An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  His eyes narrowed into little slits and he snorted; he went from looking like a shaggy dog to looking like a pig. “Laugh, but we know you’re a cop killer, convicted or not,” he added as he walked out.

  Despite my sarcasm and contempt, I realized that this man was my enemy and would hurt me at the first chance he got. That, I took very seriously.

  All the higher-ups having left, the COs returned and went to work in earnest. I had been “received” before in many other places, but this time there was a new dimension: a psychologist was brought in to interview me. At that point, I could not tell if I would be sent to segregation first or straight into population. It was up to the doctor to make that determination.

  Dr. LeBarre strode in. Her appearance shocked me to the very core. She had short, red hair and a tattooed star on her ear, and she wore a hippie-esque outfit of flowing purple linen. In her early thirties, she looked like someone who could have been a progressive from some movement—feminist, gay liberation, whatever. I was reminded once more that I was no longer in the South, where someone like Dr. LeBarre would have been seen as a foreigner.

  “Clear out,” she ordered. Once again, the COs trooped out, as one of the younger ones rolled her eyes in disgust. The procedure was becoming comic, even to me. As Dr. LeBarre eyed me up and down, she and I began a verbal dance involving ideology, choice, politics—all of those differing strands bound together—that would characterize our interactions for years to come.

  “You don’t look all that frightening,” she said. “I know your friend Silvia, and she doesn’t seem all that dangerous, either.”

  I did not say anything. I just stood still, taking her in.

  Then she said, “I’m a cop first—above all else, I am a cop, not a psychologist or doctor. You have to know that.”

  “I would never assume anything else,” I said.

  “I mean, if I think you are a threat to yourself or anyone else, or if I think you are planning an escape or any violence, I will lock you up faster than a heartbeat, and it won’t be about treatment or therapy or any of that stuff.”

  My curiosity about this interesting-looking woman turned to revulsion. I loathed her for looking like a “liberated person,” or at least for matching my frozen-in-time image of what a liberated person might look like. I thought to myself, This is what we fought for? Now we have “feminist"police masquerading as “service"professionals.

  She continued. “It’s up to me whether you go to segregation or not. What can you tell me? Are you a threat? Do you want to kill yourself? Anyone else?”

  I just shook my head no. She had my file open and was filling out a form. I tried to read the open page upside down. All I could make out was the top line of the first typed paragraph, which said: “Escape risk. Inmate is extremely personable. Do not be fooled.” I kept my face still, trying to strike a balance between a normal gaze and the convict stare.

  Finally I said, “There’s no reason not to let me into population. It won’t be a problem.”

  Dr. LeBarre stared at me hard, and then said, “You’re going to long-term housing. If you want to talk to me, I am in Three North.”

  I thought, What prisoner would ever tell this Ice Woman they wanted to kill themselves? I couldn’t imagine it. She probably is studying us so she can write a book.

  But she let me go into population. And when they could procrastinate no more, the COs walked me down the long corridor with windows looking out onto the inner compound of the prison. They unlocked a door, and out I stepped into the general population, into a big, open inner courtyard and the waiting arms of Alejandrina, Silvia—who I hadn’t seen since we had been transferred from Lexington—Frin and Phyllis, both of whom had been at Marianna with me, and many others. I was mobbed by scores of women. They had known I was coming to Danbury before I had. That was the way the prison rumor mill worked.

  My first twenty-four hours in Danbury immersed me in a kaleidoscope of feelings. I was ecstatic and at the same time despondent because I realized how sick the past years had made me. The first morning, when I entered the dining room with four hundred other women—all yelling, with guards breathing down everyone’s neck to “eat fast”—I panicked to the extent that I had to run outside and throw up. This happened repeatedly over many months.

  I was sent to live in one of the two long-term units, which housed prisoners with sentences of fifteen or more years. Most of the people who had arrived from Marianna were living in those units. The cells were small, each had a toilet, a sink, and a bunk bed. They had originally been built as one-man cells, in days when “long-term” meant five years. Now each cell housed two women instead of one man, and “long-term” usually meant life sentences.

  My first cellmate was a twenty-three-year-old Jamaican woman serving four concurrent life sentences for drug conspiracy and murder. She was beautiful, as in take-your-breath-away beautiful. Looking at her became painful when the reality of her future struck my heart. She had merely been the “girlfriend"; she had used drugs, but she had not pulled any triggers and had not actually stood in the street and sold dope. She had been in the car when the shooting happened and people had died, and then she had refused to testify against anyone. She had no understanding of what was happening to her. She didn’t know how to stand up for herself, how to determine what she needed, and had no outside support to help her with money. Unfortunately, I was too self-absorbed and trying to deal with my new circumstances to communicate with her. I was emotionally overwhelmed by her future and my own.

  I had come from isolation and found myself in an unknown prison beset by overcrowding, petty degradation, and cruelty. In my first few weeks there, the energy that I had to expend merely to stay alive was exhausting. While living among thousands of women was stimulating, I was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and alternating between depression and hyper-activity.

