An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  It was difficult to figure out how to respond to this. I accelerated my AIDS work. I continued working in the chapel, and I talked with as many women as I could, but internally I retreated to my private studies. I began to read mythology. The “myth of the fallen woman” was an idea that gave me a new view of my surroundings. According to this myth, the source of all human misery lay in the missteps of women who then enticed men to transgress—Eve and Pandora are two well-known examples. I wondered if their stories were behind the prison system’s effort to pathologize women who rebelled.

  I also traced the history of the witch hunt as a means to conceptualize the life I was living. In fact, during this time, the BOP came out with a new policy that amounted to a witch hunt against lesbians. We woke up one day to find the hunt had begun without warning. Anyone suspected of being in a lesbian relationship with another prisoner was sent to segregation and placed under investigation for thirty days. If you were accused, it was not your “right” to know why you were under investigation or who had made the accusation. No physical contact had to be witnessed—the accusation alone was enough to trigger an immediate lockup. The consequences were real. An investigation of thirty days usually meant losing your job, your phone privileges, and any private property you had. It even could mean a parole denial.

  The BOP administration actually held meetings and informed us that lesbianism would no longer be tolerated. They had a list of names and would “vigorously pursue” the matter to the end. Scores of women were put in the hole. Others were called in for interrogation. The administration subjected everyone who was known to have ever loved a woman or who had created a prison family. The little shreds of hope that we had found in reaching out to one another were under attack. The entire institution was filled with paranoia and fear.

  I could only assume that behind this witch hunt was the real issue of sexual abuse on the part of prison guards. Pat-searching and voyeurism (manifested in constant intrusions into our lives) were two of the symptoms of systemic abuse of power. More telling was that over the past two years, more than twenty-five male officers had been removed from Danbury for having sex with women prisoners. Hunting for sex between women was a way of deflecting the misogyny of the system.

  One hot night while I was walking around the prison compound, I saw four young white women, all of them with varying shades of blond hair. They looked to be about eighteen years old and stood out prominently in the larger sea of black and Latina women. They seemed nervous, again in marked contrast to the women around them, who were eating, listening and jamming to their Walkmans, or just mingling in the oppressive summer night. After that night, I noticed a few other newcomers. As I scanned all the new faces, I saw that there were equal numbers of black and Latina women, all twenty or under. It was just insane—these young women doing hard time in federal prison instead of going to school, working, and having a good time.

  Each of the young white women had a hefty sentence. None was getting out with less than a twenty-six-month stay. They had all been minor characters in a plot to rob a bank devised and carried out by two young men. It was a bungled and stupid attempt, and potentially dangerous, but it resulted in no injuries. The young men had been caught and in exchange for six-month sentences, they identified the girls. The girls, who had no one to turn in, got the maximum allowable sentences; one of them had been sentenced to six years. The women in this case fell hard.

  I began to think about what I could do to help these women. How could I share my experience with them? Teaching “Prison 101” became my mission. I developed the following speech: “Don’t trust just anyone. Don’t show your papers to anyone who promises to help you. Don’t get caught up in the bullshit. Don’t get caught up in slave labor ‘working for the man.’ Don’t get cut by another prisoner. Don’t cut yourself. Don’t get sick. Don’t under any circumstances snitch. When asked a question, only answer it; don’t volunteer information. Don’t stereotype. Don’t join a gang.” I followed the don’ts with some do’s: “Fight your sentence. Use the time: sleep, exercise, read, think, write, create, get fit, go to school. Keep connected with the outside, Keep your head down, but keep your heart open. But, above all, fight your sentence.”

  I thought about these girls’ youth. How do you keep perspective if you haven’t had a broader framework than prison life to draw from? Unfortunately, my Prison 101 speech was merely a finger in the dike, and I watched these young women lapse into patterns of juvenile behavior again and again. As people settle into the role of prisoner, many go crazy, either loudly or quietly. They take heavy psychiatric medication. Others sleep around constantly, diving into an ever-changing stream of sexual partners.

  I became friends with one of these young women, Courtney, who was twenty when she came to Danbury. One day, after we had spent some time talking, I was in the visiting room when Courtney’s mother and grandmother arrived. All three were frightened at the unknowns and cowed by the security. I sat next to them and talked with them as best as I could, given that it was against the rules to “cross-visit.” I told them not to worry, that Courtney would be okay, and that she would not fall victim to violence. I promised I would watch out for her. Her mother started to cry while thanking me. It embarrassed me to no end, but I kept my promise. Courtney was my first “prison kid.”

  The first time I walked into Dr. Gibson’s office, he was playing a Joan Baez tape. I was dumbstruck, as I had been when I first encountered Dr. LeBarre on my first day at Danbury; “Joan Baez fan” was not a label that I would have pasted onto a prison psychologist. Dr. Gibson was the AIDS awareness group’s staff sponsor, and he needed to approve everything we did.

