An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  The months that followed the death of my father were the most difficult. They were filled with a deep grief, a reckoning with consequences, and a fall into an abyss. I remembered a dream that my father had described to me. He was in the Lexington HSU, both as a visitor and a prisoner. He woke up screaming because of our pain and his inability to stop it. He knew my imprisonment was a direct result of my choices, but on a deeper level he felt that he was a failure for not protecting me against those choices. He was distraught over this, and the longer I was in jail, the more he cried. His sadness at our suffering was apparent. His sadness and compassion were intimately linked. And as I began to realize this, I hated myself for having created the situation.

  Perhaps because I was so isolated in maximum security, or perhaps because I was coming up on ten years inside, or perhaps because my father’s death made me feel as I had never felt before—whatever the reasons—my extreme grief drove me mad. I could not get away from it. I marked all time by Dad’s death. This birthday, that event, each was the first without him. Every time I thought about his being gone, my chest would constrict and I could not breathe. Sometimes I could hear his voice; other times I could not remember exactly what he looked like. I was angry that I didn’t know, and had no way of finding out now, his favorite season or his favorite color. I was angry at being gone for ten years and wasting time, as though time were unending, as though we had lifetimes. I realized that our family line would end with me, and that made me the saddest of all. It was hard to grieve in maximum security. I missed my father’s fierce love, which had broken through every concrete wall. I thought of his heartfelt politics and his goodness. I wanted to be more like him. I felt that I had to have his goodness in me. It was hard to locate under the conditions I was in. To be good and kind was viewed by the authorities and prisoners as a sign of weakness. But I wanted a fresh start in my own self.

  That year, 1993, was a year of grave loss. The inability to take on the normal role of child burying a parent, or beginning to care for the remaining parent is a terrible part of the state’s punishment. I don’t know whether being aware of such consequences beforehand would have functioned as a deterrent for me. I like to think it would have, and yet in this strange and unpredictable dialectic, the bonds of love and responsibility I felt would not have been as strong without the suffering and the separation I had experienced.

  At the same time, my health, and that of my friends, was deteriorating. Medical care at Marianna was nonexistent and we suffered. Marilyn had a bum knee from a poorly healed kneecap and a shortened tendon; Silvia had developed a rare form of uterine cancer and had radiation burns from the treatment she had received in 1991. Laura woke up one day so dizzy she could not walk a straight line. She was diagnosed with shingles, and later Ménière’s disease, and her illness lasted for years. For months the authorities’ only response was to constantly give her breathalyzer tests because her weaving suggested drunkenness. I began to lose my teeth, one at a time. I had arrived at Marianna with only twelve because of terrible periodontal disease and equally terrible care from the authorities, so that by 1993 I had only six left. We had all endured prison under extremely difficult and terribly stressful conditions for five, seven, nine years, but because we were not dying, no one was sent to the outside hospital.

  I was in despair: grieving for my father, for me, and for all of us. When I finally lifted my head up several months later, it appeared that the revolutionary impulse around the world was in decline. Social justice, equality, and peace were no less needed now than they were thirty, twenty, ten years ago. But the vision and means and capabilities had been transformed in the last decade. Activists had been demobilized around the globe. I, too, had been transformed. I had gone from being a passionate militant and a committed revolutionary to being … I was not sure what. I wanted to think that Che Guevara’s great pronouncement that “revolutionaries above all else are motivated by love” was still true for me. But my own vision now functioned in a much narrower framework. Had I gone from social revolutionary to social worker? No doubt it was all more complex than that, but without a revolutionary movement or theory or radical or socialist camp in the world, I was not sure that one could continue to be a revolutionary. How could I, or anyone for that matter, operate in a complete vacuum? I did not feel that I could separate myself from history.

  In 1994, Ms. Nolan made good on her collective promise to us. She succeeded in chipping away at the security wall encasing us and got first Silvia, then Marilyn, and then Laura transferred to general population. Our classification had been reduced and we political prisoners were no longer to be confined in maximum security. I decided to apply to the parole board and test the waters of opinion.

  Going up for parole is a wretched process. Laura joked with me that I would need fleece-lined knee pads to survive the parole request. In our brief time together at Metropolitan Correctional Center, in 1985, Irish Republican Army prisoner Joe Doherty had told me that courts in England and Ireland had railings on the dock to prevent prisoners from having permanent knee injuries. Baring one’s soul in remorse is hard to do, but when your release depends on it, and yet whatever you say never seems to be either apt or sufficient, it is painful indeed. Ten years inside is a long time, and now I was in the midst of a growing desire and pressure to get out. I had made a promise to my father that, although unrealistic, I wanted to keep.

  For years I had put release on the back burner of my mind. A fifty-eight-year sentence felt like a life sentence. But I was eligible to try at ten years, so I decided to file for parole at Marianna.

  Going before the parole board would reveal what the government’s legal position was; the government had always used the conspiracy charges in the Brink’s robbery case to bolster its extreme classification and treatment of me. But because those charges had been dropped, if they used those charges against me now in a parole application, I would have grounds to fight for release. My grounds would be strengthened by the fact that the average sentence for weapons possession was five years in the United States.

