At Louisiana's Angola — the plantation-turned-penitentiary — Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace, and Robert King organized a Black Panther Party chapter inside the walls in 1971, against the prison's systematized rape economy and dollar-a-day field labor. When guard Brent Miller was killed in 1972, the organizers were convicted on testimony bought with cartons of cigarettes and promises of pardon; King was convicted of a separate killing on similar evidence. The three were then buried in solitary confinement — six-by-nine cells, twenty-three hours a day, for decades.

Robert King's conviction was overturned in 2001 after 29 years in solitary; Herman Wallace, dying of cancer, was freed by a federal judge in 2013 and died three days later; Albert Woodfox, his conviction thrice overturned, was released on his 69th birthday in 2016 after nearly 44 years in solitary — the longest such confinement in American history, and the case that put solitary itself on trial worldwide.