By the end of the 1990s, there was no unified movement that could articulate one strategy to get people out of prison to win a mass clemency or to figure out a way to move prisoners from the margins of the political landscape and into some vibrant organization working for social change. Without such a movement, it was up to individuals to win parole, serve their sentences, or apply for clemency entirely on their own.
The idea of parole—the idea that if you do enough time and you have good behavior and you are remorseful, you will be released—is a lie. It is an absolute lie. For some reason, there is a set of myths that begins on the macro level with what a great democracy we have, and works its way down to the micro level with our belief in individual rehabilitation. The macro myth and the micro myth are so ingrained that even when one knows—and I know it like I know the blood coursing through my veins—that once you are caught in the criminal justice system you are frozen in your worst, most extreme, bizarre, or out of luck moment, you believe that when you go up for parole some rational and just set of eyes will look at how you are now and set you free. But rehabilitation is a myth that allows fine, upstanding citizens to think that people are put in prison only for their own good. But that justification is merely a mental safety valve to justify the continuing brutalization and destruction of the most marginalized populations in our country.
And so it went. I was furious at being dragged through what essentially turned out to be an exercise in the U.S. Parole Commission’s abuse of power. I wasn’t broken; I was just angry.
In 1999, Henry Bean, my thesis adviser, friend, and a prominent screenwriter, introduced me to Howard Gutman. Howard was a friend of Henry’s brother and a lawyer in the firm Williams and Connelly, the biggest and most prominent law firm in Washington, D.C., which had every possible political connection. One of the senior partners was President Bill Clinton’s lawyer. I was skeptical about tapping into this kind of network, but so many different people had told me that “this is how it’s done” that I embarked on a brief attempt to use these channels.
When Howard first came to Danbury, I knew from the moment I saw him that he had never been in a prison visiting room and had never met anyone like me before. Howard was rail thin and his nervous energy flitted around him like a moth at a light. He had the strangest watch I had ever seen; inlaid into its thin gold face was a gold paper clip. I spent the first visit with Howard groping to understand what it might symbolize.
Howard wanted to meet with the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York and convince them to drop their opposition to my release on parole. Mary Jo White, the chief U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, had been the one to voice the opposition. Howard argued that if the Southern District withdrew its vociferous objection, then my status in the eyes of the U.S. Parole Commission would shift to the position that they had taken with my codefendant Tim, and they would release me.
But what did that mean? What would talking to the Southern District of New York entail? I had nothing to say to them that was different from the public record, nothing new to add. Howard argued that just the act of talking to the Southern District judges was a way to demonstrate greater remorse, to show that I understood how the game was played. It would show that I was willing to cooperate with the system. He was convinced that this would help me in the future with the parole board. Mary was opposed to the whole process. She had spent the last fifteen years representing me essentially pro bono, and given her job as a representative for workers in labor law, she was not a fan of the old boys’ network. In fact, she had specifically opted out of practicing or working in that kind of environment. I know that it offended Mary, but I felt that my options were narrowing and I wanted to explore this new avenue.
Howard and Mary Jo White danced back and forth for months, but in the end the “negotiations” were a complete flop. I do not know if Howard would agree with this assessment, but the U.S. attorneys working for the Southern District of New York refused to change their position and refused to withdraw their opposition to my parole.
My reaction to yet another denial was multifaceted. I could not really deal with thinking about serving out my remaining time. I certainly could not project what the future held, and so I threw myself into my writing and graduate school. I processed my life through writing about it. I grappled in writing with the consequences of my life choices by creating a set of fictional characters. I wrote one screenplay, scores of short stories, and half a novel. The energy I put into writing preserved my mental well-being and consequently saved my very life. In fiction, I could confront and dissect motivations, morals, and choices. I created some characters that were the antithesis of me and my friends, while others were thinly disguised carbon copies. I loved all those made-up people, even the despicable ones. I felt, as my dear friend and novelist Doris Schwerin said, that I was mining for gold, and that while most writing turned up as fool’s gold, the real nuggets in between were worth all the work.