  I was exhausted by prison. Every bit of it offended my sensibilities. But prison was only one piece of my life. I tried to rekindle an earlier time when my blood had boiled and I had raged against the crimes of the state, when my own savage heart had beat to an oppressive pulse and what had compelled me to act was a vision of social justice and social liberation. As I sat in Marianna, that time seemed so far away that I could barely reclaim it. Life for me at this point was a series of compromises about coexistence with the authorities in the most deadening situation imaginable.

  There were varied opinions among us about what our relationship to the parole process should or should not be. “Us” included other political prisoners, the lawyers who had represented us and who continued to defend our rights, our families, and our associates, both past and present. I had come to the conclusion that every individual who had come out of the left in the 1960s and 1970s and was now doing time had a right to develop his or her own position, whether that meant refusing to admit any wrongdoing, refusing to be self-critical, or begging the government for mercy.

  Yet I also feared that I was succumbing to self-preservation and by taking part in the parole process I would lose much of my integrity. My friends outside took a more objective view, saying, “Of course, you should apologize to try to get out, what difference does it make?” It made a difference to me.

  I vacillated for months as my desire to get out of jail and help my mother grew. For every single choice I had made, I could blame no one but myself.

  I decided that I would apologize to the parole board. I would admit my actions were criminal and dangerous. I would agree that having dynamite was an endangerment to innocent people, regardless of intent. I would acknowledge that the terrible antagonism Tim and I had put forth at our trial was my doing, against the advice of our lawyers, and had grown directly out of a refusal to take responsibility for my actions and a lack of remorse. I would further
admit that I now believed that violence is wrong and that we were lucky no one was killed. I would say that I would never, ever repeat such actions, nor would I counsel anyone else to use such methods. I would not talk about anyone but myself. I would bend as far as I could without breaking.

  In late November 1994, the government canceled my parole hearing because the parole commission wanted the Southern District of New York to explain in writing why they had failed to prosecute me for any involvement in the Brink’s conspiracy case. Parole officials wanted to know what the evidence against me was. The U.S. Parole Commission stated that unless the Southern District said that it had dropped the case for lack of evidence, then any evidence it had would be used against me in a “release determination.” Since the charges included murder, it would be a “no-release” type of ruling; it would mean a fifteen-year set-off. This meant that I would not be considered for parole until the fifteen years were over.

  This was all communicated to me by a blank-faced parole examiner whose desk stood in front of a bare wall. His droning words receded as my thoughts raced around and around until one took hold: a recollection of the men who had rebelled at Attica prison in 1971. I recalled their lack of vindication, although they proved their case over and over again. Forty-three men had died, most of them simply demanding decent and humane treatment. I thought about the state’s lack of accountability in that case, and its acts of retribution in so many other cases. Accountability, retribution—did either bring justice? I did not think so.

  I thought about the state’s ability to remember its enemies and their acts and the long reach of punishment as the droning examiner told me that very probably I would live on until I died in prison. I recalled the statement I had made at my trial in 1984—that the system would not last as long as my sentence. I had been so cavalier about that—yet so off the mark. I thought of one memory ending and another beginning. I thought about the policemen who were killed in the Brink’s robbery on October 20, 1981, the shootout between Sekou Odinga and Mtyari Sundiata, who had been accused of participation in the robbery and had been hunted by the police and FBI. And how they had been spotted in Queens on October 21st, the next day, and had been in a shootout. Mtyari had been shot to death and after Sekou had been arrested, he was tortured for several days in a Queens police precinct. I thought about the children of all the different people on different ideological sides who had grown up without parents, who were now teenagers and grown-ups themselves. So many lives had been changed forever by that one horrific event in Nyack, New York. It was a terrible thing, and the consequences were unending. The futility of it, God, I thought.

  Daniel Singer, French writer and intellectual, in writing about the Italian Red Brigades, said that when a self-appointed guerilla group declares itself the leadership of a movement, it actually does harm to the social struggle. By substituting political violence for organizing people where they are, it shortcuts the necessary work of winning peoples’ hearts and minds. This description fit us to a tee.

  By Christmas, 1994, I had been at Marianna for four years. Silvia was in Danbury, Marilyn and Laura were in Pleasanton, California, and K.C. was in a Colorado state prison serving the end of her sentence. Others at Marianna had come and gone. I was the last one of us still there. The Southern District of New York did not answer the board’s request for months, and I withdrew my parole application and applied for transfer instead. However, my application for transfer was denied. Again, the reason given was my sentence length. I was losing ground in every quarter. I was back to where I had started. I had nothing to do but turn to life in the unit.

  When Sue Gambill came to visit me after everyone else had gone, she said that not one person had signed the visitors’ log from her last visit six weeks earlier. There were no visitors to Marianna. My friends and I were the only people who had ever gotten consistent visits. Every one of the Marianna prisoners was hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from home.

