He went ballistic. He began screaming at the camera to whoever was watching in the video control room. “These fucking bitches, these lazy fucking bitches! That’s it!” He left the tier. An hour later, he was back with two lieutenants and two other COs. We had expected him to return, so we stayed in our individual cells. They locked us in and then slid pink slips, the disciplinary write-ups we called “shots,” under our doors. We were all charged with refusing to work, disobeying a direct order, and slothfulness. I didn’t care. I don’t think anyone did. Someone down the hall said, “Take the fucking TV.” Later that same day, Sig came and unlocked us and asked us to clean the unit. He was being polite. We thought that maybe he had seen the tape and knew how crazy and hostile Dozier had been. He ripped up the shots. But again, we said no. That night officers came and cleaned, a sight I had never seen before. They were mopping and buffing the already gleaming floors. Their glares were filled with hatred for us.
The next morning, Silvia had a visit with her lawyer, Elizabeth Fink—Liz—a longtime radical who had fought numerous political cases and won many of them. Among many cases, Liz had been the attorney for the Attica brothers in the case stemming from the Attica prison rebellion in the 1970s, and worked unceasingly on the brothers’ behalf. Because we were jointly working on the lawsuit against the BOP to close down the HSU, I was allowed to visit with Liz and Silvia. We were in the midst of explaining to her why we had to sue and not accept the BOP status quo. I looked up and, out of the day room window, I saw the director of the Bureau of Prisons, J. Michael Quinlan. He was walking past us down the hallway, flanked by numerous “men in suits.” Men in suits, as opposed to men in uniform, were always a signal that higher-level administrators were walking the unit. The director was one of the shortest and slightest and mousiest men I had ever seen. “It’s Quinlan. It’s fucking Quinlan,” I said.
The three of us stood up all at once, getting ready for battle. Liz stepped out into the hall. “Mr. Quinlan,” she absolutely roared, “we’d like to speak with you.” Because the men had to wait for an electronic gate to open for them, they were trapped with us in the hall. Quinlan turned and trained on us a look that was both contemptuous and hesitant, as though he expected us to rush his party and physically attack them in the hall. “Mr. Quinlan, we must talk to you,” Liz intoned again.
As she started moving up the hall, Quinlan apparently decided that it would be safer to talk to us in the tiny legal visiting room. He turned and approached us. I was seething. I simply could not believe that this was the man responsible for our condition, this small, ugly, nondescript man. Liz is a big woman, physically intimidating, a woman who can command a chaotic courtroom into utter quiet. She used that skill now. Standing as close as she could possibly get without stepping on the man, she said, “This unit is an abomination. It is the most repulsive and degrading place I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot.”
“I’m sure you have, Ms. Fink.” Quinlan did not blink. “It looks very good to me,” he went on, “but we are, as your clients know, opening a bigger unit and they’ll be sent there soon.”
“It will be just like this. You know we should be in population,” Silvia broke in, with such anger in her that tears spilled out of her eyes.
“I don’t think so, Ms. Baraldini,” he replied, eyeing Silvia.
“And where is this new control unit prison? And when is it opening?” Liz demanded.
“In Florida, within a year or so.” And with that, his security guards hustled him through the gate.
Later, after Liz had left and we were put back in our cells, Quinlan took another tour of our tier. When he walked past Alex’s cell, she told him that he would need to build many units because they couldn’t build enough prisons to contain the Puerto Rican independence movement.
We were terribly demoralized by what we felt was the inactivity of our supporters. We thought that they were acquiescing to the BOP’s newest statement that they were closing the HSU. We felt that believing anything they said was a grave mistake. We needed to use whatever mechanism we could in order to resist. We needed something to struggle for. Without it, we felt increasingly stifled. It was during this lull that I developed my suicide plan. Until that point in my sentence, I had not seriously thought of suicide as an option. But now planning one’s own death seemed like the ultimate exertion of power over one’s own life. It was my back-door escape plan if all else failed. I revised it over and over again. I felt that if my mind turned to mush, or they succeeded in breaking my spirit and mental capacities, then death would be the most honorable end. It was not romantic or hysterical; it simply was an option that, given my circumstances, I believed I had to consider. And once my plan was complete, I felt a great relief, as though I had liberated myself from the fear of being destroyed. The final act of control over myself would then be mine to determine.