The year 1999 was filled with tremendous highs and excruciating lows. One morning I woke up thinking passionately about Frin with lush impressions and intensities—of feelings, colors, tastes, and pains. I woke up remembering the feeling of diving into the cold ocean waves and the incredible, tingling shock to the system, the feeling of wetness as the head submerges and the taste of the first lick of the tongue as it darts out to touch the salty water, but not to let too much in. I recalled the spray right before the impact of the dive and the feeling of being carried away without fear and anxiety. The Atlantic Ocean was friendly and willing to let me ride its wave and take pleasure from it. To imagine the horizon where the sky and ocean meet blue on blue and to reflect on all the people who had stood for years at the same vista, that same point fixed but not fixed, mutable but not mutable. Impermanence and sameness: the eternal paradox. I thought of the Atlantic as my ocean, because it is where I grew up and its familiarity is deep and profound for me.
I was seeking intensity, from my dreams, from my surroundings, from any tactile and sensual stimuli I could find, because the same place, the same day in and day out, the grinding routine and never-ending days, the violence, the falseness, the artificiality of it all was making me forget the ocean. How could I be descriptive and tactile and remember the feelings in order to translate them into words? I lived by the maxim, “Write what you know.” Prison was what I had known for fifteen years, but I refused to let it be my horizon. I felt that my memory, the details of my past, had to be stirred up and then stored up; otherwise, I would have no vocabulary or language. So I forced myself to remember. I lived in a box where freedom was a memory. And then there was the word. I tried to keep writing and to study and finish my coursework from Antioch.
I had been working for four years in the chapel at Danbury and had watched religion become more and more a mechanism for codifying the prison’s rules. A system used to serve as a means of meeting prisoners’ spiritual needs and of offering them recreation and enjoyment had turned into its opposite. The chapel library, which a small group of us had built almost from scratch with the chaplain’s budget, contained more than six hundred books, two hundred and fifty videos, and two hundred audiotapes. The books, in seven languages, contained information about all the major religions and raised questions that readers could think about and learn from. The collection included books about Buddhism, Shamanism, Catholic liberation theology, anti-racism, women’s role in religion, the Holocaust, and Rumi’s poetry. Yet very few women read or used any of this material.
The Reverend T. D. Jakes’s books, tapes, and videos had swept the population. He promised salvation and redemption. Coupled with that was the ever more popular study of Orthodox Islam and Judaism. Testimonials and devotionals had become the sole order of the day, and as prisoners with longer and longer sentences were entering at younger and younger ages, with less and less education and inner experiential knowledge, easy access to an all-forgiving God was the quickest solace. It seemed to give people some mod
icum of peace. But even Chaplain Sheridan called God a replacement drug, taken from Leo Booth’s book When God Becomes a Drug.
The visiting Muslim Sunni imam had been replaced by someone stricter, and now members of Danbury’s Islamic community were wearing chadors and retreating more and more into themselves. The warm, sympathetic Reform rabbi who had been on part-time contract for several years was underbid for the position by a Chabad rabbi and now the only organized Jewish religious practice was an Orthodox Lubavitcher. Perhaps even more telling was the fact that the most progressive event that the chaplaincy organized was a Catholic mass given by Bishop Edward Egan from Bridgeport, Connecticut. Then, one day, we came back from work and found red crosses painted on the doors of cells in which either Jews or Muslims lived. My door had been painted. Later we found out that the culprits were several newly born-again Christian fundamentalists who were part of the Bible study group led by the inmate choir coordinator.
As a secular Jew, and having been witness to how religious practice was manipulated for the purpose of control within the Bureau of Prisons, I could no longer stand the dogma taking hold in the chapel and its environs. Genuine education was losing ground to a rigid, oppressive, and reactionary set of conditions. Multicultural acceptance and interfaith unity had severely declined since I first started working in the library.
