An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  I got an excuse from the chaplain to leave work and I sat in our cell for a day, smelling her, dreaming about her, and examining all of her little knickknacks and her prison junk that she had left me. That moment turned into weeks and then unrelentingly painful months. I could not figure out how to live without her. I did the minimum at work and fortunately, I was not reassigned a cellmate for a few months. What I had known in part while we were together, I realized in full after Frin was gone. I had never been so happy loving someone. And the incongruity of this happening under the worst of circumstances had only intensified my joy all the more. I became despondent. I carried my sadness indelibly, and the only thing that I actively wanted to do was sit under the oak tree.

  Frin was held in detention in England for only a short while. Afterward, she moved to Dublin to live with her sister and help take care of her aging father. She began corresponding with me and we began to write our second screenplay. Frin went to the Dublin School of Film, where she worked on our script, “Sanctuary.” The script was about the faith-based social movement in the U.S. that helped undocumented Central American refugees who were fleeing political persecution from right-wing dictatorships and civil wars. Our contact was the critical thing that kept me going. She urged me to go to school, write, keep living, and working to get out. I could not see any end in sight. There was no word about Tim. His November release date came and went, and I was sitting in legal limbo. Eventually, I began thinking about going to graduate school.

  I enrolled in a long-distance learning program. The only graduate school I could find that would waive the residency requirement was Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I was accepted into Antioch’s McGregor Graduate School with the goal of completing a master’s degree in writing. I first had to research the requirements of such a degree at various top U.S. schools, and then I had to find two professors in my field who would become associated with Antioch for the duration of my program. I was also assigned an adviser from Antioch and I had to coordinate the communication between this adviser and the professors. Then I had to create courses or find professors who were willing to let me take their class via correspondence, or a combination of writing, visiting, and phone exchanges. After I completed the course work, I would write a thesis. If Antioch and my academic committee approved the thesis, then I would be awarded a master’s.

  The prison’s education department was as unhelpful and skeptical as they could possibly have been. To do anything related to working with a nonprison program I needed permission, and getting permission was difficult. Using the phone in the education building, using the library, asking the librarian for help and using inter-library loan, bringing volunteer professors into the visiting room, all of that the prison was reluctant to approve. The biggest hurdle was getting a typewriter I could use whenever I needed. There was a computer lab that taught short-termers word processing and finally the head of that program helped me work there part-time so that I could use the equipment for my courses. Since the Pell Grants that gave scholarships to prisoners had ended in 1994, no one had completed a college degree, let alone a graduate program.

  Despite the repeated studies showing a lowering of recidivism with increased educational levels, higher education was considered a luxury and not a priority. The prison considered college courses elitist and since they were out of the ordinary, conducting them was considered a bad security risk. In prison, anything that is not part of the routine is deemed a threat to security, and security always comes first.

  The only mandatory educational programs at Danbury were general equivalency diploma (GED) classes and English as a Second Language (ESL) classes for non-English speakers. Like the prison psychologist Dr. LeBarre, the prison teachers were first and foremost cops. The aides under them used their curricula and taught all their classes. Because the teacher/officers had many hundreds of people assigned to each of their specific sections, the prisoner aides were in effect the primary teachers. To be an aide, a prisoner had to have completed high school. There were several women who had been educated in other countries. They were allowed to teach women from their own countries or in their native language until the first Anti-Terrorism Act was signed into law in 1997. (One of the provisions of the new law was that all Immigration Naturalization Service detainees, whether they were newly in custody or had lived in the prison for years, were labeled high security risks and placed in “lockdown” until they had their deportation hearings.)

  Finally, there was an adult continuing education program that was not for academic credit and taught solely by prisoners at night and on the weekends. Attendance was voluntary and the program was the most popular activity in the prison outside of church.

  Six to eight courses were running at any given time and they included African American history, film studies, Spanish, AIDS education and prevention, and Latin American literature in Spanish and English. The women who developed and taught these courses were a diverse group. Their convictions ranged from drugs to spying, from fraud to bank robbery. Yet in the back room into which they were all crowded, they were united in their mission to keep developing their own minds and to share their knowledge with others. If they had not carved out that space and pushed the limits imposed by the prison authorities, I would not have been able to enroll in that experimental degree program at Antioch.

  Professor F. Horwitz signed on as the Ph.D. head of my whole program. He had been a professor of English literature for thirty years and was recently retired and writing a book about Henry James. He was a generous, kind, and very sardonic man. Many years earlier, when he had lived in Kansas, he had done work in support of several activists from the Black Panther Party who had been attacked by the FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) aimed at destroying the black freedom movement. Without his support, encouragement, challenges, and monthly trips to the prison visiting room, my graduate program would not have happened. Professor Horwitz had a wry sense of humor and always understood that unless one laughed at the total absurdity of arbitrary power, it was impossible to survive and create real work.