My plan was very simple. I would hang myself with a sheet. There was a water pipe that ran across the ceiling of my cell, and it was high enough off the ground to do the trick. I asked myself if I would know when the time came. I worried that I would decide on the moment but then be too screwed up to be capable of actually doing it. For months, I practiced yoga and meditation to strengthen my mind so that I would know when the right time came. And as I prepared my plan to die, I thought about how much I would miss the moon, and Aretha Franklin, and my family and friends, and Chinese food, which I could hardly remember. I thought about everyone on death row, and of Debra only two cells down the tier, fighting to live. And I thought how awful it would be not to know how things turned out.
On the unit, we never discussed suicide among ourselves. But we were getting sicker. Alex had a heart condition, a mitrovalve prolapse. Every day we asked the COs to take her to a doctor, and every day we were told only, “The PA is coming.” Each day, Alex got worse. The COs accused her of hunger striking and used that as the explanation for increased physical weakness.
It took a week for the physician’s assistant to come to the unit. He wouldn’t go through the electronic gate. He called down the tier, “Mrs. Torres, Mrs. Torres, I’m the PA.”
Alex came out of her cell and walked to the gate. The PA said, “Come here, come closer.”
As she approached, he picked up his stethoscope, which was hanging around his neck. “Unbutton your shirt,” he said.
Alex looked at him in utter disbelief as he put the stethoscope through the bars. “You have got to be kidding.”
All of us were standing at our cell doors on the tier watching this. “Come on, Mrs. Torres; let me have your heart.”
“Forget it,” Alex said as she walked back to her cell.
“She’s refusing medical care—see, its all bullshit; she’s lying,” the voice from the control room yelled through the intercom under the surveillance camera.
The PA said, “She’s refusing,” as he walked down the hall out of our vision.
We were so stunned by what had just happened that we did not protest. We all looked at one another with a combination of fury and grief. Silvia said, “That’s it. I’m going on a work strike until Alex gets to see a doctor. Can you beat that shit?”
I said, “Me, too.” Both Debra Brown and Sylvia Brown also wanted to strike. Witnessing the prison’s version of medical care fortified our resolve to do whatever we had to do.
Functionally, going on strike meant that we would all be locked in our own cells all day instead of being allowed out on the tier. It meant that no one would clean or go outside. It meant that we would get a write-up and have our TVs taken away. Sig, who by now was ready to take early retirement, came and talked to us. His conversation with Silvia went like this:
“I can’t understand how you would jeopardize your status over what you call this thing, this ridiculous thing you call solidarity. I mean, throwing out your record for someone else.”
“Come on, Sig, you were in the Navy or the Marines or some military. You know it’s like the esprit de corps, or going down for your bu
ddy, that kind of thing,” Silvia said.
“Yeah, okay, I understand that, but I only stand by my buddy if he’s right, not if he’s wrong.”
“Well, we think we’re right. You should give proper medical treatment to Alex, and until you do, that’s the way it is.”
“I’m trying to informally resolve this. I’m offering you a way out of lockdown.” He was pleading.
“Look, this isn’t going to work. We have been cooperative, we asked, explained, even pleaded, and all you people have done is thrown shit in our face. We’ve utilized every possible informal channel and you know it.” Silvia’s voice was rising with exasperation.
“I don’t understand you people,” Sig said.
“We know,” Silvia replied and turned her back on him.
He moved down the tier and took Alex out of her cell through the gate and into the officers’ station.
