In Solitary, Woodfox repeatedly runs up against injustices in the justice system, in the police, among prosecutors, and in elected officials. Though his struggles often end in defeat, his perseverance serves both as a testament to his character and a reminder of the systemic nature of discrimination, which cannot be easily rectified.

Woodfox describes realizing from an early age that police constituted a threat, when his mother moved him out of sight of a passing patrol car. From here, Woodfox’s encounters with police would become more serious, but the risk of injustice remained the same. Finally, in 1969, police “cleaned the books” on Woodfox after he was arrested for armed robbery, charging him with all the unsolved rapes and robberies they had on their books as a way of getting rid of the charges—a common tactic use to force people to accept plea deals. In Woodfox’s case, the charges stayed on his record and would be used decades later by another corrupt part of the justice system.

The issue of police corruption and injustice was significant in the book in another way, insofar as it inspired the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense started to combat police harassment and violence in black communities and would eventually become one of the most powerful forces in Woodfox’s life. Near the end of his sentence, Woodfox describes watching news coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, sparked by police shootings of African Americans, and reflects that little has changed over his lifetime. In this way, injustices perpetrated by police form a thread running through Woodfox’s life and the text.

The corruption in the justice system also comes across in Woodfox’s trials for the murder of Brent Miller. In his first trial, he was convicted by an all-white, all-male jury after less than an hour of deliberation, and was represented by an inexperienced pro bono lawyer. The FBI had infiltrated his support committee in New Orleans, sabotaging attempts to fundraise for better legal representation. In his second trial, Woodfox describes the issue of prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecutor Julie Cullen used inflammatory and misleading language—describing the Black Panthers as motivated by racial hatred and the killing of Brent Miller as a hate crime—and deployed underhanded tactics to present evidence that was supposed to be inadmissible. For Woodfox’s third indictment, prosecutors told the grand jury that his conviction had been overturned on a technicality, which was not true. After the jury voted to indict Woodfox, the grand jury foreperson grew so troubled by the indictment that she sought to have it overturned. “She felt betrayed and used because she had trusted the attorney general’s office to be honest and now she knew she didn’t get the whole story,” Woodfox writes (384). By stacking up these injustices, and describing the trials in close detail, Woodfox gives the reader a sense of the scale of the challenge he was up against and evokes the claustrophobia and despair he experienced being trapped in a powerful system.  

Woodfox also experiences injustice at the hands of elected officials, namely, the attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Caldwell, in particular, deployed underhanded tactics to prevent Woodfox’s release from prison, including making false statements about Woodfox being a convicted sex offender, dating back to his 1969 arrest. In this way, we can see that these claims were based on an initial injustice, but also perpetuated a new one insofar as they were used to keep Woodfox in prison after a judge had ordered his release. Caldwell also represents corruption in the justice system in that he used millions of dollars of taxpayer money to keep Woodfox and Wallace in prison—including re-indicting Wallace on his death bed—despite a growing chorus of voices noting the lack evidence tying to the two men to the murder.