An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  I thought that she would escape the plague of AIDS, that somehow she would slide through it, or around it, or miss it altogether. But she was dead at thirty-four. For a long time Donna’s spirit was my guide, and even in death she helped me navigate the hateful circumstances that surrounded me and all of us in that prison.

  After my arrival at Danbury, I talked incessantly to women whose sentences varied greatly in length. I was obsessed with the lifers, and had been since my first days in prison. I had met a few lifers over the years, and had done time with women who were waiting to go to death row, but I had never lived with so many women who had life sentences. I simply could not fathom the idea that all these women would live out their lives in prison and die on a prison ward. I knew that in a certain way I had a life sentence, with a fifty-eight-year sentence and a minimum of twenty years. But it wasn’t life. Though it seemed unlikely, I did have an outside chance of parole. I could not allow myself to think that I would die in jail. Dying in jail seemed the hardest thing of all.

  The punishment of a life sentence for the many women I had met was disproportionate to their crimes. My experience with drugs had been primarily as a medical problem, in a community where addiction was understood as a disease and people sold drugs to support a habit. But that was old history from the 1970s, and it no longer fit the current conditions. In the 1990s, the war on drugs had become a war on women in the drug trade: the wives and girlfriends of drug dealers, the drug runners—called mules—and drug users. These were the women who were, and still are, doing life at Danbury. For the most part, these lifers are first-time, nonviolent offenders whose convictions are related to drug conspiracies. The unfairness of their sentences is compounded by the fact that, although most drug users in America are male and white, the majority of those who are behind bars for drug-related offenses are black or Latina women.

  Though some women in prison are fortunate enough to have family members who remain unscathed by the criminal prosecution—a loved one who can hold some semblance of family life together—many have no one to care for their children. Without family at home, these women lose their children to the state. In a matter of minutes, a woman’s life is over and done with. Gone. Only prison time lies ahead, often more time than there are years left to live.

  The lengthy sentences and the often great distances that family members or friends must travel to visit prisoners make it nearly impossible for a woman to maintain ties with the outside world. When there is little hope of release, women prisoners quickly lose touch with those that they leave behind. Under the current sentencing laws, if you are thirty-five years old and you get a forty-five-year sentence, you must do at least forty years, which means you can walk out free and clear at age seventy-five. If you have a natural life sentence, you never walk out; you die in the women’s prison hospital center at Carswell Air Force Base in Texas.

  The severity of punishments in drug-related cases is intended to be coercive. Women targeted by drug agents are pressured into becoming snitches; the agents typically offer sentence reductions in exchange for information. Prisoners who have no information to trade are stuck with lengthy sentences. And those who do have vital information, and who cave in to the pressure to implicate others, essentially become government property. They have been bought by the government and can and will be used again and again. It is the government that holds their fate in its hands; it is the government that must be obeyed. Other prisoners are seen as a threat. Thus, building unity among women prisoners becomes close to impossible. The trading of information in prison may not rise to the level of informant trial testimony, where facts have to be verified, but prison informants can and do prevent women prisoners from exercising collective power over the difficult conditions of their lives.

  The Bureau of Prisons plays an active role in this coercion. The BOP claims that it is neutral and only carries out the directives of the courts, that it is involved only in custody, not in the terms of punishment. But this is not so. No longer is prison itself sufficient punishment. No longer is the loss of freedom enough. Now the purpose of imprisonment is to ensure total “cooperation,” total subservience.

  Most people who get arrested do not think that they will ever wind up giving information to the government. But the threats of lengthy sentences begin before an indictment and continue several years after conviction. Before the implementation of mandatory minimum sentences, prisoners had the right to request a sentence reduction: the Rule 35 motion I had brought in Tucson and had failed to get granted. There were various grounds on which one could bring this motion, including family hardship. If a prisoner could demonstrate to a judge that her imprisonment was causing her family undue suffering, the judge could reduce the sentence.

  Though not common, sentence reductions under Rule 35 gave prisoners hope, a chance for a break in the unrelenting prison time.

  In 1987, many of the sentencing laws were changed and a Rule 35 motion was one of them. Now it can only be brought to a judge by the prosecution. The rule has been transformed into a government tool whereby compliance is the only grounds for sentence reduction. The motion has been reduced to a one-page list of categories with a box for a check mark next to each. Under the first category, “debriefing” (meaning an interview with the FBI giving information about the crime), are four subcategories: debriefing on own role; debriefing on other principals; debriefing on general activities of the conspiracy; debriefing on criminal acts. The sentence reduction depends on how many boxes contain check marks.