  In spite of my mental state, I talked to everyone. I talked to women who had ten- or fifteen-year sentences, women who were repeat offenders, women who were parole violators, and women I knew from the D.C. jail, all of whom had been doing time for most of their lives in one state institution or another.

  Each day, I perceived the administration’s utter contempt toward the prisoners more fully than I ever had before. Whereas the terrible conditions at the D.C. jail were like a well-kept family secret as everyone knew about them but just shrugged at them, and the Lexington officials had been concerned with destroying us and our identities, here a pure hatred of women oozed out of every official pore.

  During the hottest summer in Connecticut’s memory, when it was 105 degrees Fahrenheit for days running, there was no air-conditioning. Women were packed into cells the size of bathtubs, and there was not enough food in the kitchen to meet daily requirements because of the overcrowding.

  Slowly, I began to understand the transformation that had taken place within the federal prisons during the ten years that I had been in maximum security. The most obvious difference was the sheer increase in the number of female prisoners. But the other change that stood out was a shift in the racial balance from half white and half black and Latina to a black majority.

  In my almost forty years, I had been witness to a great deal of suffering, racial and sexual oppression, degradation, and indecency. Danbury reminded me most of the South Bronx in the 1970s, where I had worked in a devastated urban community in which nothing worked, in which no needs were met, and expectations were so low that only survival at the barest level was considered a victory. To exist with low expectations about the quality and content of life is a terrible thing, and I saw this crushing reality everywhere I looked. It seemed to me that the Bureau of Prisons was succeeding in its attempts at destroying the mass of humanity at Danbury prison.

  A few months after I arrived at Danbury, I found out that my friend Donna Nelson—a soul sister of the deepest connection who had saved me again and again in D.C., first by bucking the police lies about us and then by being the first p
risoner to smuggle food to me—had died from complications related to AIDS. Five years earlier, she had not even been HIV positive, and now suddenly she was gone. As the weeks went by, I heard about more and more women who had died of AIDS. My codefendants and I could count hundreds of prisoners that we personally knew. All that wasted life energy, all that terrible suffering.

  A lovely woman named Pam Cooper who had been in the D.C. jail and then at Lexington, and who had been a great friend of Laura Whitehorn, had at the age of thirty-six received four life sentences despite her unwillingness to pull a trigger. (A conviction of conspiracy murder does not differentiate between the actual shooter and those who participate in any way. All those indicted are considered equally culpable.) I asked Pam, “How do you deal with that? With four life sentences?” She answered, “I don’t lay claim to them, I don’t claim them.”

  Her words gave me chills. In truth, Pam would soon die from AIDS, rendering the concept of “life sentence” almost absurd and irrelevant.

  The scourge of AIDS was on my mind when I walked into the prison gym one day and saw seven young black women sitting in the bleachers, all of them new arrivals. They approached me and asked me about prison life, about the commissary, the laundry, the rules, and the housing units. I asked if any of them had done “fed time” before. They all shook their heads. “No,” they answered. As we talked, I learned that they had sentences ranging from ten years to life. I again thought of my years working in the Bronx, where I first witnessed the impact of racism, prison, and drug addiction.

  Danbury, I learned, doubled as an immigration holding prison for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. On top of the predominance of African Americans within the population, there were dozens of women from the Caribbean and the whole African diaspora, primarily from Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda. On any given day, there were women representing more than forty different countries. As I walked around the compound that summer, I could hear an array of languages. Danbury resembled a small city in the developing world, both poor and cosmopolitan at the same time. Laundry was hanging out the windows; women were carrying buckets of water when the water system broke down. Everybody was dressed in ill-fitting brown, green, or khaki-colored clothes.

  The extreme heat of the summer gave way to the coldest winter that had hit Connecticut in many years. There was not enough heat in the housing units, even with all the bodies jammed together. The brick, stone, and steel walls allowed the bitter temperatures to penetrate. The pipes burst, leaving more than five hundred women in one unit without hot water. For six weeks, they had to walk through the snow in the inner compound to take a shower. The complex looked like a refugee camp. We were all internally displaced people.

  The unit managers at Danbury set the tone for the kind of treatment that the staff meted out. In a closed institution, all things related to the outside world pass through a variety of individuals’ hands. The mailroom clerks inspect your mail and determine whether or not you get the birthday card, which book is approved, and which letters are returned to sender. The counselors decide who is allowed to visit you and who you may telephone. The unit manager, in conjunction with your case manager, decides which job you have and whether or not you can go to school. The unit manager also approves your application for transfer to an institution closer to home, or whether you are moved against your will to a prison farther away. Nothing happens to you without a staff member’s direct involvement. You can limit your interactions with the staff, but it is impossible to evade them altogether. They intrude on your reality every day and in every way. As a result, some prisoners decide that it is easier to live in prison with as little contact with the staff as possible. They either withdraw or resist or do time in segregation. Regardless of their decisions, this team of people, “your team” of people, will interact with you at some point. I have heard prisoners after an interaction with their “team” come away sardonically singing, “You can’t always get what you want,” from the Rolling Stones song, as a means of relief from the disappointment of denied requests.