From working in the chapel, I had learned tolerance for belief systems different from my own and I had come to understand why so many people felt it was so important to have faith. But I could not help feeling that the way religion was now being practiced was merely a salve for the gaping wounds that existed among the prison population. I could not see how born-again Christianity could be either a tool for empowerment or the advancement of social skills. I decided that I had to leave the chapel job or I would wither. My best alternative was to go to work in the education department as a continuing education instructor.
I did not know then that all the things that I had taken as immutable conditions for life and living at Danbury were about to come to an end. How do you say good-bye to someone you have been soldiering with for years and years? The person is not your leader and not your follower. She is not your lover, not a parent, not your best friend, but she is more than your road dog, more than your running buddy, more than the person who rides second with you. You’ve seen the beauty of her soul and felt terror for her as though it was your own when her weaknesses were exposed. You’ve benefited from her solidarity and suffered the brunt of her individualism and anger. And because of time, place, and conditions, she has seen it all in reverse with you. The time when you witnessed someone who was having a heart attack, and the time you were once brutally attacked, this person helped you. And day in and day out, she gave you a smile that helped you get up and do another day. So how do you say good-bye to a person who has become a part of you as no one else ever again can be?
That was Alejandrina. Doing time with her was one of the greatest gifts I’d known in prison. We were not always friends. We disagreed on things as much as we agreed, and there were times when I could not fathom her actions. But from the moment I met her in Tucson, Arizona, in 1985, until the day she walked out of Danbury in August 1999, in my eyes, she was always a beautiful human being. Alex embodied the revolutionary passion and sacrifice of Puerto Rican nationalism and the movement for independence. I know that her imprisonment hurt every day in a million ways, but Alex bore it with grace. Alex was a true heroine.
When Alex told me on August 11, 1999, that President Clinton had made a conditional offer of clemency for the Puerto Rican political prisoners and signed a sentence commutation, I knew that eventually she and others would negotiate it and get out. The demand from the independence movement had always been unconditional release for all the Puerto Rican prisoners, so this offer was not a total victory, but it was still a tremendous success. It was a profound concession from the head of the most powerful empire on the planet. I knew it was a victory before they walked out the door because the Bureau of Prisons allowed them (all fourteen of them) several lengthy joint phone calls from all the different prisons they were in, from California to Connecticut, from Leavenworth, Kansas, to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The authorities had been directed by President Clinton to decriminalize them. By that, I mean that even though the Puerto Rican prisoners had been tried in different cases and had different convictions from different times, they were comrades who needed to talk with one another and determine a joint response. This was totally unheard of within the BOP.
Other prisoners were completely shocked that on the day the clemency was offered Alex did not just sign and walk out the door into the waiting arms of her husband and children. The offer was conditional; it did not include Carlos Alberto Torres or Marie Hay-dée Beltrán Torres, and there were special conditions for Oscar Lopez and Juan Segarra Palmer. Thus, the other prisoners had to determine what they would accept. As the days of negotiation continued, the tension grew and grew. After a week, not one of the prisoners granted clemency had signed—no one had rushed to get out the door. Having spent ten or sixteen or nineteen years in prison fighting for Puerto Rican independence, not one of them was going to “capitulate.” And while the overwhelming response from the Puerto Rican people was jubilation, there was also anger. The commutation carried with it onerous conditions that included the denial of free speech and the right to associate. During the weeks that followed, over 100,000 people in Puerto Rico demonstrated in their defense and demanded no imposition of restrictions on their release.
