They got a stretcher and went in. They carried her out with a blanket draped over her. I couldn’t see her at all. Then they broke from normal procedure and cleaned the cell themselves. Everyone stayed locked down. Had she died? Yes. Who was she? I never knew. The prison was responsible. Not that the administration ever acknowledged it.
I told my codefendants about this as soon as I could, and I told my lawyers and friends. They could not find anything out. It was as though it hadn’t happened. There were no records. No one came forward to find a missing person. No one inside knew who she was.
Later, a woman on my block, in response to my attempt to protest the woman’s death, said, “Shit, Susan, she OD’d on PCP and crack. It happens all the time.”
For the next year, we tried every way we could to keep body and soul together. We eventually were among the longest-held prisoners in the jail. But the extreme and excessive security conditions had been lessened. After eleven months of total lockdown, we had been released into general population and were allowed to meet together daily. This in effect put us smack in the middle of the life of the jail. We were given a large room and lockers for our papers. We were ultimately allowed to meet together without lawyers or paralegals and with guards posted outside the room.
It was our most productive and most difficult time. We had worked in various organizations with each other for over fifteen years. We had all been great friends and at different times in leadership. We had worked together, organized together, lived together, loved one another, and fought with one another. We were all inspired by a vision of a just and radical society. We had all been willing to give our lives in pursuit of that vision. We believed that we were justified in attempting to build a revolutionary underground, to actively oppose our government’s aggression and racism in all its manifestations, and to make women and gay people equal and free. But we had all experienced our arrests, trials, and imprisonments alone, for the past three years. And we had all drawn our own conclusions from those experiences. Regardless of our differences and changes, we knew we needed unity more than we ever did before if we were going to survive and win now.
While all this was going on, the legal motions in our case were progressing through the courts. We were charged with a conspiracy to use violent and illegal means to protest and change U.S. foreign and domestic policy. The indictment read, “Charged in a conspiracy to influence, change, and protest policies and practices of the United States government concerning various international and domestic matters through the use of violent and illegal means.” The indictment also charged us with aiding and abetting nine bombings of military and governmental buildings—resulting in property damage. The U.S. Capitol bombing in 1983 was the most significant. But there had been other bombings against the United States to protest its policies and practices in Central America, its support of the Contras in Nicaragua, the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada, the establishment of dictatorships in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Chile, and the continuing disappearances of people in the region.
During this same period, the Iran-Contra hearings produced indictments against Oliver North and Elliott Abrams. The Iran-Contra scheme had begun in 1983 and was a plan to provide funds to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels from profits gained by selling arms to Iran. The Iran-Contra scandal was the product of two separate initiatives during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The first was a commitment to aid the Contras, who were conducting a guerrilla war against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The second was to placate “moderates” within the Iranian government in order to secure the release of American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon and to influence Iranian foreign policy in a pro-American direction. Despite the strong opposition of the Reagan administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress enacted legislation, known as the Boland amendments, that prohibited the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, or any other government agency from providing military aid to the Contras from December 1983 to September 1985. The Reagan administration circumvented these limitations by using the National Security Council (NSC), which was not explicitly covered by the law, to supervise covert military aid to the Contras. Under Robert McFarlane (1983–85) and John Poindexter (1985–86), the NSC raised private and foreign funds for the Contras. This operation was directed by NSC staffer Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. The indictment of government officials was a political blow to the administration and they wanted to recoup their losses.
We believed the prosecution’s plan was to use our trial and the attendant publicity to counter the congressional revelations and indictments surrounding Iran-Contra. Our case was to be a “show trial” of Americans citizens who, with the use of armed propaganda, opposed and showed the vulnerability of the Reagan administration’s entire Central American strategy and all of its foreign policy. It was intended to have a chilling effect on activism and they hoped it would divert attention from the Oliver North and John Poindexter hearings going on down the hall from our own trial.
When we counted all the previous trials that we had gone through either individually or in various permutations, they totaled fourteen prosecutions. We had all been incarcerated for three or more years and all had lengthy sentences, with the exception of Laura Whitehorn, who had yet to be brought to trial but had been held in preventive detention for three years. When we realized that the government was stacking the charges, meaning that they were using the same acts to try us over and over again, we thought that we had found the flaw in the government’s case against us. They already had convicted us in all cases. On top of that and most importantly, Tim and I had already been convicted of conspiracy, as had Alan, in our first trials. The government was using the same conspiracy and the same evidence from our New Jersey case to try us again in Washington, D.C. In January 1989, as part of an agreed-to strategy, Tim, Alan and I filed to have our cases severed from those of Linda, Laura, and Marilyn. In April, Judge Greene dismissed the charges against the three of us. He had agreed that the government was committing double jeopardy. The government appealed and we remained in the D.C. jail.
