An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  At 4:50 p.m., when the count had been unofficially cleared and the kitchen workers were massing at the door to be escorted to work for the dinner shift, my case manager, Ms. Shaloub, who had an office at the front of our block, walked down the hall to my cell. She stood outside and said, “My office. Now.”

  The whole floor lit up with chatter. Jane walked with me to the office. I went in and Ms. Shaloub closed the door. I said nothing. She said, “Call your lawyer. Call Mary.” She pushed the phone across the desk toward me.

  I was struck by how familiar people become in times of extremity, as though we were all in this together. I guess it was human nature. I dialed Mary’s office number while staring at Ms. Shaloub, trying to read something from her demeanor. Mary picked up. “Mary, hi, what’s up? They had me pack out and the whole place is crazy.”

  “Susan, there is no official list yet, but someone in New York called me and said that on the five o’clock news on Channel 9, you and Mark Rich and several others were mentioned as getting clemency. Then a reporter from another station called me to ask if it was true.”

  “Really?” It felt like my rib cage was going to crack. “Wow,” I whispered into the phone.

  “There is no official list,” she repeated. I looked at my watch.

  “Mary, if I get out tomorrow, I think you should be here to pick me up.”

  “The last shuttle to New York is eight o’clock. I’ll be on it with Susie, and we’ll be there in the morning.”

  “Thank you, thank you, and thank you. Either way, thank you,” I said.

  “If I hear anything else before we leave, I’ll call Ms. Shaloub back. She says she’ll be there until seven forty-five.”

  “Okay, great.” I hung up. My case manager and I looked at each other across the desk.

  “I hope you get it,” she said. “You know I am getting my master’s at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and so I don’t intend to stay here, either,” she continued.

  I hadn’t known that. I thought back to when she had first started at Danbury. I remembered that she had been mean and was overly meticulous and thorough. I realized that she had moved up the ranks quickly in less than five years.

  “Can I just sit here for a minute?” I asked. I didn’t want to go back into the unit and I certainly didn’t want to go to the dining room. I sat there about a half an hour and thanked her. Mary didn’t call back.

  Just before Ms. Shaloub went home, she called me back into her office and said that there was still no word. She wished me good luck. I saw that my very thick BOP file, my “prison jacket,” was sitting on her desk.

  That night, Jane and I talked for hours. We had shared a cell together for over three years and had gone through bouts of closeness and times when we just struggled to co-exist in our tiny cell. We had lived on the second floor in the last cell on the line with a double ceiling and a tall window that looked out onto the sky and no fences, and then we had lived in a cell on the first floor that had no distinguishing features other than the energy and beauty we brought to it.

  I went to breakfast alone as soon as the door was unlocked. It was Saturday, January 20, and there was no real breakfast, just cereal, donuts, and coffee in advance of the Saturday brunch. Saturday visiting hours were 8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., but because of the 10:00 a.m. count, new visitors were not admitted between 9:15 and 11:00. I was hoping that Mary and Susie would be there in that first forty-five minutes.

  I also knew that the Bush inauguration would begin at noon. I had only four hours left. At 8:30 on the nose, I was called to the visiting room over the prison-wide PA system. I was ready. I hugged Jane and said, “See you later.” I stood outside the locked door waiting for the CO to open it so that I could enter the strip room and be let into the visiting room. It had snowed that week and it was very cold. Despite the weather, I lit a cigarette while I was waiting. The smoke and my icy breath commingled and I blew it out in a straight and powerful stream. I have to quit, I thought to myself, but not today. I did not have gloves, so I alternated between stuffing one fist and then the other into each pocket as I switched the cigarette from hand to hand. I smoked the whole thing and was about to light another when the door popped open.

  The strip room was very cold and I tried to get through the whole embarrassing process as quickly as possible. I had it down to a science, and for once the CO was rolling along as fast as I was. She was cold, too. I walked out into the visiting room and immediately saw Mary and Susie sitting in the larger legal room. They were worried and tired, but still looked wonderful to me. We all hugged as though it was the last time. No word, that was clear, and it was 9:00 a.m. Susie had made an unofficial agreement with the COs at the main entrance and then at the desk in the visiting room that she would be able to go out to the parking lot to use her cell phone and then come back in. It was a violation of their procedure, but this once they had acquiesced. We sat there just kind of looking at one another. At 9:30, Susie went out to call someone. She was back in twenty minutes, but with no answer.

  The rest of the visiting room was filling up with families. Every one of the prisoners knew what we were waiting for. It was hard to talk. At 10:30, Susie went back out to call. Mary and I held hands. A little before 11:00 a.m., Susie wasn’t back and Mary started to cry. I said, “Don’t cry yet. It’s not over.” But as 11:00 came and went, I kept thinking of George W. Bush putting his hand on the Bible that Chief Justice William Rehnquist would be holding. From where we were sitting, we couldn’t see through the window into the parking lot. We couldn’t see Susie. By then, the 10:00 a.m. count had cleared and a few other prisoners were greeting their families.

