I told the men to let it go at that—time was running out, and we had to begin our service. We did, and throughout the meal Harv held my hand under the table; he would not let go. When we got to the part about fleeing from Egypt, every one of us felt a surreal edge to the whole thing. I told the men about being in segregation and asked them to spread the word so we women would not be hurt, so that other people would know just how difficult things were for us. Harv promised. We ate everything in sight, including all the ceremonial elements. It was a great seder and an experience, for me, of unexpected solidarity. While I doubted that any of my Jewish compatriots would have agreed with my views of the world, under those circumstances nothing mattered except our Judaism and us.
In September 1986, nearly a year after my arrival in Tucson, Alex and I heard rumors that the Lexington High Security Unit was almost finished. We had been wondering why the construction was taking so long since the HSU was in the basement of an already existing prison. Now the tension of our transfer grew with each day. Every time the doors opened unexpectedly I jumped, thinking we were on the verge of leaving. Even though I had visitors whom I had come to care for deeply, Jane, and friends from California, and my parents who had traveled to see me, where we sat and actually laughed at our situation and shared a great time, I desperately wanted to get out of Tucson. I had a feeling of foreboding there that cast a pall over everything, and the constant and intense contempt directed at both Alex and me was increasingly hard to deal with. I realized that the consequences of my life choices and my incarceration had only just begun, and I wanted to move on with things, as though I had a date with my own destiny, even if it meant worse conditions.
The morning they came for me was like every other morning except that the COs would not let me out of my cell until I had put my arms through the food slot backward so that they could attach the handcuffs securely. I knew the time had come. They would not let me pack my legal papers, books, or photos, much less the few personal items I had been able to keep. “Step out” was all they said. There were several women COs standing in the hall. Alex stepped out of her cell—handcuffed, as well—and I knew we were both going. They walked us through the doors into the men’s segregation intake room. It was five in the morning and very quiet. We yelled good-bye and heard Rosita’s and Debra’s good-byes echoing down the corridor. We walked out of the building and down a path that led toward the receiving and discharge room, but the COs turned and hustled us into the medical building. Right then I knew they were going to pay us back for being who we were.
I started talking. “Why are we here? What’s going on?”
One woman CO with whom I’d had some conversations throughout the year said, “We have to search you.” She wouldn’t meet my look.
“Search us? Oh no.”
We were all standing in the hall and then the captain and the associate warden showed up. The captain had papers in his hand; he shoved them at us. I saw the heading “Permission/Notification for High Security Contraband Search” and the boxes with writing next to them. The first box that was checked was “cavity search,” the second was “rectal.” They wanted us to sign the forms.
Alex said, “You can do an X-ray instead.”
The captain laughed. “No, we don’t have to and we won’t. You are going to a control unit and it’s our call on this. We have the right to do it.”
My voice was pitched. “You don’t have to do this.”
The captain looked at the associate warden; the warden looked at us, and nodded. Then he walked out of the building. I started to curse, but the next thing I knew the COs had surrounded both of us. Some of them took Alex down the hall and into a room; others held me in the hall. The physician’s assistant appeared, snapping his surgical gloves, and entered the room where Alex was. Within minutes there came a long, loud scream—“Nooooo!”—and I tried, without success, to get away from the COs and go to Alex’s aid. Then there was silence.
Five COs pushed me into an examining room. The physician’s assistant came in and said, “We can do this easy or hard. It’s up to you.”
I went crazy. I started hitting and kicking with every ounce of my being. I might have to do it, but I would not do it easy. They overpowered me, pushed my head down onto the examining table, pinned me there, and pulled down my pants. I kept kicking backward until they held my legs. I was cursing and yelling. “This is rape. You’re fucking raping me! You could do an X-ray. You know we don’t have contraband!”
The physician’s assistant took his fist and rammed it up my anus, and then he took it out and did the same thing up my vagina. He didn’t “look” for anything. The woman officer who had talked to me had to leave the room. That it was too much for her was merely an irrelevant triumph for me, but I was glad just the same. I was shocked, in pain, and so angry that I would have strangled one of them if I could. They all had to hold me to get my pants up and to cuff my legs. They half carried, half walked me down the hall out of the building into receiving and discharge. Alex was sitting on the floor against a wall. She was shackled with full chains. I sat down next to her. We didn’t speak. What was there to say? When the marshals came to transport us and I stood up, there was blood on the floor. They wouldn’t let me change my uniform or get medical attention. It was just policy. We left Tucson covered with the stench of hate.
Part Three
Lexington
Chapter 7
Lexington High Security Unit
I HAD ALWAYS loved old cemeteries, especially in the crisp, blustery New England fall. I especially enjoyed the quiet. But my love for such things was ended that October day in 1987 when I descended the flight of those narrow steel stairs into the basement of the High Security Unit of the federal prison in Lexington. The space was cold and small, airless and frightening. Alex and I were going to our own burial with that downward walk, only we were still alive. I would never find a cemetery compelling again.