  I began the program in January 1997. I read Homer, Euripides, Ovid, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. The reading was challenging, and my complacency about my own knowledge was shaken. I realized that for all of my intellectual arrogance, I knew very little. I adopted Alejandrinas saying, “I only know what I don’t know.” The reading did something else: it took me back again to my own life and history, forcing me to re-examine my own responsibilities in the political world that I had belonged to and to its methods.

  In April, Tim was finally released on parole. I knew that he must have been ecstatic and amazed. I imagined myself at the gates of Lewisburg at his release and I played the scene over and over in my head. One moment I was inside watching, the next I was outside waiting, and then I was accompanying him as he went through those interminable bureaucratic procedures to gain his freedom. I imagined the administrators giving him the suit of clothes that had been left for him and a cashier’s check for forty dollars, which he would repeatedly refuse to accept until, as their last act, they ordered him to put it in his pocket. I imagined that he had his prison ID card in his pocket and that they told him that it would help him get other IDs, as if he would be fool enough to show it at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  Tim was forty years old and beginning life anew. He had significant amounts of emotional baggage, more to negotiate than most forty-year-olds, but he was not without love and resources. I wondered, as I sat in Danbury, if he thought of his life as a waste and how he assessed the past. We had lost our youth, and in some ways had lived our lives through our friends on the outside acting as intermediaries. We had been punished and changed by that punishment. I hoped that he had been changed for the better. I hoped that I had, too.

  So Tim was free. Alan Berkman was free, and Laura Whitehorn was expected to get out of the prison in Pleasanton
soon. I felt that I had to fight to follow them. My spirit rose in reaction to Tim’s release. The relentless grinding down by repression, routine, contempt, and neglect at Danbury got harder to take as the idea of freedom took up more and more mental energy. But when I thought about my friends’ release, I could get past myself and my jealousies and desires. Even if only briefly, I could revel in their liberation and at times wake up and hear that particular timbre that flowed from the unique voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he cried out, “Because I have been to the mountaintop … Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

  After thirteen years inside, I had to confront the process of fighting for release. I had done this self-examination before, but I had to reflect on my past this time by taking responsibility for it. Even before that, I had to convince myself that I was worthy of getting parole, that in fact I deserved parole. I would never again be involved with a small group and engage in violent action to fight policies of the government. But my analysis of the ills of society that had defined me were reinforced in prison on a minute-by-minute basis.

  Tim’s release should have set a precedent for me because he was my codefendant, had been convicted of the exact same charges, and had been given the same sentence. But I assumed that the parole board would deal with me differently as a Brink’s defendant. (Even though the charges had been dropped, they were still mentioned in my prison records.) At least that seemed the most likely scenario. Whether the parole board would hold me accountable for charges that had been dropped eleven years earlier (whether or not this was legal under the administrative law governing them) or if they would simply consider my standing conviction of weapons possession could only be determined by appearing before the board.

  Dennis Curtis, a Yale Law School professor and national expert on sentencing, parole, and prisoners’ rights, and Mary O’Melveny prepared me for the hearing. We met repeatedly from July until the hearing in November 1997. I liked Dennis. He was a handsome Irish American with a wrestler’s build and a gentle smile. His easy and calm manner, his quiet assurance was always a pleasure to see in the visiting room. Dennis had done more legal work to help prisoners retain their rights and regain their dignity over the preceding twenty-five years than almost anyone else in America. I had wanted him to help me with my parole case from the first time I had heard about him. But when I had first wanted to talk with Dennis in the 1990s, he was living in Los Angeles and I was in prison in Florida. He could not make that trip. Then he moved to New Haven to teach at Yale, and I was in Danbury, less than an hour’s drive away. Dennis knew how the parole system worked and Mary knew everything about my case and so together they navigated through the proceedings. I felt a gathering of forces in my defense, or rather, a defense of my life and my right to create a new life. It became my greatest hope and my greatest fear. The fact that my mother was also rallying around the idea of winning parole compelled me more.

  The summer after Silvia’s parole denial was filled with my own preparations, teaching grammar and English, writing, developing my graduate school program, and my rising hopes. So I was surprised when Silvia suggested that she and I jointly teach an adult education course about the Jewish Holocaust. The idea behind teaching this subject to a predominately African American group was that it might help black women develop a broader framework for looking at the world and their own history. I did not expect anyone in the course to know much about World War II and the Nazi concentration camps. Silvia and I decided that we would not get into the argument about which genocide was greater, the Atlantic slave trade or the Holocaust.

  I realized as I read one book after another that the ancient Jews rejected the notion of the state in their religion and their life. Their rejection of this in part led to their outcast status. They were not a nation. They were a people who consciously identified with their religion over and above governments and states. They did not assimilate into other societies because of their religion. Consequently, despite their nonviolent stance, they were always the outsider, the stranger, the outcast, and subject to anti-Semitism. The whole process of how anti-Semitism took root and then evolved with the ideas of conversion, expulsion, and finally extermination all began to make more sense as the various countries in which Jews resided saw them as a threat to their state. I finally understood the true meaning of the ghetto. How basic this was, and yet until this reading I had not grasped it fully.

