An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  I knew that we were not forgotten, but the isolation was profound and on some levels effective. So while Mary’s words made me happy, their meaning didn’t really penetrate. Then Mary said, “You know, Susan, you have to explain what this place and the conditions here represent because there are other people living in conditions that are just as bad. Laura is in Alderson in the hole; Tim and Alan [Berkman] are at Marion, and you know Marion is in a twenty-three-hour lockdown.”

  “Mary, a hole is a hole for sure. It may vary in size and temperature, but its purpose is always to further punish and control the prisoner’s behavior and access. No doubt, most county jails are filthy, unsanitary, with horrible food, and no physical activity. I know because I have been in some while in transit from one prison to another. I’ve been in Oklahoma, in Dallas, in Birmingham. But this place has to be viewed in its political context. We have to look at how it developed, what counter-insurgency techniques are being used, how the Bureau of Prisons created new classifications for women, the psychological conditions, and, most important, who is in it! There is room here for sixteen, but there are only two of us.” I was on a roll now. “Prisoners, especially political or militant people, spend years in holes. Martin Sostre, Geronimo Pratt—both spent seven years in the hole. And there are many others. But here, the authorities are saying, ‘Because you are political, you will spend your entire sentence under these conditions unless you renounce your beliefs.’ And it is written in the coming regulations about this place, and that is what makes it different. Supposedly, we in America don’t have political prisons, and we don’t use torture to coerce people to renounce their beliefs.” I sat back exhausted. I could see from Mary’s eyes that she thought that getting that kind of analysis out into the public arena would be difficult. She wanted to see the regulations in writing herself. But I could also see that she agreed with me. Mary would organize as much as she could, to the best of her ability.

  After every visit the COs retaliated against us for breaking their control over every aspect of our lives. The strip searches increased.

  By the spring of 1987, there were five of us. When Silvia Baraldini was brought to Lexington in the late winter of 1987, Alex and I had been there for four months. Silvia had been quietly living in general population in California for four years. She had a record of clear conduct and despite her forty-year sentence had managed to create a life inside. She had been the prison librarian; she had visits from her sister Marina and her mother, both of whom lived in Italy. She was reconnecting with her past—friends from her days with the Students for a Democratic Society in Madison, Wisconsin; friends from her defense work for the Black Panthers; friends from her years in the women’s movement. Silvia had created a network of support and survival. But when she refused to talk to the FBI agents who came to question her about other people, the very next day she was transferred to the HSU at Lexington. Silvia was the only one of us who knew what life in general population was like. Because she knew that general population in prison was less restrictive, she had something to compare our conditions to. Having that knowledge made doing time harder for her.

  I knew Silvia well. We had worked in political organizations together for more than a decade. We had been in a leadership body of the May 19 Communist organization, an outgrowth of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, which had been a support organization for the Weather Underground. We had both been indicted in the New York federal conspiracy case. Silvia had been convicted of conspiracy, the same conspiracy that included the prison break of Assata Shakur and several bank robberies. We had been partners, but I hadn’t seen her for five years, and we hadn’t been on the best terms when we had seen each other last. But Silvia and I made an agreement on the very first day to build our unity in that basement, and we wouldn’t let them divide us.

  had my parents. My mother and father may at one time have been left-leaning liberal, secular Jews from the Upper West Side, but they had moved far beyond that stereotype to become dedicated advocates for my human rights and freedom. I saw this at Lexington and watching their transformation was fantastic. They embraced Silvia, Alex, Tim, Marilyn, Mutulu Shakur, and many other political prisoners. They refused to be intimidated by all the forces that the government unleashed against them directly and through its attacks on me. When in 1982, the FBI threatened my mother with prison if she didn’t testify in front of a grand jury, she immediately got a lawyer and said, “Try it.” When the FBI went to my father’s dental office and warned him that they could hurt his practice, he threw them out.

  At the start, my folks had been furious with me. They said that I had brought my punishment on myself, that I was wrong to choose political violence over pacifism. But as they involved themselves in my defense, they came to believe that those of us involved in the “struggle” were moral and that our political principles were motivated out of concern, not out of hatred. I don’t know exactly how their views began to change, but I know that after they visited Lexington they were with me with a fierce and undying love.

  My desire not to have them visit, which had sparked my argument with Mary, was partly due to my own arrogance: I was afraid they wouldn’t be able to deal with it. Up until then, in all our visits we had been able to maintain at least the pretense of well-being, a semblance of normalcy. Alex’s husband, the Reverend Jose Torres, had visited at Tucson the same time as my parents, and we had all spent time together. Somehow we laughed, and ate, and carried on as families do, even if we also wept. Those were good visits. But the HSU was a living tomb, and I knew it would break my parents’ hearts.

  I spent hours preparing for the visit. I thought about all the best things to say, how to be positive, what we could talk about that would not be too painful. Mainly I tried to be calm and appear okay. I wanted to protect them and to manage our emotions. Knowing that the visiting room was filmed and taped, I felt it was important to keep control. I was even then losing the ability to distinguish between the repression that was directed against me in the HSU experiment and the wall of ice I was building between me and feeling anything at all. I was clamping down on my own self and my own feelings in order to repress myself rather than succumb to the BOP’s repressive tactics.