I looked around and was overcome by the sheer whiteness of the space. It was a bright, gleaming, artificial white, the kind of white that with any lengthy exposure could almost sear your eyeballs. It was the kind of white that can make you go mad. Lexington was over fifty years old. It had been built in the 1930s as an insane asylum, and then it became a federal drug treatment center and later a women’s prison. Billie Holiday had detoxed in this facility.
The basement, however, was new. They had gutted everything and constructed it all over again. It was lifeless. The only sounds were the rattling and clanking of our own chains and the barely audible buzz of the rotating surveillance cameras mounted on every wall and at every crevice. At the entrance to the tier were eight metal doors on each side. They, too, were white except for their steel handles. All the cells were locked. It was colder in the hall than outside. The air-conditioning was on full blast and there was no natural light to provide warmth anywhere. The space resembled the refrigerator in a morgue. Nothing living had yet left an imprint.
After being herded by several officers through the set of steel doors leading ever deeper underground, we were put in an airless room containing only a standing scale in one corner. A sign over the scale read medical room. The men accompanying us stepped outside and several women COs filed in. They did not look at us or speak. Neither Alex nor I tried to tell what had happened that morning in Tucson. They unchained us, strip-searched us, and left us naked. As one of them went off to find uniforms, another examined our bloody underwear and remained stone-faced. Still, no one spoke. Once we suited up in large blue jumpsuits, several men returned to escort us to yet another small room where we found our “property” sitting in opened boxes. It had arrived before we had, and had been searched and secured. The COs had inventoried all of it: photos, earrings, underwear, a favorite pen, our legal papers and books.
Mr. Ogden, the unit manager who would oversee us, secure us, and implement our psychological program, was waiting. He was a big, rambling man in his early forties, with lank dark hair that fell across
his receding hairline. An American flag was pinned to his lapel. He spoke in drawn-out, excessively enunciated words as if he were speaking to someone hearing impaired.
“Well-ll, girls-s-s-s, welcome to your new home.” We looked at him. “We’ve spent a lot of money on this place, just for you. I hope you can ap-pre-cia-te that.
“Now, all that property you have there”—he pointed to the boxes—“you can’t have most of it.” He pulled out a photo album filled with fifty or so pictures of Alex’s family. Sitting down on a metal folding chair, crossing his legs, he started flipping through the pages. “Nice kid. Whose is it?” he asked as we stood there watching him. “Mrs. Torres, you can have five of these. Pick the top five.”
“You have got to be kidding,” Alex said. “Nope. We’ll send the rest home at our expense,” he said. “We’re allowed a photo album,” I said. “You sell them in the commissary.”
“Not here, not in this unit. We have our own rules. Pick five;
that’s it.”
And so it went with everything: no shoes, no underwear, no jewelry, no religious medallions, nothing personal. We really argued about the book limit. The rule was five, like the pictures. Except, we realized, he was making up the rules as he went along. When we asked to see a copy of the regulations, we were told that Washington, D.C., was still working on them. It was clear that he was playing with us.
Finally Alex said, “Take it all, and send it all out. I don’t want any of it.”
Mr. Ogden demurred, stating that he wanted us to choose in front of him the one or two items of most importance to us. Right then, in our first hour after the morning in Tucson and the entrance to Lexington, it became clear to me that this was an initial attempt to make us dependent on the prison. More important, it was the opening salvo (albeit small) in what would become a war between two distinct sides, one of which had overwhelming power and force while the other—our side, my side—had only beliefs and a view of the world to hang on to. Alex and I would have to divest ourselves of all material ties to our world, to our past lives. We had to begin to acclimate and internalize the idea that less is more, that everything important in our lives, the things that bound us, would go on only in our heads and hearts, with nothing tangible to stir the memory. We decided in that very first hour to hang our sanity on our identity. We would not comply with our jailer’s command to choose. He seemed disappointed.
We were then handcuffed and walked through the unit, back to the cells. At the last electronic gate we were surrounded by a group of officers and officials. In the silence and whiteness even they were slightly dumbstruck. Alex and I looked at each other. We knew we were entering a tomb. I whispered out of the side of my mouth, “Nazis.” She nodded and whispered back, “A white sepulcher.”
As I looked down the hallway, my mind filled up with images of other places that were centers of human suffering: death rows in Huntsville, Angola, and Comstock; white cells and dead wings1 in Germany where captured enemies of the state experience the severest effects of isolation; the torture center on Robben Island in South Africa and La Libertad in Uruguay. As these images rose and fell, my ideas and goals—my whole life—passed before me, I began to disassociate from myself.
But freeze the frame, pull the camera back: there are only two calm, small, battered women standing there, waiting. The prison camera swiveled in a 360-degree turn and a bark sounded over the intercom: “R-two gate, R-two gate, we don’t see you.”
A CO standing next to me said, “Move! Get in line with the camera—you can see where it is.”
He shoved me and I pulled away, inadvertently stepping into direct view. “Fine,” said the disembodied voice. There was a loud electronic click, but instead of the gate swinging open, the fire alarms went off. All the men jumped. Alex and I looked at each other and started laughing.
Eventually, the alarms died down and we got through the gate. The door swung shut and Mr. Ogden stood on the outside, staring at me through the small glass windows in the full metal front door. He smiled, gave me a one-handed wave, and disappeared from view.