  He was my age, maybe a bit younger. He was over six feet two and a bit on the heavy side, not fat but beefy. Blond and clean shaven, he wore wire-rimmed spectacles that were small and round. Sometimes I thought he looked like a grown-up Dennis the Menace, cowlick and all; other times he was extremely serious and kind.

  He was a devout Mormon and not afraid of ideas, and he had a wife and three children. Somehow, being the chief psychologist in the federal prison system did not seem to mesh with the rest of his life.

  I do not know why, but Dr. Gibson never believed the lies about me that the administration had spread. Perhaps because he had been a prison psychologist for over ten years before meeting me, he had learned that even if the criminal justice personnel had written conclusions in stone, it was still better to make your own assessment. Maybe he realized that the information in a prisoner’s “jacket” reflected the most extreme and difficult moment in his or her life and was not the best grounds on which to make a summary judgment. Or maybe he was just jaded. He had been the resident psychologist when G. Gordon Liddy had been at Danbury, and he had seen many other high-profile male prisoners. In any case, it was unique in my prison experience not to be pre-judged.

  Over four years, Dr. Gibson and I came as close as a prisoner and a prison psychologist can to being friends. He never once asked me about anyone or any situation on the inside, and I never compromised him by asking him for anything he did not think was right, meaning things that would threaten his position. We did talk about how screwed up the prison system was and how he could not do his job anymore (at least as he perceived it) as the emphasis on work and punishment took hold over the more benign form of control known as rehabilitation. Dr. Gibson had worked with a lot of Vietnam veterans at Danbury in the early 1990s when it had been a men’s institution, and he had written about the relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder and incarceration rates.

  Dr. Gibson and I talked about the course of the AIDS epidemic both inside and outside, and about BOP policy with regard to the disease. We also talked about folk music and even about politics and religion. I once said to him that it was impossible to get psychological help in a coercive institutional environment because the role of the institution was solely to maintain social control. This was our central argument, the one that we always came back to. I discu
ssed with him the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s ideas about prisons and hospitals, and he read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish at my urging. Essentially, Foucault argues that disciplinary punishment gives “professionals” (wardens, psychologists, program facilitators, parole officers, etc.) power over the prisoner, because the prisoner’s sentence length and release on parole depends on the professionals’ opinions. Foucault further suggests that a “carceral continuum” runs through modern society, from the maximum-security prison, through secure accommodation, probation, social workers, police, and teachers, to our everyday working and domestic lives. All are connected by the (witting or unwitting) supervision (surveillance, application of norms of acceptable behavior) of some humans by others. Our conversations were probably more important to me than to him, but they did affect him, as well. As the head of his department he was always subject to the overriding concerns of security, but he did support programs that were beneficial to women. He agreed that it was wrong for male COs to pat-search female prisoners and he said so openly.

  With each administration, the psychological services got buffeted about, depending on the warden’s view of psychology. Like Ms. Nolan from the Marianna High Security Unit, a tiny minority of people in the prison system had gone into it thinking that they could make a difference or seeing it as a form of service. They all said, “If we weren’t here, life would be worse.” It was undoubtedly true, but I always felt that no matter how nice or kind they were, they were still part of a process that trafficked in human freedom and that would eventually destroy their decency and humanity.

  Although befriending Dr. Gibson taught me how to work within that horrific system and to push the boundaries of what was allowed by the administration, the power dynamics that existed between the administration and me made me a prisoner first and foremost. I never believed in the system or thought that it could be changed for the good. I was never a prison reformer, although I fought constantly to extend medical, educational, and legal rights to prisoners. I didn’t have an ideology that surrounded the service I did. I just wanted to alleviate people’s suffering, to empower people to think critically, and to help other prisoners understand the system they were living in and use whatever options were available to them.

  In 1998, the parole commission granted me a reconsideration hearing. I had three options in how to approach the hearing: I could bring a lawyer, go alone, or ask a staff person to be my representative. I asked Dr. Gibson to go with me, and he said he would. In fact, he held a meeting with Chaplain Sheridan and others in the education department to discuss how they could support my parole application. I brought letters from BOP staff, as well as from the outside. I also brought letters from the various teachers who were working with me through the Antioch program and other longtime supporters. In the end, the original decision was upheld. I felt I was back at square one. I was being held in prison, whereas Tim, my codefendant, was out on parole. I was still being held because of the Brink’s case, which I was never arrested or brought to trial for. Whenever people heard me voice that idea, they were shocked. To hold someone indefinitely without trial was a downright un-American thing to do, wasn’t it?

  My friends Rabbi Matalon, William Wardlaw, Barbara Zeller, and Shirley Cloyes worked along with my family and my lawyer, Mary, to begin to create conditions and develop resources to build broader support for my release.