  Those of us remaining at Marianna were an odd assortment, considered the worst of the worst, because of our crimes, sentences, levels of organization outside, or behavior. This was a group ripe with the potential for betrayal and vengeance. Every day, our lockdown time increased, and shakedowns were coming fast and furiously. The little garden for food that we had cultivated in the rec yard was suddenly filled in with concrete, and the UNICOR factory that had employed thirty-five women in data entry was closed. The GED classes ended, and the little world that we all existed in was shrinking. As it did, people started fighting. One day a woman took a twenty-pound dumbbell to another woman’s skull and blood spattered from one tier to the next. The prison guards locked us down for a week and charged the woman with attempted murder. My anger at everything returned.

  And it was just at that point that I was transferred to the brand-new, multi-million-dollar Oklahoma Processing and Detention Center and held incommunicado for three days, only to surface at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution the following day.

  Part Six

  Danbury

  Chapter 15

  Danbury General Population

  I ARRIVED IN the early evening. It was late spring and the New England sky was pale, with streaks of blue and white. It was familiar, that light, and I could actually see the horizon. So I did not even care when the cops dumped me into the old and worn room that housed the Danbury prison’s receiving and discharge (R&D) area. In fact, the light filled me with an almost uncontainable excitement as I stood waiting to be unchained. I had spent ten and a half years locked inside one space or another: cells, corridors, tiers, “dog runs.” Now it was the very first time I would be in general population. I was only seventy miles from New York City and my family and friends. This meant that I would have regular visits. On top of that, the unbelievable irony was that the prison complex extended right to the shore of Candlewood Lake, the same lake on which my parents had owned a house for over twenty years.

  Waiting in the R&D area, I let my mind wander. Here in Connecticut, I would no longer have to listen to Christian “rock” radio. Maybe I would even get to hear jazz again—Thelonious Monk and Ella Fitzgerald, Erroll Garner and Billie Holiday. Surely some university station would breach the walls. Yale University was near by, the University of Bridgeport and other schools, as well. Before all the officials came to inspect me, read me my non-rights, and get me prepped for population, I was happy. The Danbury prison would mean less repression, less control. It was an incredible relief.

  And then I took in my surroundings. I remembered reading that there had been a fire at Danbury that had killed some prisoners years back. It smelled dank even in May; everything at Danbury appeared old. The stone and brick walls needed paint; the furniture looked like old prison issue. Only the high-tech equipment—the surveillance cameras and the metal detectors—were modern. I remembered reading that Danbury was one of the oldest federal prisons in the country and that it had housed many famous and iniquitous people: the Plowshares movement antiwar activists Philip and Daniel Berrigan; G. Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent and Watergate burglar; international marijuana dealer-turned-author Richard Stratton; a number of mob members; and various high-profile, white-collar criminals. It had been changed to house women only in the early 1990s.

  As one CO unchained me, I could hear the chatter from the others who were lounging around and watching the process. This batch was young except for the gray-bearded man in charge of R&D. He seemed impatient, as if he had dinner waiting at home. He looked as if he were about to tell everyone to “get out” when the steel door separating the room from the inside of the prison was pushed open. The warden walked in, flanked by an entourage of lieutenants. I knew it was the warden instantly because the lounging COs abruptly stood up and looked down at their feet. He stared at me and I stared back, which was easy to do because he was five foot six, my exact height. He reminded me of Quinlan, the former head of the BOP. They both were balding, thin, middle-aged, bland-looking man. They were the kind of men
who had other more physically powerful men do their bidding.

  “Hey, thanks for taking me into your institution. Don’t worry, it will be okay,” I said, my voice thick with contempt.

  “Wasn’t my choice,” he said as he eyed me up and down. As suddenly as he had come in, he turned on his heel and strode out.

  The COs were all staring at me. One of the lieutenants, an overweight, shaggy guy only a little older than I, ordered everyone out. The COs dispersed quickly, leaving me alone with the hound dog-looking lieutenant. “I’m SIS [Special Investigation Service],” he said.

  “I’m scared of you,” I retorted snottily. What made me do this, I don’t know. My initial excitement about the light and the prospect of relief from repression had given way to anger—at the way I had been transported, being disappeared for three days into the maximum-security holding facility in Oklahoma, where I had been put into a cell on the men’s floor, at the chains, at the armed-camp atmosphere, at the animal-in-a-cage atmosphere with all the COs hanging around. It was not the best way to start this new part of my prison life. I could not help it.

  I took a closer look at the man in front of me. His name tag said “Frederickson,” and I knew, despite his benign appearance, that he was not on my side.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Poor choice of friends.”

  He cut to the chase. “You’ll never get parole. This little trip here is a temporary stay. You fuck up and you’re outta here.” “Tell that to my lawyers,” I said.

  “You stay away from the other terrorists,” he went on. “You don’t associate, and you might get room to breathe.”

  “Lieutenant,” I said, “this is old news. My friends and I did Lexington together, and they tried to drive us crazy there. It didn’t work; they couldn’t divide us.”