An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  “Who’s coming?” we wanted to know.

  “The American Civil Liberties Union.” He said it as sarcastically as he could muster. “They’re going to walk through, they can enter your cells, and then they’ll talk to each of you individually.”

  At last, I thought. “Praises be,” someone said.

  We had known that they had been trying to get in, but we had not heard that they had succeeded. Sig and Lurch left us all standing on the tier. As I waited for them to arrive, I thought, We can win, somehow we can make them see what’s really going on. They’ve got to believe us. The next thing I knew, the gates popped open and they were walking down the tier. They were the first civilians outside of BOP and law enforcement to see our cells. I felt like crying, because to have resisted enough to force the administration to let observers into the prison was in and of itself a victory. There were two of them, and they were surrounded by a gaggle of public relations and administrative BOPers. The smell of Brut was strong as the prison administrators tried to funnel the ACLU representatives through.

  I heard Adjoa Aiyetoro’s voice before I saw her. “Mr. Sig, uh, uh, Sig … there’s no curtain between the camera and the shower area. How is that possible?”

  Yes, I thought. Her tone conveyed her utter outrage, yet she had a power that she conveyed even in the quiet of her voice. Yes. I stood in the doorway of the cell, watching them approach. Adjoa Aiyetoro was the lead litigator for the National Prison Project. She had been a prisoners’ rights advocate for several years, and her reputation was one of fierceness, stubbornness, and meticulous preparation. She was a very thin, high-energy African American woman. Her appearance that day emphasized the African, which I thought she had done partly for our benefit. She was wearing what looked like an African textile shirt, and her hair was held back by a bright kente cloth head wrap. Seeing her that first time, I felt that I was being liberated right then and there, if not in body, then certainly in spirit. Her physical contrast to all the white men in their tight-fitting polyester suits and dark ties was a beautiful thing to behold. Following close behind her was a big, full-bearded man wearing a worn worsted-tweed suit. He looked professorial in that leather-patch-on-the-elbow kind of way, except that in his hand he was holding a large leather safari hat. Under his arm he had a leather-encased pad. He was in full scowl as he listened to Mr. Sam Smith, the warden’s representative.

  “The prison psychologist monitors them? I would like to speak to him. I would like to see his files.”

  “I doubt that will be possible. They haven’t signed releases for that,” Smith said.

  The bearded man saw me in the door and smiled. He stuck his hand out. “Dr. Korn, Dr. Dick Korn.” He pumped my hand. “May I?” He pointed to the cell.

  I said yes.

  “You’re Susan, right?”

  I nodded. He and I were standing alone in the cell. He had partially closed the door. I felt so strange, embarrassed that this was where I lived, shy that he was actually standing in my cell, happy that a real person and not a corrections officer was seeing it. He walked up to the bulletin board and read the poem pinned to it. His whole face split into a grin. “Oh my, oh my, he is my favorite poet. Do you know him?”

  “Yes, that’s why I have his poem.”

  “You’ve read his poetry?” Dr. Korn asked.

  “Yes, I have read his epic poetry and prison poetry,” I answered.

  “I wouldn’t call it prison poetry, I’d call it his prison period. He wrote for years after he got out.” Dr. Korn was now staring at me. I may have shrugged, not at all sure what to say. “He really is my favorite poet.”

  I did not say, “Mine, too.” I did not know what to do. I could not really chat anymore. It was beyond my capacity. “Ask them why we can’t live on the other side of the tier; ask to see one of the cells that gets sunlight,” I said.

  At that point Ms. Aiyetoro came into my cell. “I just realized you all are on the same side, the interior side,” she said. She turned to Smith. “I want to see all the cells, every one of them, occupied or not.” They walked out. At that moment, I felt elated by her attitude.

  They interviewed all of us. We had thirty minutes each. I went first, and when I was finished I hoped that everyone else had been more detailed in their descriptions, as I didn’t think I had been clear enough. The ACLU team had been sympathetic, but the problem of my “terrorist jacket” seemed to be a big concern. They asked me question after question about my record. Dr. Korn said that it was clear to him that the unit had a specific intent. He said that by limiting the overt physical brutality of the living conditions, coupled with the creation of such a highly controlled group that was at its core hostile, the BOP was ensuring that we would internalize the control and the rage, allowing it to intensify until someone snapped. What he meant was until someone could not control their rage any longer and would have to express it. They asked Silvia about the difference between general population and the HSU. They talked to Alex about her medical condition. They talked to Sylvia Brown and Debra Brown about how they felt.

  After the ACLU tour, things got more hostile and intense than they had ever been. A constant in all prisons is that when the prisoners fight for their rights or dignity, the authorities retaliate—and retaliate they did, in every way they could. First, they went on a campaign of sleep deprivation, waking us every fifteen minutes night after night. This drove all of us so close to the edge that we knew it was dangerous. We had until now succeeded in keeping our unity, but they began a divide-and-conquer strategy that involved trying to turn Sylvia and Debra, the two social prisoners, against Alex, Silvia, and me. Still, we kept our sense of humor, slim though it was. There was no further disciplinary measure they could take, except to remove our TVs, which they did. They gave us write-ups upon write-ups. But if they wrote us up for having six books instead of five, we would laugh: “What are you going to do to us? Go ahead, take us to segregation.” They would not let us near the rest of the population, not even in segregation.