Throughout this time, the Lexington HSU legal case was running on a parallel track. The political struggles around it were evolving. It was independent of the Resistance Conspiracy case, but the two cases intersected through me. While at the jail, I had been called to testify in Judge Barrington Parker’s courtroom. The idea of testifying in the case, of being able to tell the judge in an open courtroom how the Bureau of Prisons was treating us, to tell him how I actually felt, was overwhelming. It would be the first time I had been in public, not in a prison, in over five years. It was bad luck, coincidence, or destiny that I was even there in Washington to be able to testify. It was only because of the Resistance Conspiracy indictment that the judge agreed to have me in his courtroom. The BOP had opposed my testifying, had opposed anyone from our side giving evidence. Their grounds had been that we were too dangerous to be allowed into an open court, with a secondary argument that it would be too expensive to secure the proceeding. But Judge Parker overruled them. The BOP’s next motion was to move the hearing to the special anti-terrorist courtroom where they had built a Plexiglas wall between the well of the court and the rows for the public observers. The government’s argument was that I was too dangerous to be in open court, and that the public needed protection from me. Judge Parker was in a wheelchair and had a special ramp built between his chambers and the bench, which allowed him to enter the courtroom without assistance. He would not move to another courtroom under any circumstances. He again overruled the government.
On the day of the hearing, the U.S. marshals, D.C. police, and FBI agents in a ten-car caravan with sirens blaring and helicopters swarming above escorted me to the empty holding cells in the basement of the federal courthouse. I was nervous; I felt so much was at stake. I had to be clear and articulate and not be afraid, and I had to represent the other women who were still being held at Lexington. I was out of practice speaking publicly and I h
ad never taken the stand in a courtroom before. I needed a haircut and my clothes didn’t fit. I weighed about one hundred pounds.
While in the holding cell, Mary and Susie came downstairs to help me prepare. They stood on one side of the bars and I paced back and forth close to the bars on the inside. Mary was giving me strength; I could feel it through the bars. She said, “Just tell the truth. That will be enough to make the case.” Susie was trying to pat my arm by reaching her own arm through the bars. “It will be great,” she said reassuringly. Then they went upstairs and I kept pacing, practicing what I would say out loud to the empty space.
Two marshals came into the room and one of them, without uttering a word, held out a pair of handcuffs. I, equally silent, put my hands through a section of the bars and they cuffed me. We walked into a small, old-fashioned elevator with a manual handle. We stopped and they opened the door and we stepped out into a very small room. It was wood paneled and airless. It was the witness room connected to Judge Parker’s courtroom. The court was in session; I could hear murmuring through the door. One of the marshals had a radio transmitter in his ear and he was intently listening to whatever was being said on the other end. I felt I was suffocating in that room with them, as though my spirit and personality and very being were tamped down, waiting to explode.
The taller marshal nodded to his partner and the next thing I knew, they were literally carrying me into the courtroom, holding me up by my arms with my feet off the floor. The rush of seeing all these people sitting in front of me, the judge on the bench to the side of me, and the many cops standing and ringing the back of the courtroom was electric to me, causing a huge adrenaline rush. They sat me down at our side’s table. It was all women attorneys and paralegals sitting in a row. They were all in colorful ensembles, Adjoa most strikingly wearing an African fabric of many shades of yellow, gold, and blue. I looked at the government’s table and it was all men in gray and blue suits. It was a fantastic contrast, and at that moment it gave me a visual cue that built my confidence. Our side was beautiful. Then I turned and looked at the public spectators’ rows. I saw my parents. Before I could take it all in, I was called to take the witness stand. The proceedings had been in full swing when I had walked into the room. The marshals wanted to keep the cuffs on me but Judge Parker thundered from the bench, “Not in this courtroom,” and ordered them to take the cuffs off. He was staring at me from the moment that I had been carried into the room.
I walked unencumbered to the witness stand. My body recouped from the anxiety that my mind was feeling and my legs carried. It was the first time in a long time that I was not chained and surrounded by hostile men. I took the stand and put my hand on the Bible as the clerk asked me to swear. I couldn’t help turning my head and looking at the judge, trying to size him up, but at the same time afraid of really meeting his stare. The U.S. attorney representing the BOP stood up and began. He asked me my name, which I answered. Then he asked me to explain why I was in prison. He asked me to clarify a point I said about being in prison for possession of explosives. He wanted me to describe the explosives. He was aggressive in his tone and his demeanor. I answered him back rather quietly, at which point the judge started to ask me questions directly. He told the U.S. attorney to sit down. Judge Parker asked me to describe the Lexington High Security Unit. He asked me to supply details. Then he had me stand up and go to a blackboard and draw where the cameras were located in the showers. As I stood up and got off the stand and walked into the well of the courtroom, I realized that the whole scene was pretty incredible. The marshals and the different police agents scattered around the courtroom where on full alert as I walked back and forth to the blackboard, explaining to the judge my answers to his questions. After he questioned me for forty-five minutes, he then asked me what I thought the effect of the Unit was on me. At that moment, there was complete silence in the courtroom. I answered, “I feel that my humanity is diminished.” I was crying, because all of this was so difficult, and I was ashamed at my reduced capacity to act as a full human being. I was whisked from the courtroom by the marshals as soon as I stepped off the stand and taken back downstairs to the holding pen.
In his decision to immediately close the HSU, Judge Parker said that the conditions there bordered on human indecency and that our First Amendment rights had been violated by our being placed in these onerous conditions, with no due process and no remedy.
