Surviving such hell was a mark of distinction in the neighborhood Woodfox then called home. When men returned from Angola, they were accorded genuine respect. “I thought it would be an honor to go there,” he confesses. From this decisive moment onward, the book becomes a dizzying catalog of horrors, the most harrowing of which is not mere violence — stabbings and even gassings were so common as to be almost banal — but the omnipresent threat of male rape. “Master/slave” relations among prisoners were not only condoned but encouraged by the guards. Such tacit acceptance of sexual predation as the simple cost of doing business in the carceral state is one of the most damning moral stains on the American conscience and Woodfox makes this excruciatingly clear. Another, and this is the inescapable lesson of the book, is the terrible reality that the use of long-term solitary confinement is not just an enhanced form of punishment — it is torture through and through.

In his 20s, Woodfox was in and out of prison for several more years of ever deeper involvement with drugs and crime, culminating, at one point, in a brazen escape from a courthouse elevator full of prisoners and a sheriff’s deputy. Recaptured in New York, he was placed in temporary detention in the Manhattan jail known as the Tombs — a turn of events, ironically, that proves to be his life-defining break even as it ensures he will spend many more decades behind bars. Before being sent back to Louisiana, he meets members of the Black Panthers who instill his life with purpose, introducing him to the concept of political struggle. Thinking of himself as a political prisoner provides Woodfox with the template both to assume responsibility for and to disavow the criminal he has been while allowing him to develop an analysis of the ways in which his race and class have consistently precluded the possibility of receiving just treatment for his acts. His life becomes meaningful to himself — and profoundly so — only once he is able to locate it within a larger fight. (He begins to see his mother’s problems differently, too.) “It was as if a light went on in a room inside me that I hadn’t known existed,” he writes.

This shift in perspective will be what preserves his sanity when he and three other black inmates at Angola are framed for the murder of a 23-year-old white guard. “I turned my cell into a university, a hall of debate, a law school,” he writes of the years of solitary confinement (and debilitating bouts of claustrophobia) that swiftly followed. In addition, he forges life-defining friendships with two other falsely accused men also being held in solitary. (Woodfox’s description of the lengths these men go to in order to know and care for one another in the near complete absence of physical contact or even face-to-face communication amounts to some of the most touching writing on platonic male friendship I have ever encountered.) Together they begin to organize the other prisoners around them and teach themselves the law. Hunger strike by hunger strike, petition by petition, lawsuit by lawsuit, they attempt — and sometimes, though often at tremendous personal cost, are able — to force the prison to reform.

“We must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus famously wrote, and such a prompt is the ennobling virtue at the core of “Solitary.” It lifts the book above mere advocacy or even memoir and places it in the realm of stoic philosophy. Crucially, Woodfox is not a bitter man. He refuses to see himself as a victim. Ultimately, this allergy to self-pity allows him to grapple with the consequences and consolations of whatever agency — and dignity — can exist in even the most abhorrent and restricted circumstances.