  We went on a protest in response. We refused to go to “recreation” and we went on a work strike. The only work was cleaning and folding men’s underwear in a closet that had been deemed the UNICOR satellite factory (UNICOR is the prison industry system). Not working was not very difficult.

  Dr. Korn’s report deconstructed the unit in every way and condemned it from every penological and psychological point of view. It said, “Taken in its totality, the HSU seeks to reduce prisoners to a state of submission essential for their ideological conversion. That failing, the next objective is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient self-directing antagonists. That failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves.” After the report was released, there was a growing demand to inspect the unit from other groups, including the General Board of Global Ministries of the Methodist Church and Amnesty International.

  One day that summer the SWAT team came again. My cell was closest to the entrance, so they began with me. They were yelling, “Move it, move it!” The SWAT team often used screaming and group grunting to pump themselves up, to intimidate us and to make themselves believe that they were in combat. The uncertainty of what was happening and why, coupled with the threat of imminent violence, made my heart pound so hard I thought my ribs would crack. Then Sig, the unit manager, appeared and everything got quiet. He ceremoniously removed a ring of keys from beneath his fat gut and opened the cell door directly opposite mine. Without any acknowledgment, he said, “Put your stuff in here.” It was a cell on the light side.

  I thought, Why me? But I did not dare ask aloud. I did manage to ask, “Is everyone moving?”

  “None of your business. Get in there,” he ordered.

  They pushed me into the cell and shoved in all of my belongings, including the mattress, the bedding, and my bulletin board. They slammed the door and locked it. I bent down to peer through
the food slot to see what they were doing. In those moments, I realized that they were trying to divide me from Alex and Silvia. Then I got mad. It was, admittedly, a delayed reaction and it replaced the heart-pounding fear. I yelled through the slot, “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to treat us this way!” Then the other women started yelling, asking me what was going on. I yelled back, saying I had been moved to the other side. Then they went to Alex and moved her.

  They continued down the line until they stopped at Silvia’s cell. Silvia was in another part of the unit on a legal call. When she came back to the tier, accompanied by two COs, Alex and I started talking through our doors. Silvia wanted to know why she had not been moved. She needed daylight as much as anyone else. The cops refused to speak with her, and locked her in. We proceeded to have hours of discussion and debate at mega-volume through the vents. We finally agreed to lock in and refuse to come out of our cells until they moved Silvia. Everyone was upset and exhausted. It seemed like such a minor thing, yet we knew it was enormous and terrible. In Spanish there is an expression: Qué lástima. It means, “Woe is me,” “This is the ultimate,” “This is the worst of all ends.” We had not been in the HSU a year yet, but our world had been so successfully narrowed that we no longer could keep perspective. Qué lástima.

  That night in the new cell was bad. The three-foot-square window was at waist height and the floor of the cell was level with the ground outside. The window was covered with a thick, steel-mesh gate that made it impossible to see anything directly. The only way to see the outside was to eyeball the small holes in the mesh. They blacked out the green rolling hills of Kentucky, but they did not block the spotlights that ran adjacent to the razor-wire fence that surrounded the building. It was that fence’s inescapable shadows the spotlights cast onto the walls of my cell.

  That night my despair was the worst I had ever felt. I was consumed by the shadows. Having lived for so long on the cavelike dark side, I now found that the light drove me crazy and left me absolutely sleepless. Worse still, the wire shadow that hung on my wall seemed to cut into me. I kept muttering to myself, “Now I am in a concentration camp.” I had the first of several panic attacks that night. I could not control the terrible anxiety that caused me to shake and then alternate between feeling cold and then hot. I felt I was breaking.

  In the morning I went to Alex and Silvia and told them about the panic attack. They were very kind, and I am sure upset for me and for us all. They calmed me down and told me to come to them if I felt it coming again. Later, the COs moved Silvia to the light side. Later still, the prison psychologist, whose nickname was “Call Me Mark” (because no matter how many times he appeared at each cell door, his first words were always “call me Mark”) came to ask each of us how we were doing. We all told him to go to hell.

  Night after night, I tried to cover the window. The only thing that worked was stuffing a sheet through the mesh holes with a pencil, but at each hourly count the CO would stand at the door and scream at me to take it down until I did. I finally made peace with the cell one night when I was peering out and looked up to see the full moon. I hadn’t seen the moon, in any of its phases, for almost a year. It made me very happy. I shouted to the others, “Check out the moon! You can see the moon—it’s full!” I was entranced by the beauty of it. The mystical energy of its glow penetrated into me and forced me to move. At first I paced around, but as I basked in the moon I began to dance. And then I saw my own shadow over the wire moving through it, around it, and in between all those jagged edges. I realized that I had actually forgotten the moon. I hadn’t thought about the moon for months, not once. I thought, Never again, never can I forget the moon.