  At 11:25, Susie came back in. I couldn’t tell anything from how she was moving toward us. She saw us looking at her—in fact, everyone was looking at her—and she was about twenty feet away from the door to the clear glass wall and entrance between us. She paused, looked at us, raised her arm above her waist, and gave us a thumbs-up. The entire room burst into a yelling roar of tears and screaming. People were jumping up and down. Mary and I burst into a hug and tears that took us to the center of the earth. I felt a rushing in my head. I was free.

  Susie came into our little room and we hugged and hugged and jumped up and down and laughed and yelled and couldn’t stop until a CO from the front came and told us to be still, we were disrupting the visiting room. A woman sitting with her family told the CO, “Leave them alone. They are happy, and we are all happy.” But the exchange brought us back to where we were.

  Susie said, “You are on the official list released from the White House. I talked to Alan and he saw the list online.”

  I looked at my watch; it was 11:45. They had waited till the last possible moment. Susie was doing the negotiating with the police and she was calm, collected, and systematic. But I could see the joy around her eyes. All the different prison visiting rooms of the last sixteen years passed through my head. I had seen Mary in all of them, Susie in most.

  Susie went to the desk. “My client has received presidential clemency, and we would like to leave. Her mother is waiting for her.”

  “We have nothing official on that,” the CO said.

  We sat for an hour. Finally, Mary got mad and went to the desk. “I would like to see the captain or the warden. I would like to speak to someone in charge about what this delay is about.”

  The officer nodded. A few minutes later, the side entrance opened and in strode the two associate wardens and a slew of lieutenants. They walked up to the doorway and the tall, thin associate warden in charge of operations said to me, “Ms. Rosenberg, you have received a presidential pardon and you will be leaving with your lawyers.” He stuck his hand out to shake mine.

  I thought of all the encounters he and I had had over medical treatment and living conditions. I stood up and shook his hand. “When?”

  The other associate warden, a blond woman who was formerly an education supervisor, said, “We are waiting for a fax, and then we can get the pa
perwork moving.”

  I disliked her even more than the other one because she had oversight in education and had happily cut all the programs.

  Mary said, “I have a bag with clothes for Susan to put on.”

  “Give them to the officer at the entrance and he will see that she gets them,” the blonde replied. “Susan has to go through R&D.”

  I was still standing up, looking, at all of them. “I need to go back inside to get the last of my things together,” I said.

  “Oh no, that’s impossible,” said the blond associate warden.

  “I really have to. I have papers and things I need.”

  “We can’t let you go back there. It wouldn’t be safe.”

  That made me so angry I forgot that I wasn’t quite free yet. “That is such a crock. I’ve lived in your prisons for over sixteen years and I have never felt threatened by prisoners. The only time I have felt unsafe has been in the presence of your staff.” My voice was raised.

  Mary put her hand on my arm. The officials all stepped away from us. They had a quick conference, and then the operations assistant warden said, “Okay, fifteen minutes, with an escort.”

  I turned to Mary and Susie and said, “See you outside.” I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth.

  I handed Mary my legal papers, walked back into the strip room, got my coat, and stepped into the compound, where there was one CO waiting to escort me. On the other side of the door were hundreds of women milling around. I realized that they had been waiting for me. As I walked past two buildings toward my unit, more and more inmates gathered and were following me.

  I realized that I had to say something to them. They all wanted to say something and to touch me. Before I went into my unit, I turned at the door and faced the more than five hundred women amassed there. People were all talking and yelling.

  I said, “I am going home today. I want to tell all of you that I have done over sixteen years and have been looking at another fifteen, and so I thought I might be buried alive in here. But I want you all to know that if my case has meaning, if it means something to you, I stand for hope. Let me stand for hope. Don’t ever give up and don’t lose hope that you all will be free. One day you will all be free. Fight for the living.”

  People started cheering and I was totally undone. I cried my way back into the unit. All 140 women were on the first floor lining the tier. People were crying and grabbing me. I went down the hall to my cell. I didn’t really have anything to pack; I had just wanted to say good-bye and give people my thanks.

  Jane said, “I told you! I love you, Susan.”

  I grabbed her and held on to her for dear life as long as I could; I didn’t want to leave her there. But she pried me from her and pushed me out of the cell. I walked down the hall and spoke to every person who was standing and waiting to say good-bye. I got to Maureen and she was smiling an enormous smile. “You I will see in Jamaica.”

  “Right soon, I hope.”

  Pandemonium broke loose as I got to the front of the unit. Ms. Shaloub came out of her office. “Come on, let’s go.” She took my arm.

  I turned to everyone standing there and yelled, “I love you all! Remember, freedom is a constant struggle.” She moved me out into the crowd outside, and into the R&D building.

  I had to sign papers and get my clothes and wait until they were ready to let me out the door. Another woman had also been given a sentence commutation and was going to Houston, Texas, all by herself, with no spare clothes and no money beyond the exact amount to buy the fare. The prison personnel were going to drive her to the bus station in Danbury and then she would go to Penn Station in New York and get a bus to Texas. She was twenty-four years old and had been in prison since she was eighteen. She had never been to New York and was worried about traveling alone. She had four days until she had to report to the authorities in Texas. It would take her that long to get there, and so the plan didn’t leave her much room to breathe.