Alex started, “My attorney told me that you told her that you don’t think I like you, and that fact concerns you. Frankly, Mr. Sigman, that has absolutely nothing to do with this conflict we are in. We know that decisions about us are made from Washington— you’ve certainly told us that often enough—so really, you are just an errand boy for them. Like and dislike are not relevant.”
“I don’t like you? Uh, uh, no, no. I didn’t say that. I like you. You don’t like me.” He was stymied.
“Mr. Sigman, I know that we have not been communicating, and it seems as if we talk at cross-purposes, and that you don’t listen to me, and I don’t listen to you. So let me try to explain it again.” Alex was calm.
He interrupted, “You have to admit that the last time we talked you screamed at me. You said, ‘Go ahead, do the courageous thing, lock me up. Don’t be a coward. Do what you all wanted from the day we got here.’”
“No,” Alex said, “I said lock me up anytime you want, whenever you feel like it, because you don’t use your own procedures, and I won’t be played with. I refuse to play the little power games, and so lock me up so that we don’t play this anymore. That is what I said.”
“But Alex, you were screaming at me, and someone in my position isn’t used to being screamed at by people.”
“You mean by a prisoner. That is the way I talk when I am angry. I raise my voice; it’s the way I am.”
“Well, I have three medical people who tell me you are fit to work, that you’re just malingering. It is a medical department decision. It’s out of my hands, except, you see, I’m in charge of the work assignments.”
“I am trying to tell you how I feel. I feel very bad. I am not talking about a PA who refused to examine me or a doctor who reads an old chart. I’m talking about what my body is telling me, and it is not well.” Alex kept going. “Can’t we come to some agreement or understanding about this?”
“Well, we’ll discuss all this with your attorney.” He didn’t bother to escort Alex back. He nodded to a CO, who accompanied her the two hundred feet she had to walk.
The next day the lieutenants came with the COs and handed out shots. We were locked in. Sig came to my cell and spoke to me through the window in the door. “Too bad you’re not Catholic.”
“What?” I said.
“Now that you’re in the hole, it could be penance to sacrifice, you know, to avoid purgatory to get to heaven quicker.”
“Every day here is penance,” I answered, “and believe me, I am going straight to paradise as quickly as possible.”
Part Four
Washington, D.C.
Chapter 9
D.C. County Jail
I HEARD ABOUT our indictment over the phone. I was standing in the medical room with two COs standing next to me. Mary had gotten a call through to me, and as soon as I picked up the receiver, she said, “Are you sitting down?”
I knew it wasn’t good news. “Yes,” I lied.
“A secret indictment against you and Alan, Laura and Linda, Tim and Marilyn was unsealed this morning in Washington, D.C. You are charged with conspiracy to bomb the U.S. Capitol and other government buildings.”
I sat down.
Mary went on, “You are being brought to D.C. in the next few days where all of you will be arraigned.”
“But what about the lawsuit against this place?” I asked.
“It will happen,” Mary said. I could hear the fury in Mary’s voice through the thousand miles of wire.
I tried to keep mine out of my voice. “Will you come for the arraignment?” I asked.
“You know I will,” she answered.
The COs at my back sneered as the conversation continued.
Whether or not they had known before I did about the new indictment didn’t matter; they were just pleased that I would be put on trial again. They were pleased because they thought my leaving the HSU would help the BOP win the lawsuit. I had been in prison for three and a half years, and almost all that time had been spent in either segregation or one form of isolation or another.
Three days later, I was airlifted to Washington in a BOP Lear-jet along with Linda Evans. It had been two years since I had seen Linda. The sequence of events that had occurred after my arrest had led not only to Linda’s arrest, but also to the arrest of Marilyn Buck, Dr. Alan Berkman, and Laura Whitehorn. They were the people I was with while I was underground. When Tim and I were arrested, the FBI had been able to trace the evidence from us to Alan, and from him to Marilyn and Linda, and finally to a house in Baltimore where they had arrested Laura.