  Silvia and I taught the class for eight weeks to twenty women. We accepted women only with a high school degree because the class required a lot of reading. We watched Night and Fog, a silent film about the concentration camps. No one in the class had ever watched a silent film. We got permission to show the film Schindler’s List and that was an important addition to our curriculum. Later, the film was put on an official BOP list of banned films (supposedly because of the violence). We talked about the tenets of Judaism and the history of anti-Semitism.

  Up until that class, I had taught only AIDS education and literacy. I had never written an academic curriculum or thought about teaching as a means of community building. The very pro-vocativeness of the subject and the development of a dialogue between Silvia and me and our students was a lot of fun. We heard all the usual anti-Semitic stereotypes, as well as common criticisms of “Jewish landlords” and yet, eventually the women in the class were changed by their exposure to the facts and understanding of the history. I, too, was changed: I came to understand my dual identity as both “the other” and as a more privileged American Jew who identified with all “the others.” More important, I realized that teaching was the way to give back, to be fully present in the world, and to communicate ideas in order to make change.

  In November 1997, I appeared before the parole board. I had been in prison thirteen years and I had waited three years past my ten-year eligibility before applying for parole. My family, friends, lawyers, and I were trying with great effort to contain our hopes. Mary had been my lawyer and friend every step of the way for twelve years. Whenever I had won in fighting the courts and the BOP, Mary had been directly involved. Each time my case took a new and more daunting turn, she had said, “I am a civil litigator, a labor lawyer, not a criminal defense attorney or an expert on parole.” But when I needed a criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C., ten years earlier, Mary had become one. In fact, she had become the head of the entire legal defense team for six of us in the Resistance Conspiracy case. When I had needed a prisoners’ rights lawyer to fight the hideous conditions at the High Security Unit in Lexington, Kentucky, Mary had become a prisoners’ rights advocate and ended up—along with others from the National Prison Project of the ACLU, the People’s Law Office in Chicago, and Elizabeth Fink in New York City—winning one of the more difficult prisoners’ rights cases in U.S. history at the district court level.

  However, when Mary firmly told me that she was not an expert on parole, I knew she meant it, and so I was glad when Dennis Curtis joined the defense team to guide the parole process. We all felt that having an expert might somehow miraculously transform the conditions around my situation and produce a positive result.

  Mary did not want to bear the brunt of my disappointment or blame at the continuing defeats that we had experienced. I believed that she did not want her heart broken again by another legal setback in my struggle for freedom.

  I was at work in the chapel the day before my scheduled appearance. It was to be held in the building that housed the warden’s office. I was nervous. My biggest concern was whether the administrators would ask me to implicate other people as a condition for my own parole.

  Sitting at my desk lost in thought, I didn’t hear the lieutenant come in.

  “Rosenberg,” he hemmed.

  I jerked up and just stared at him.

  “You should call your lawyer.”

  I didn’t ask why or which one. “Okay, thanks,” I answered.

  I went to Chaplain Sheridan and got permission to go back to my unit t
o make a call. I shut the phone room door and called Dennis at his office at Yale. There was no answer, just a machine. I called his home number. After the operator went through the routine of saying, “This is a collect call from a federal prison and you do not have to accept the charges,” I heard a croaking sound say, “I’ll accept the call.” I knew immediately that Dennis was sick.

  “I’ll be there,” he said, coughing.

  “I can go alone,” I said.

  “No, you shouldn’t go alone, not this time,” he whispered. “I’m staying home today to get better.”

  “Okay,” I said. We hung up. I went back to work to wait out the day.

  I awoke to a cold fall day. I put on my prison-issue army jacket. It seemed unfair to me that the one time I needed to wear my own clothes I could not. Not that I had many of my own clothes left, but even a jacket would have been better than the prison garb. I spent a long time straightening out my shirt and pants and combing my hair, and so I missed breakfast altogether. Before I could get to the phone to call Dennis, I was sent to the visiting room. I was patted and stripped and searched, my legal folder rifled through, and then I was escorted into the visiting room. It, too, was chilly. I scanned the place and it was empty except for the CO at the front desk where people were let in. Then I walked toward the legal visiting rooms.

  The only person there was Mary, sitting in the corner where she always sat during our visits. She was dressed up in a beautiful suit of fall colors. With her briefcase and bag she looked courtroom ready, as I wished I did. We hugged each other under the watchful camera’s eye. She smiled an ironic smile. “Dennis is too sick to be here today.” Despite all protestations to the contrary, I was glad. I had wanted Mary to be there. Mary always “had my back,” so to speak.

  Mary had to walk inside the prison. I wanted to give her a tour, and show her my cell, but of course that was not allowed. I left her and went back to the strip search room, where I was again stripped and searched and then allowed back into the inner compound. I met Mary in the waiting room on the ground floor of the building. There were no other prisoners milling about because this whole building was off limits. While it was still within the double-tiered, chain-link, barbed-wire fence, most of the building was set off and faced the staff parking lot. And most it faced outward and not inward.