earlier this month. I spoke to him in 2019 and asked after an experience like his,

what did freedom really mean? Philosophically, mentally emotionally, I was free longer,

the actual physical freedom occurred.

And so that was a part of, I guess you could say, my survival, one of my many survival techniques that allowed me to, you know, survive being in solitary confinement for such a long period of time. I just wonder in terms of,

literally in terms of muscle memory, 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 of literally two meters by

three, or has that left your body?

Well, I still have claustrophobic attacks occasionally, and I guess there are several times

I wake up and been disorientated, you know, because I'm used to getting up and seeing

bars and stuff like that, so you wake up and you see walls in the bedroom and stuff.

And for a brief moment, I'm disorientated.

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