  An advisory board was organized whose purpose was to build a high-profile group with strong professional and cultural credentials, including people with academic, legal, and artistic backgrounds, who could be called upon if and when there was a need to organize publicly as the “Campaign to Release Susan Rosenberg.” Shirley’s idea behind this was to develop a public relations and congressional campaign for a parole appeal, or if that failed, then whatever legal remedies there might be.

  On a deeper level, I was relieved about the development of this strategy because over the past decade I had witnessed the work that the progressive and radical left movements had done in support of political prisoners. I had felt that while the work was motivated out of the best solidarity and concern, its effectiveness varied greatly. I had come to believe that some of the same reasons that we had landed in jail—principally, our marginalization from American society and our misreading of people’s consciousness with regard to opposition to U.S. policies—were reflected and repeated in the work in support of political prisoners. This was further complicated by the different types of political prisoners coming from different movements and holding different strategies and positions. I felt that there was a real failure to communicate between those of us on the left and the rest of the society. I felt that developing strategies to win by finding nonpublicly negotiated methods was at times in direct conflict with the need to use us as public representatives of social movements.

  There were several hundred political prisoners still inside U.S. prisons—people who had been involved in various political movements in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, ranging from protesters of the Vietnam War to the U.S. occupation of Vieques, Puerto Rico, to advocates for civil rights and black nationalism. The list included Leonard Peltier, a leader and founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM); Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther Party activist and journalist now on death row; Geronimo Pratt, a former leader of the Black Panther Party (BPP); the Puerto Rican Prisoners of War and Political Prisoners; the MOVE Nine prisoners; black religious and environmentalist organizers; Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a member of the Republic of New Afrika and the Black Panthers; Sekou Odinga, member of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA); Tom Manning, a leading member of the United Freedom Front (UFF); Bill Dunne, an anti-imperialist; David Gilbert, a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and then of the Weather Underground (WUO); and Marilyn Buck, who was a leader of the anti-imperialist revolutionary movement. Every single one of them had been subject to the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) during their time in the movement and through the course of their trials and imprisonment.

  Over the years, there had been unitary efforts to raise the consciousness of the general public regarding the reality of political prisoners in the United States. The Puerto Rican movement had repeatedly tried to publicize the existence of their prisoners in every avenue they could, including in the Decolonization Committee of the United Nations. Remaining revolutionary groups—from the black independence movement, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the new left and the women’s and lesbian movements—had held public forums. There were defense committees or loose structures around all of us with varying degrees of organization and capabilities. Different lawyers, law collectives, and law practices were dedicated to keeping alive the fight to free political activists from U.S. prisons.

  Still, the existence of U.S. political prisoners seemed to be a well-kept secret. While there were discussions in the rest of the world about the release of political prisoners, recognition of real civil and political conflict that caused casualties, and the need for reconciliation on all sides, there was absolutely none of that in the United States. After the Second World War and the start of the cold war, there arose an organized and concerted effort by the people of the colonized world to end their colonial exploitation. Out of that impulse had come the political struggles for national liberation and independence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Throughout the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s, independence movements had raged all over the world. In South Africa, the anti-apartheid movement was organizing. All over Southeast Asia there were national struggles for self-determination. There were revolutionary movements in every country in Latin America that challenged the role of U.S. profit making and dominance, as well as advocated for the poorest of the poor. A worldwide radical movement spurred equivalent developments in the United States and throughout Europe. The war in Vietnam, the role of racism, the lack of economic equality, and the role of women, all confronted pe
ople here in the U.S. Out of this came revolutionaries who took up alternative means to challenge power relations. In Italy, Ireland, Germany, Spain and France, groups of people fought their governments for social change and many of those participants went to prison. Ten, fifteen, and twenty years later, European societies decided to engage in public discussions about what the past had meant, why civil conflict had occurred, who the victims of it were, and whether these conflicts could ultimately be resolved. Over time, this national dialogue led to the call for amnesty for people who had been incarcerated during that period, and if not outright amnesty, then at least recognition that they had been punished enough, and should be released. Mass releases of political prisoners in Spain, in Ireland, in Italy, and in many countries in the developing world occurred. No equivalent dialogue or amnesty took place in the United States.

  Even Amnesty International, the world’s oldest and most respected human rights organization, was unwilling to recognize U.S. prisoners as political unless they were deemed prisoners of conscience, people imprisoned for expressing their political or religious beliefs in a peaceful manner, or were wrongly convicted, or were on death row. Amnesty did recognize Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Geronimo Pratt as prisoners of conscience, and they were willing to examine the horrendous conditions inside maximum-security prisons in the United States. But other prisoners and institutions fell outside of their boundaries. Amnesty placed the majority of political prisoners into the category of “politically motivated/criminally convicted,” which was designated for those who had been involved in armed struggle or illegal activities. This included Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, the most famous South African prisoners from the African National Congress, and Joe Doherty and Bobby Sands from the Irish Republican Army.