We had won our lawsuit. Amnesty International had conducted its first investigation of a U.S. prison-conditions complaint and found the United States in violation of international law on torture. Nina Rosenblum’s documentary about the HSU had been completed and had aired on PBS. It went on to win international film festival awards and was nominated for an Academy Award. When Silvia Baraldini and Alejandrina Torres were transferred to other prisons, Alejandrina was diagnosed as having had a heart attack at the HSU and Silvia as having a rare form of uterine cancer. When I had arrived at the D.C. jail, I was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I weighed one hundred and four pounds.
Chapter 10
AIDS Epidemic
DURING 1988–89, seven women prisoners at the Washington, D.C., jail died of AIDS. The epidemic hit the population head-on like a speeding truck. While thousands of gay men had been dealing with AIDS since 1983, it was still early in the epidemic and little was known about the disease. There were few preventive treatments for opportunistic infections, and the drug AZT was still in clinical trials. President Reagan had gone through his first term without ever once mentioning AIDS. The medical establishment still believed that women couldn’t get infected by HIV and that they could only transmit it. Most people had no idea what “casual contact” (contact without any exchange of body fluids) meant or how the virus was passed. At the jail, the small number of people who had been tested positive or had started to get sick were further sickened and ultimately destroyed by fear, stigma, and stupidity. HIV-positive prisoners were fed in separate Styrofoam trays by gloved workers.
The anguish from AIDS was compounded by the general state of conditions in the jail. A young black man died after his intestines burst and he was refused medical treatment. There was an outbreak of dysentery and all the kitchen workers were tested. People were sick on every unit, with high fevers and diarrhea. The size of the population, over two thousand, had exceeded the court-ordered limit; not one bed in the entire jail was empty. The count did not clear for three days; this meant that no one could leave their cells and guards came and counted and recounted and counted again and still couldn’t get the number of prisoners in the jail to match the number that they had on paper. So, for four nights in a row, dinner consisted of a piece of American cheese, a slice of white bread, and a few peas. The noise was so bad it was impossible to use the phone. There were fights over food, the phone, medication—and battles with the COs. Once done weekly, the tier and cell shakedowns were now done daily.
And then physical assaults started on HIV-positive prisoners. On my unit, one woman shared a cigarette with another woman. After lunch, when the cigarette owner realized (because of the Styrofoam lunch tray) that the other woman was HIV-positive, she broke every finger of the woman’s hand. “She won’t smoke with that hand,” the cigarette owner said as she walked away.
My codefendants and I had been discussing AIDS among ourselves since we arrived at the jail. Now we began to study the virus and discuss the public health implications for people in prison. Alan Berkman, a doctor who had worked in poor communities and hospitals, had been actively involved in public health for decades. He understood both the medical and public health aspects of the epidemic. We asked our outside supporters to send us information about HIV/AIDS and we began to study the virus, the immune system, biochemistry, testing, transmission, and treatment. We wanted to develop a survey so that we could get some honest idea of the depth of the infection rates and correspondingly a definition of infected prisoners’ needs. We wanted to develop HIV education and p
revention programs for prisoners, and we wanted decent care for HIV-positive people who were not yet sick and for those who were. We organized inside with prisoners, and we petitioned the administration. We wrote request after request to the head of the jail and asked him to meet with us to talk about the HIV epidemic. We asked our friends on the outside to help, and we worked with the jail chaplains and psychologists, who all recognized the need for a response to the epidemic. After months of asking, and then demanding, we succeeded in launching a prisoner-based peer education program with the help of the Whitman Walker Clinic, a D.C. clinic devoted exclusively to serving HIV/AIDS patients in poor neighborhoods. It was one of the first programs of its kind in the country in a city jail. The HIV/AIDS work that we began in prison gave me a means to my own salvation. It helped me put into context the worst of conditions and gave me something very meaningful to do. What made it happen was meeting the extraordinary women who, in the face of all the outrageously horrible conditions, stood up and struggled for their dignity.
Despite this initial effort, people continued to die all around us. On my block, one of many skirmishes in what by then we were calling the AIDS war was playing out most excruciatingly. Every day I would hear Theresa call out at the top of her voice, “Rider, Rider, where are you?” Rider, a friend of mine, one of the coolest and hardest-looking women I had met at the D.C. jail, would answer, “Okay, baby, I’m coming, hang on.” Rider would glide down the stairs to the bottom of the tier and slide into Theresa’s cell, and they would talk. Then she would slide out and go on about her work on the unit as an orderly.
One day when I was on the phone, I looked into the cell that Theresa and Rider shared. Rider was sitting on their trunk with her back against the wall and looking at the bed, where Theresa was sitting, knees-up. The intensity and intimacy they shared was as clear as a day after rain. Rider was cool, and she had years and years of practice at showing nothing. She lived behind a mask of nonreaction. She never lost at poker or spades, never. But this feeling she had, this love for her partner, she could not hide. The outer corners of her forty-five-year-old eyes began to turn upward, and the squint lines slowly became laugh lines. Their love affair affected anyone who acknowledged it. They navigated through the jailhouse rules and prohibitions with practiced grace and ease. The police knew the deal and let them cell together.
An American Radical Page 15