  The Methodist delegation toured the unit. One of the members was the Reverend Ben Chavis. I was so excited—almost delirious—that he was there walking around, asking questions. He had been a political prisoner himself as part of the Wilmington Ten1 case. The Wilmington Ten conspiracy case began during the racial rioting that occurred in February 1971 when Wilmington, North Carolina’s, African American students announced a boycott of the city’s schools. Reverend Chavis, along with nine others, was arrested during the aftermath of the rioting. The Wilmington Ten case aroused national and international outrage. In 1978, Amnesty International cited the Wilmington Ten as the first official case of political prisoners in the United States. On December 4, 1980, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the convictions, exonerating the Wilmington Ten.

  I knew that if anyone would grasp the implications of our conditions, it would be Ben Chavis. We were given five minutes to talk with his delegation. One of the women on the tour knew a woman who had worked with Silvia in Zimbabwe, when she had been invited to be an international observer of the first democratic elections in Rhodesia in 1980. We could tell that our visitors were angered by the prison. Reverend Chavis told us, “Hang on, people know, hang on.” After each interaction with people who were not our captors, we always felt better. Their words fueled our ability to resist.

  A writer from The Nation came to interview us. Mr. William A. Reuben was a longtime progressive journalist and he talked to us with a depth of understanding that helped us articulate our own reactions. He was very sympathetic and kind to us. He had interviewed Morton Sobell at Alcatraz in the early 1960s. Morton Sobell had been one of the coaccused in the 1950 Rosenberg trial that had convicted and sentenced Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to death for being Soviet spies. Morton Sobell was convicted of “conspiracy to commit espionage” in 1951 and served more than eighteen years in prison. His experience writing about other politically motivated prison treatment gave him greater understanding of our conditions. The article that resulted from his interview with us broke the silence in which we had been shrouded. One thing followed another, and then NBC news—led by Danny Schechter (an old acquaintance of Silvia from her SDS days) in conjunction with the documentary filmmaker Nina Rosenblum—was given permission by the BOP to do an on-camera interview with all of us. I could not believe that they were going to allow the interview to take place. The BOP believed that it would be our undoing, that we would appear as insane and paranoid individuals. They always underestimated us and the support we had outside. They believed that their total control over us meant that they had full authority. It was an important distinction in the war of wills in which we were engaged. They had control, but we resisted as best we could by not accepting their authority. They hated us for that more than our politics.

  While the story was getting out into the public, the ACLU was in discussions with the BOP. We were never privy to those conversations, but we heard the end result: the ACLU told our lawyers that they would not take our case because the BOP was planning to close the HSU and transfer us to a new maximum-security women’s prison in Northwest Florida. They estimated that it would take a year or two to build the new prison. The BOP said that the closing was an administrative decision and not the result of outside pressure—they simply needed more space for maximum-security women. We thought that rationale was funny because there were many empty cells in our basement. There were sixteen cells and only five of us.

  Initially, we were happy. When the warden came and walked through the unit, I could not contain myself. I said, “We know all about closing the HSU. Your experiment failed.”

  “Your opinion and your words, not mine,” he retorted.

  “Yes, those are my words. All you do is lie about your abuses.”

  “Your opinion, not mine,” he said again.

  “Fortunately for us, human rights activists agree with us and not you. That’s why we are leaving this nightmare. We shut it down, no matter what you tell the press.”

  But I spoke too soon. As the days turned into weeks, the five of us on the unit realized that “a year or two” was more like “three or more,” and conditions were not changing for the better; things were getting worse.

  The BOP had admitted to the ACLU that while we had been housed in the HSU, there had
been no threats by outside forces to either retaliate against the BOP or to free us and that our placement there was simply a matter of the “justice community’s” decision. We believed that if we relied on the BOP’s answer, we would never get into general population and never get rid of the “terrorist jacket.” They would construct a larger version of what we were in, with all the necessary controls in it. We further believed that our psychological files needed to be released to prove that the HSU was an experiment in psychological torture. We were deeply concerned that if we did not expose the program now, the BOP would institutionalize psychological maltreatment and manipulation as a form of behavior modification and mind control for all the political women prisoners. Work began on a lawsuit by the ACLU and our lawyers and other progressive organizations.

  Our suspicions were right: nothing came of the BOP’s pronouncement. Life continued. One morning, Mr. Dozier, the head CO, came charging onto the tier, yelling as he approached, “Get up! Attention! I have orders for you, direct orders!”

  Mr. Dozier seemed like he was a man who was stuck in his life, as though he had put a foot down into the mud and couldn’t lift it up. He was in his mid-forties and had a glistening buzz cut (but, we were told, no wife). Unlike so many others of our jailers, however, he was still fit. He had worked in a Kentucky men’s maximum-security mental institution for years, and when he transferred to the federal system there were promises of opportunities to use his skills and of promotions. But he had not made it past CO, because working in a mental institution hadn’t required any special skills. He was angry, all of the time.

  “Your orders are to clean the unit,” he bellowed. He wanted it spotless and shining. By then, however, we were through with cooperating or listening to orders; we were no longer complying. No one moved, no one stood, and no one even came to a cell door to look at him.