  I waited in the visiting room for my folks to be processed. When the CO escorted them in, they bounded toward me, enveloping me in an embrace of love and support that was like a laser cutting through ice. We hugged as tightly as possible until the CO watching us rapped on the glass window and said, “No more contact. You can only have contact at the beginning.” I turned to say something, and my father put his hand on my arm to tell me not to waste time on them.

  We sat cramped in this ridiculously tiny room, happy for the tight quarters that allowed our knees to touch and our energy to envelop us. My father’s eyes filled with tears. “This is unbelievable,” he whispered.

  “Let’s not cry,” I said, barely managing to keep my voice from cracking.

  “No, we won’t cry, we’ll just be quiet for a while,” my mother replied.

  After we all pulled ourselves together, we began to talk as if our lives depended on it. All my careful thinking, all my preparations, evaporated and I told them as much as I could about my life in that basement. They told me about all the people they were meeting and learning about who were sympathetic. The words poured out of our mouths.

  When we stopped to catch our breath, I asked about my father’s side of the family. None of my uncles, aunts, or cousins shared my parents’ liberal sympathies. My father had taken a different path. He had been the only son of his Polish-Latvian immigrant family to go to college and then on to dental school. He had veered from their rigid and narrow immigrant community during World War II when he had met Communists and radicals in his Army unit in the Pacific. His vision and politics was a mix of humanism and socialism (although he voted Democrat) for the rest of his life.

  My father married my mother when they were in their thirties, and it took a long time before his family acce
pted her. To them, she was an exotic, bohemian beauty whose experience surpassed their understanding. The daughter of a Hungarian immigrant and factory worker, my mother had come from Detroit, Michigan, by way of Hollywood, California, where she had become a film editor and movie producer, a radical and an organizer. Most problematic, though, was that she was divorced.

  Over time, however, everyone mended the rifts and coexisted in the way that dysfunctional families do—that is, until 1965, when they all argued over the Vietnam War. I remember visiting at an uncle’s house when the subject of the war came up and the screaming started. It didn’t take long for the differences and then the old prejudices to spill out.

  My uncle told my father, “It’s my country, right or wrong. You love it or leave it, you unpatriotic bastard.”

  My father turned so red with anger that I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Then my aunt said something about my mother that I couldn’t quite hear. My father grabbed me and herded us out of the house. We never went back.

  Forgiveness had come twenty years later, but now, when I asked how each one was by name—Uncle Jack, Aunt Ruth, and on and on—I felt the hesitation and a discordant energy.

  “Did someone die?” I quietly asked. “Who is it?” When you are in prison, you always think about people dying; it is what time and hostile surroundings do to your mind. But this time I knew.

  “Is it Neil?”

  Now there was total silence in the room. Neil was my favorite cousin. Only a few years older than I, he was a painter, an artist, a fellow tortured soul who had for much of his life been in and out of mental institutions with schizophrenia. Neil’s father had died when he was little, and my father had filled in. They loved each other. My parents had tried to help Neil throughout his childhood and had encouraged him to study at the Art Students League. They visited him in the various hospitals and homes that he bounced in and out of. They introduced him to other artists; they tried to sell his work.

  Neil lived with us for short periods when I was growing up and I loved him. Everyone said that we looked alike, more like brother and sister than cousins. I was an only child and Neil was a middle child, the problem child. He was odd, and I felt odd, and we had an uncanny affinity. I hadn’t seen Neil in over five years.

  “Please tell me,” I asked.

  “Susie,” my mother said, “Neil is dead.”

  “He died of a heroin overdose,” my father added.

  “Heroin?” I asked, surprised. I hadn’t known he was a junkie. I wasn’t shocked to hear he was dead, just terribly sad.

  And then my father said, “He died the night you got arrested.”

  “What? What do you mean? That’s over three years ago. How could no one tell me?” Now I was shocked.

  “We didn’t want to tell you when it first happened, when we first saw you in New York. We thought it would be too much, and then it never seemed to be the right time, and you didn’t ask about him. Then it got harder and harder to figure out how to tell you,” my mother said, searching me inside with her eyes.

  I began to cry. I don’t know if it was about Neil, about their not telling me, or about the idea that I could be so isolated from my past life that a favorite person could be gone for three years without my knowing it. “This is cosmic, this is too much. The same day—me and Neil on the same day,” I said.

  I looked at my parents sitting across from me and I realized that we were alike in many ways. The three of us were always trying to parcel out our pain in limited quantities, to protect ourselves. I knew they had withheld the news about Neil to protect me, just as I had tried to plan our visit in order to protect them. Yet I was angry, too. I felt they should have told me about Neil a lot sooner. That they didn’t made me feel excluded from our family. Sitting there, I couldn’t sort out my emotions. I had thought my parents would be devastated at seeing Lexington, but death had intervened and made the HSU recede.

  Our visit was terminated arbitrarily by the guard, lest we forget for one second where we were. I was left with only a promise of more talk the next day.