  I suggested to her that she talk to my friends outside in the parking lot and said we could take her to New York with us. The head of the records department, who had been called in overtime to do our paperwork, overheard me and said that would not be possible because we were both on parole and as soon as we walked out the door we would not be able to talk to each other, let alone drive to New York. I thought he was kidding, but they sent her out the door before I could speak further with her.

  Then the same administrator handed me a piece of paper and said, “Sign it. These are the ten federal conditions of parole.”

  As I read them, they seemed as absurd to me as the Bureau of Prisons forms I had signed prior to transit saying that I promised not to escape. But the condition that flashed in front of me now was “no association with any ex-felons.”

  I signed the paper. Then I was done.

  It was cold and starting to snow. My friends wanted to go home. It was fine with me. I put on my coat, stuffed the papers in my pocket along with a piece of BOP identification, and pushed open the door.

  After more than sixteen years of prison, freedom was only a memory. With each successive door I passed through, however, that state of being, that faded dream, grew upon me. I walked out of the Danbury Federal Prison for Women into an empty parking lot on a snowy afternoon. An hour earlier, as I sat on the other side of the fence and wall, that same weather had been depressing and uncomfortable, but now it looked pristine and dramatic. That afternoon, for the first time in more than sixteen years, I was not listed on the national four o’clock institutional count. I would not have to stand up and be counted. I was free of handcuffs, free of leg cuffs. I had a clear view of the horizon, and there were no helicopters buzzing overhead as I threw my hands toward the sky and shouted to my father’s spirit, “Dad, I am free! We made good on the promise! I’m free!” I hadn’t even realized that I had been holding my breath.

  After sixteen years and three months I was released on parole, having been granted executive clemency by departing President William Jefferson Clinton. On January 20, 2001, at 4:00 p.m., I fell into the waiting arms of Mary O’Melveny and Susie Waysdorf. Mary and Susie were at the front door waiting to take me to Manhattan, where my mother, Bella, and friends were waiting for me. My mother had said, “I won’t believe it until she is out and on her way.”

  But I could not leave until I walked around the parking lot to get a final view. I looked back from the other side of the wall, knowing that hundreds of women, whom I had left moments before, many of them dear friends, were crammed at the windows watching me, filled with their own longings. I waved, I saluted, and I jumped up and down as I stared past the razor wire and the distance between me and all of them. I wondered who of all those hundreds of women would make it out. Which of them would make it to the other side, to freedom? I made a snowball and packed it hard and threw it at the side of an empty prison truck. A man standing at the front entrance and cradling a shotgun in his arms scowled at me. “Get out of here,” he shouted. At that moment, Mary and Susie drove their car up and Mary motioned to me to get in. Her grin was as wide as the open door. I hopped into the front seat with tears streaming down my face, and we drove out of the parking lot, down the big hill, and onto Route 37, which would take us to New York. Home.

  Afterword

  I WAS part of the political left that grew out of the 1960s and I took up the radical choice of trying to help make a revolution. This period of history was a different time than the one that we are living in today. It was a time when I—and thousands of people like me—believed that “you’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.” And it was a time of massive civil conflict. Whether it was the FBI’s infamous counterintelligence program (cointelpro) that led to the infiltration, deaths, incarceration, and silencing of rising activists within their social movements, especially African Americans and other people of color, or whether it was small groups of students or workers trying to physically stop the war machine by attacking the gov
ernment, the two sides were locked in struggle. As a result of my own choices and actions, I became part of this narrative and ultimately a political prisoner.

  The U.S. government does not recognize the existence of political prisoners in our country. The identity of political prisoners is concealed from the public and, consequently, their right to justice is denied. Today, many nations publicly recognize that the post-World War II era, especially from the 1950s to the 1980s, was characterized by legitimate conflict in response to social inequities that resulted in the imprisonment and death of men and women across the globe. But not the United States. There are still scores of political prisoners behind bars in America.

  Going to prison blew my mind. It changed every idea that I previously had and all of my relationships to my friends and family. It destroyed every preconception I had about oppression and suffering, my own and others. It was a terrible, relentless, sixteen-year existential nightmare. The work of staying alive in prison was all-consuming. For long periods of time, prison life reduced me to a grave state of nothingness. What was common to all the institutions I passed through was a brutal application of social control and loss of freedom. I made lists to remember what I had lost.

  One list went:

  The power of control over my life

  My connections to the past

  My privacy

  My memory

  With time and age and lack of care,control over

  As these losses accumulated, I was stripped barer and barer, and the world became smaller and smaller, narrower and narrower, my very being diminished. Many times it drove me to utter despair because I was experiencing the loss cell by cell, emotion by emotion, and memory by memory. And to feel that is enraging. I felt I was being destroyed bit by bit.