  The adage “The less you need, the better off you are” is especially true in a federal prison. But needing less is useful only if your goal is co-existence with the set of antagonists on the prison staff. It does not get you anywhere if you want to advocate for anything or help another prisoner with real-life problems. “They,” the prison staff, determine how and when you are able to visit your children or parents, what happens when you get scheduled for deportation to a country where you have not lived in years, what happens if you are sick and your security designation prevents you from going to an outside hospital, or what to do when you cannot pay your fine so your paltry wages are garnished and you cannot even buy so much as a bar of soap.

  In October 1995, I had been at Danbury for six months and was scrutinizing all the unit managers to see which one seemed the best and the least intrusive, and which one I could get along with and would leave me alone. It was the rainiest night since my arrival when I walked across the compound into the hallway of Unit 9 in my green army jacket, soaked to the skin. I didn’t have a hat and my hair was dripping into my collar and down my back. I was waiting to talk to Ms. Sharpe, the unit manager of the east wing. I had heard that she was unpredictable and spontaneous, always blowing from hot to cold. I wanted to live in Unit 9, which had large cells and single bunks. I had never seen the inside of the unit before because prisoners were not allowed to move freely inside of the cellblocks. We were restricted to the unit that we were assigned to live in. Simply standing where I was at that moment was “out of bounds” and potentially punishable as a violation.

  I found myself next to another woman in front of Ms. Sharpe’s office. I stood silently as one of the unit staff for the east wing, a Mr. Luce, a short, skinny man in his middle thirties, the most distinctive thing about him was that he had a prominent wall eye, came bounding down the stairs. As soon as he saw the other woman and me, he screamed, “Do you live here? Do you live here? You two are out of bounds. I know every inmate who lives here, and you do not. Come with me. You are in trouble.”

  The other woman and I followed him to the unit next door, and into his office. It annoyed me to no end that male counselors were assigned offices within the living space of so many women; from their posts, they could watch women walking around at all times of the day or night. I could see that Luce was really reveling in it; he had placed his office desk so that he could see directly into the first row of bunk beds.

  One of my friends, Maureen, had called Luce “one ugly black shit.” His face now was twisted up in anger, and one eye was way off center.

  Luce proceeded to scream at the woman next to me, but she did not reply. I did not know her or why she had come to Unit 9. When she did not respond, though, I assumed that she was African, because I knew that an African American would have yelled back. She appeared to be in her late twenties with very curly, short hair and no jewelry. Her clothes, far too large, hung on her body. She started crying. With each hateful word from Luce, she cowered, shrinking into herself.

  Luce threatened her for being “out of bounds,” but never once asked why she had been standing in the hall. He railed about “the stupid Africans” and how they could not speak English and could not read. “You look like a fucking wet monkey,” he yelled. “That’s my new name for you, Wet Monkey.”

  I gasped. He turned to me and told me not to utter a word. By now he had worked himself into a total rage.

  The African woman was wailing. Her body was shaking so hard that I thought she would crack. I put my arms around her to get her to stop. She began to stutter, trying to beg Luce not to lock her up. She said she was sorry and that she should have known. “Please, please, sir, oh kind sir, don’t put me in the hole.”

  Luce was loving it, loving her distress so much that his bad eye started twitching and swiveling around in its socket. Then he smiled and said, “You are both stupid bitches.”

 
; The other woman started crying all over again and within thirty seconds had completely fallen apart.

  Then someone from outside the window, a prisoner who had apparently been watching the whole dreadful scene, blurted out for all of us to hear, “That wall-eyed motherfucker! Look at that shit!”

  Luce jumped up and ran out of the office in pursuit of her, but the woman who had vilified him was long gone.

  I put my arm around the hysterical woman and whispered to her, “Stop crying, please stop, nothing is going to happen. He can’t really hurt you.”

  He walked back in and said, “I heard that. I can hurt you. I can hurt you both.”

  And then a look of rage passed between Luce and me. I held his gaze, and he looked away first, his eye twitching.

  “What’s your name?” he barked at me.

  I spelled it out for him as slowly as I could.

  He said, “Both of you, get out. Next time I will deal with you.”

  I grabbed the woman and we walked back to the hallway and then outside into the rain. She went to the barrack unit on one side and I returned to my own unit, where, needless to say, I remained for the next several years. The gratuitous pleasure that Luce had taken in witnessing a prisoner’s profound agony astonishes me even now.

  About three weeks later, I encountered Luce in the mess hall, surrounded by his fellow officers. He said, as sweet as pie, “Ms. Rosenberg, next time you have to be out of bounds, make sure you have permission.” I ran into the African woman several times after that. Her name was Mae. She thanked me every time she saw me.

  After that incident, I began to think about my friend Donna Nelson, from the D.C. jail. I kept cycling back to when I had been in the D.C. jail. Much of Danbury reminded me of it and it made me think of the many women I had met there, many who were now at Danbury. I recalled how Donna had been my first real friend inside prison; I thought of her big heart. I envisioned her big gap-toothed smile, her constant disrespect for authority, and her fearlessness. I remembered that first orange she had thrown into my cell, which had broken the police rhetoric about us.