  I went back to my cell exhausted. That day more than any other, I hoped there were no cameras in the cell. I lay there weeping and raging. I chain-smoked until my fingers were brown. I paced back and forth, and could barely keep from banging, pounding, and punching the cement walls. I felt a terrible, heavy sadness as I thought of the consequences that we were all living through. All these unintended consequences were from actions of my own doing. I raged against myself and against my captors until I finally fell asleep.

  I woke with a start. Both Silvia and Alex were yelling through the food slots in their doors. “Susan, Susan, turn on your TV!” I hopped up and flipped the switch. There on the local NBC news were my parents, surrounded by the women from the local Lexington support group, made up of a few women human rights activists. They were holding a press conference right outside the front gates of the prison. My mother had fire in her eyes as she defied the small jam of reporters to contradict her. “This place is a prison within a prison. No one deserves this. I don’t agree with what my daughter did, but she’s a human being, not an animal.” She was furious. Then my father read from a written statement.

  About this same time I filed a Rule 35 motion. This is a “safety valve” in federal sentencing that allows prisoners to appeal to the sentencing judge for a reduction of sentence. There are many grounds upon which to file such a motion. It is predicated on the idea of compassion in sentencing, or if not outright compassion, then a consideration of extenuating circumstances. Those can include family hardship, acceptance of responsibility, new evidence, or a willingness to comply with requests from the prosecution. Such compliance could mean cooperating in an investigation or testifying in another trial. After initial sentencing and the completion of all appeals, the clock starts running and the convicted person has 365 days to file a Rule 35 motion. Everyone files it. For the most part, it is an exercise in futility, but once in a while a judge will grant the motion and the lucky convict will get a time cut or will be released with time served.

  I had no appeals left. During sentencing, I had scoffed at my sentence. I had thought that the system itself wouldn’t last fifty-eight years. In giving me the maximum time allowable under the law, Judge Lacey had said that he was not sentencing me for anything other than what I was convicted of in his courtroom, which was a possessory offense. He had said that he was not in any way swayed by any other charges that I was facing, and that they played no role in his sentence. He was referring to the charges stemming from the federal conspiracy case that included the attempt to free Assata Shakur from prison and the Brink’s robbery. Although it was certainly not his intention, his making that assertion would help me years later. Then he was ensuring that there would be no constitutional challenge brought on the basis of bias or prejudice on his part. He didn’t know that the Southern District of New York would drop the Brink’s charges and refuse to take me to trial.

  Now it was 1987 and time to file the Rule 35. What made it even a consideration was that Judge Lacey had retired from the bench. I could bring the motion in front of an entirely different set of judicial eyes. Three years after passions had cooled and the prosecuting attorney had also retired and moved on, none of the original players would be there except for me. Mary wanted to file. I did, too. But I was in Lexington and it was taking every ounce of strength for me to manage there. Mary told me that because such a motion had to be premised on remorse or “changed circumstances” (such as a major witness recanting in a trial), there was no point in filing unless I had something new to say. I had no new circumstances, so I was left with remorse.

  Remorse is a complicated thing. In this case, it didn’t mean simply taking responsibility in front of the court—saying, “Yes, judge, I did it”—but also apologizing for endangering people and a lot more. I was sorry that I had endangered people by moving hundreds of pounds of explosives without numerous precautions in place. I had spent a lot of t
ime thinking about it, and thinking how fortunate it was that no one had been injured. But, still, I wasn’t thinking that it was wrong to have done it at all, wrong to have resorted to the use of arms; not yet, anyway. At the time, remorse to me meant apologizing for my politics, and that I wasn’t prepared to do. I felt that I had taken responsibility for my actions. I felt that by saying that my government was responsible for war crimes and genocide, and that in all good conscience I could do nothing less than oppose it, was equivalent to saying I had “done it.” But the meaning of “it” was the issue. To me, “it” stood for revolutionary opposition to my government up to and including the right to use arms. To the court, “it” stood for a violent criminal intention to murder innocent people.

  The new judge in New Jersey was Marion Trump-Barry. All I knew about her was that she was Donald Trump’s sister, and hardly a liberal. When Mary, my parents, my supporters, and several hundred friends went to court to argue the motion, all Judge Barry wanted to know was what I had been intending to do with the explosives—what I had been planning to blow up—and who else was involved. Mary answered that, to her knowledge, there had been no specific plans and that the court knew that everyone else involved had been arrested. She further argued the disproportion and disparity of the sentence, citing cases in which KKK members and anti-abortion clinic bombers had been sentenced to five years or less for similar charges.

  It took the judge less than an hour to deny the motion. A year of work, of emotional investment and energy on the part of so many, was gone in a matter of minutes. Mary and everyone else who had worked on the appeal were crushed at the ease with which the decision was rendered and knew that there were very few mechanisms left to use to change the sentence. My mother wept in the courtroom as the judge announced the decision. I heard about it over the phone in a monitored legal call. The guard who was listening laughed and rushed away to inform the other cops on duty in the unit. They had a small party in their office.