The first three months, Alex and I were the only two prisoners at the HSU. Every day was filled with confrontations between us and the COs over every human need: getting hot water for a cup of instant coffee, taking a shower, going outside, getting medical attention, getting a book. We were allowed to come out of our cells and talk with each other but stayed locked on the tier, not allowed beyond the gates. There was a camera at each end of the tier and three gates between the end of the tier and a hall that led to the rest of the unit. Our cells had windows we could see out of only by standing on tiptoe on the bed; the view was of shrubs at ground level in the main inner courtyard of the prison. We really were in the basement, and the side we were on received no natural light. In each cell there was a nineteen-inch TV mounted on the wall. There were no books. We were allowed no physical activity inside, no communication with anyone other than the Bureau of Prisons, and no educational or other programs. But there was that omnipresent TV. That TV came to justify and answer all charges of abuse and deprivation.
We were told by Mr. Ogden that we could submit a list of fifteen people, and only those who were approved by him would be able to correspond with us. Those same people were the ones we could telephone during our one ten-minute phone call a week, and if they submitted to fingerprinting and strip searches they could visit. He went on further to explain that the same conditions would apply to our lawyers. Alex would always ask “by whose authority” was this being said or done to us. His answer was always “ours.” Our reaction was to tell our families, friends, and supporters not to visit and we refused to submit a list.
We felt that the BOP was not only burying us alive under layer upon layer of lies and doublespeak, but also trying to construct extreme and unnecessary conditions designed to intimidate everyone connected to us. We felt that if we participated in their effort to define our lawyers as security threats, this would be tantamount to accepting the government’s view of us as “terrorists.” Alex especially did not want to play into their attempts to criminalize the Puerto Rican independence movement. At that time, fingerprinting lawyers was unprecedented, and clearly designed to have a chilling effect.
Every day got harder and harder. I had been incarcerated for more than two years and Alex more than three. While each prison had been difficult, the HSU brought new heights of control, harassment, denial of basic human rights, attacks on our gender, and terrible cruelty.
One day we could go outside to our tiny dog run for recreation (“rec”), and the next day it “violated policy.” One day we could take rec together, and the next we had to go separately. One day they would bring us hot food, and in the following days the food would be ice cold. But always there were verbal harangues.
When Chaplain Bits came one day to “counsel” us, he wouldn’t open the cell doors. He stood outside, staring through the window at me as if I had two heads. He was a short, red-faced, balding man with stains on his collar. His thin mouth was pursed in a sanctimonious way bred by years of misusing the power of the cloth. I remember answering his stare with “What’s the matter? Never seen a Jewish woman prisoner before?”
He finally spoke. “I have never met a woman with such a long sentence. You know, you are going to die here.”
When I said that I wanted to see a rabbi, he said no. Then he moved down the tier to the next cell. Alex’s husband was a minister in the United Church of Christ, and minister to one of the largest Methodist congregations in the Chicago neighborhood of West Town. Alex is a devout and dedicated Christian. She can quote from the Bible chapter and verse like no one else I know. I stood at my door trying, unsuccessfully, to hear their conversation. Later Alex told me that all she wanted from him was permission to have and wear a cross. To which he replied, “Not when you live by the sword, you die by it. You hardly need a cross.” An argument about peace and rebellion ensued. His utter lack of compassion was evidenced when I heard him mu
tter “that bitch” as he quickly walked down the tier past my cell.
So it went, until one day Mr. Ogden took us into the day room and sat us down. “There is a way out,” he said with a deadly seriousness, nothing jovial about him at that moment.
We sat silently.
“You can be transferred out of here if you renounce your associations, affiliations, and your … uh, err, uh … views. You can have the privilege of living out your sentence in general population.”
“On whose authority?” We both asked in unison. This time he said, “Take my word for it.”
He can’t be saying this, I thought. I have the right to my beliefs, to free association. I’m an American. Then I had to smile, even laugh at myself. The idea of this country and its glorious democracy still held sway in my thinking. I still cried whenever I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., even though I was an “enemy of the state.” Then I realized that if we could somehow convince him to put what he had just said in writing, we could expose the HSU for what it was—the first official prison for women political prisoners in America. We knew where we were, and we knew that the BOP was concealing its real mission behind exaggerated distortions of our “dangerousness.” Its officials were trying to justify the dehumanizing conditions they had put us in by slapping a label on us (and on top of that claming the conditions were not inhuman because we had TVs). I was very happy that this had just happened. I felt that he had just given us the tool to fight back with. We told Mr. Ogden that we knew what they wanted us to do, and that he could forget it. He smiled, as though to say that time was in his favor. He let us walk unchained back to our cells.
Later that same day, we were escorted through two gates and placed behind the locked gate at the entrance to the shower stalls. A voice said, “Jim, move—you’re blocking the view.” My eyes searched the walls until they found the camera down the hall, facing the shower entrance. It was trained on the two-foot-wide space between the shower stalls and the wall, the space where Alex and I stood to take our clothes off before stepping into the shower.
An American Radical Page 8
