You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service. I'm Stephen Sacker. Imagine spending 43 years of your life in shackles, confined to a bare cell measuring some

three metres by two. Only for one hour out 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 that comes with

being convicted of a 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's living as a free man in the United States, but after an

experience like his, what does that really mean? Well, Albert Woodfox joins me now. Welcome to

Hard Talk. 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? Well, yeah, I mean, you know, philosophically, mentally emotionally,

I was free longer before my 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.

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