All of them were longtime political radicals. Together, we had gone underground to organize an invisible component of what was then called the anti-imperialist left. Marilyn, and I had been charged with participation in the federal conspiracy case stemming from the Brink’s robbery investigation in 1982. Alan had been charged with treating and then not reporting medical care to a person who had been shot. By that day in May 1987, Alan had been convicted of possession of weapons, Linda had been convicted and sentenced to forty years for harboring Marilyn and purchasing four guns illegally, and Marilyn had been convicted of the conspiracy case and sentenced to sixty years in prison. Laura was the only one who had no previous federal sentence.
Linda and I were the only two passengers on that little plane in the security detail. The plane’s previous flight had held a congressional delegation, and their leftover food was given to us. There was spectacular fruit, which neither of us had eaten in a very long time. We laughed as we ate it with our hands cuffed. We were thrilled to see each other, and loving the moments of contact. But, at the same time, we were angry at the indictment and that we were now facing this new trial. Both of us had been doing our time; now we were facing life in prison.
We arrived at the jail with a cavalcade of security the likes of which I hadn’t seen before. We were accompanied by a phalanx of police cars and there were several helicopters following us overhead. The District of Columbia had taken the occasion to parade us through the streets. Linda and I went through receiving together. The jail’s procedures included fingerprinting, a strip search, an interview, and a chemical hosedown. We protested the spray; we were coming from other prisons, not from the street. They sprayed us anyway, taking pains to cover every inch. We were the only women prisoners in the area, so just before Linda was escorted away, we agreed to demand to be housed in the same unit. Then, several lieutenants and COs came for me. Everyone we had seen up to that point was African American, including this group. Handcuffed, waist-chained, and dressed in an extra-large orange jumpsuit, I was moved upstairs. I had been in many holding cells and several prisons by then, but when I got to the floor and was let into the block, my heart did a flip and every muscle went into flight mode. The block was one long tier with open-barred cells on each side. There was no solid door or wall at the front end. That meant zero privacy and no safe space, not even an inch.
They put me in the last cell and then took the chains off through an opening in the bars. I wanted my phone call, which I had started telling them from the moment we walk
ed in. No answer. I kept asking questions: Where am I? What unit is this? What is it called?
Finally, as the COs were leaving, one of them said, “Intake. You’ll get a call when someone has time.”
Linda was nowhere in sight, but out of desperation I started shouting her name as the COs retreated. They were laughing as they walked away.
My cell was all white. The cell across from mine was all white. It wasn’t a Lexington blinding white (there were no fluorescent lights), but a filthy white. It wasn’t a strip cell exactly, but it was bare and sterile. Everything metal was bolted to the wall or the floor. I had no sheets or towels; otherwise, I would have hung them on the bars. No one was across the tier from me. I was isolated within the isolation. I began to pace. I examined the space; I looked up and down the tier with my face pressed to the bars. I realized after a few minutes that it was really silent. I had seen women in the cells as we walked past, but they had all been lying down.
I did my ritual meditation: If it doesn’t get worse than this, I can find a way to get through it. Except this time I knew I couldn’t kid myself. I thought, I can’t do this. I cannot live in an open cell. And then I thought that maybe the segregation unit would have closed-front cells. But I couldn’t demand to be put in segregation. I couldn’t demand that because it was the same as demanding protective custody, and only snitches got protective custody, snitches and ex-cops. I got more and more agitated as all my mental tricks and racing thoughts led me back to exactly where I was. And just when I had bottomed out, several women down the tier started talking and then yelling. And then one voice rose above the rest and formed itself into a howl, and then another woman, and then another, and another, began to howl until the noise was a collective roar. As I stood at the bars to see what had caused this down the tier, I saw something fly through a set of bars. My mind didn’t compute what I had seen until another voice said, “There she goes again, the shitter.” The same voice then called out, “Shelia, stop. Don’t throw that. They’ll be back. You don’t have to do that garbage.” It was shit that Shelia was throwing. Whoever Shelia was.
An American Radical Page 13