Having been in support of the Puerto Rican independence movement, and having lived side by side with Alejandrina for more than a decade, I felt that the clemency the Puerto Rican prisoners were receiving was a victory for me, too. The most beautiful aspect of my extraordinary experience with the Puerto Rican liberation movement was witnessing the fruits of their labor to see themselves vindicated. For so many years, I had felt that my political movement was vanquished, even though I had felt that it was right to continue resisting attempts by the state to break my spirit and my heart. But there were not many external incidents that gave fuel to that desire. Rare material acts of social change were the most profound fuel to make my heart beat a little faster and to remember that there are ways to achieve justice. The Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, the Committee to free the Puerto Rican POWs, the Rafael Cancel Miranda High School, the Pro-Libertad committee, Dr. Luis Nieves Falcon—all of the organizations and individuals, despite their differences and struggles, were all victors in this extraordinary event. They had succeeded in uniting the existence of the prisoners and their freedom with the movement against colonialism, which included opposition to the U.S. naval occupation in Vieques and the referendums about the island’s political status. As Jan Sussler, the attorney who represented the Puerto Rican prisoners and helped to win their release, said, “This is a historic moment. The President of the United States recognized that men and women who have dedicated their lives to the freedom of their country deserve to be free, to participate in the political, legal process to shape the future of their country.”
Alex was released, and then later that year, after ten years of legal battles and struggles, Silvia was transferred back to Italy. I was now without my political companions while I was facing at least fifteen more years behind bars. The common wisdom in prison was that every seven years was a whole turn in time—you either made it past that point or went crazy. I had made it through two seven-year stints.
Besides my friends and family, I was helped by my cellmate of two years. Jane later told me that when she saw me entering the prison for the first time she knew we would be friends because we both had a kind of “wild hippie look.” She was right about that. Jane had become a great friend. In addition to engaging me in intense exchanges about books and politics and prison life, she helped me with my graduate work. We sat in our cell and discussed Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hegel, and the other thinkers that I was studying in literary theory. We made
the agreement that I had made with other friends in the past, that we would only talk about prison life and prison officials ten percent of the time. We knew that otherwise we would become consumed by hating them, and would have wasted too much time. Our greatest pleasure was playing racquetball, both against each other and as a team. We were among the oldest players in the place, but we could still kick up sufficient dust and beat those young kids.
Jane was smart and, despite what seemed to be an ephemeral quality, she had lots of life skills that always impressed me. She had read widely and had a huge frame of reference from which to draw.
Her numerous siblings (she was the oldest of twelve children) kept in contact with her, as did her lovely daughter. Jane had been a member of the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a single mother, she had gone back to school and become a pharmacist to support the two loves of her life—her daughter and son. Her son was a young man who was just beginning to come into his own identity when he was killed in a car accident. From what she said, he had a beautiful soul. His death sent Jane into a downward spiral that ended with drug addiction and a seventeen-year prison sentence. Jane had a beautiful soul and despite her own grief, a great capacity for empathy that enabled her to respond to other people’s suffering. She received an excessive sentence for her sale of drugs to support a habit. We spent many hours discussing what the world would look like if drug use were decriminalized. While I was working and psychically drifting, Jane stayed the course in our joint cell life.
Friends outside stepped up their work on my behalf. Old friends that I had not seen since I was imprisoned reappeared in my life. Some corresponded, and others came to visit. My high school friend, from Walden School, Jon Preiskel, who had also been a radical activist and done extensive solidarity work with different African liberation movements in the 1970s and later had become a lawyer, walked into the visiting room one day. I hadn’t seen him in well over a decade. He was with another friend from high school, Tony, also a defense lawyer and activist, and they both apologized for being out of my life for so long. Seeing Jon was a great, familiar relief. He embraced my views and understood my life choices and at the same time he was deeply connected with how I had grown up. His friendship helped me directly challenge the feelings of estrangement from my life before prison. Judith Mirkinson, who had been one of my closest friends for twenty-five years through all of my political sojourns, who didn’t let a month go by without sending a book or a letter, visited more frequently because her daughters were now in college on the East Coast. Paulette D’Auteuil, a longtime radical activist and old friend, would drive up from New York with my mother, and the three of us would sit and laugh and listen to Paulette’s intricate and interesting tales from her life in the Native American solidarity movement.
An American Radical Page 31