  In the years during which I was in Marianna, I witnessed the process of breaking women prisoners. The women’s unit in which I was housed is unique in the federal prison system as the only super-maximum-security unit for women. Prisoners are sent there directly from sentencing proceedings, not because they are security threats and need more supervision (studies show that very few women require maximum security conditions), but rather to give them a taste of the way the rest of their lives will be lived unless they acquiesce to the government.

  I saw women with life sentences, from forty to one hundred years, pass through Shawnee’s five electronically controlled doors. As they lay in their cells, the impact of their new lives hit them. They soon called the special agents or prosecutors, or responded when law enforcement officials contacted them. Rule 35 motions were offered, prosecutorial powers were exercised, and the women walked out, transferred to easier prisons with ten, seven, or four years left to go, accompanied by promises of protection and even money.

  In Unit 1, where I lived at Danbury, I observed a woman for weeks before the government approached her. Her name was Belle and she was a forty-year-old African American woman with a life sentence for her involvement in a drug conspiracy. She was the mother of several children, teenage and younger. Before her arrest, Belle was the backbone of her family. She is a large, smiling, expansive woman whose eyes crinkle at the corners when she tells a story. The full life she once knew as a mother was gone. Though she tried to stay involved in the lives of her children, her family ties were unraveling with each passing month.

  Along with twelve coconspirators, Belle sold about a kilo of cocaine a week. They didn’t make millions of dollars; there were no murders or any bribes or threats to public officials (the Colombian cartel, they were not). They were local people involved in a small-time operation that was labeled “big-time” by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Several of those convicted in the case and sentenced to decades in prison had no knowledge of the overall conspiracy. They were selling cocaine on the side simply to make ends meet.

  When the DEA agents arrested Belle, they told her they would put her away forever. They told her that her best friend had already rolled over on her. They said several others were ready to roll, as well. They brought Belle’s teenage daughter in and told her that if her mother failed to rat on others, she would be wheeling her mother’s body out in a cheap pine box after she died in prison. “Debrief!” the agents screamed at Belle over and ov
er for months. Her options, they explained, were to live her entire life in prison or to cooperate—and the latter would mean at most five years in prison, three years with good conduct.

  Belle was the first to admit that selling cocaine was wrong. Like many other mothers who got caught up in the drug trade, Belle told herself she was selling cocaine to give her children a better life. Because of the difficulties she faced in providing for her family, she opted for existence in the underground economy. “It was an easy way out of a bad situation,” she said.

  It was later that her own addiction took hold. “I know that crack addiction destroys people, and I am glad it’s over,” she said, not to justify her actions, but to place them in context. Belle is one of the few convicts I have met who would admit to her crime.

  However, Belle refused to get past that first check mark on the Rule 35 motion. She felt that since she did the crime, she must take the weight. She refused to implicate anyone other than herself. She was four years into a life sentence when I met her. She did go back to the DEA agents and prosecutors to explain her own role in the conspiracy, but that was not enough for the U.S. attorney to recommend a sentence reduction. Again, they told her, “Give us what we want and you can walk out in eighteen months.”

  It is difficult to imagine how one might face such a choice: eighteen months versus life in prison. Belle chose not to talk, and she struggled with this decision every day. I saw it in her face when she thought no one was looking. When she went back to be debriefed on her own role, through mirrored glass she saw her children sitting on the other side, unaware of her in the next room. The children had grown beyond recognition. She told me that at that moment her beliefs were more deeply challenged than at any previous point in her life, and she wished that she could die. It is the foulest of bribes—your beliefs or your life—an unconscionable dilemma created by an all-powerful state.

  Soon, Belle would no longer be of any use to law enforcement. If she held out and resisted the pressure to become an informant, her options would close. Her punishment, the forfeiture of her freedom for the remainder of her life, so exceeded the crime that it is difficult to comprehend. I could comprehend it only when I considered the government’s desire to break the back of the drug trade—but I am angry that it tries to do this by targeting those who are the weakest, those who are the most vulnerable.

  Everything that I believed in the 1970s about the influx of drugs into poor black and Latino communities I saw even more clearly and more sharply in prison. The men who run the international drug cartels have the power and money to buy and bargain their way out of prison, often by snitching. When the most callous and cynical manipulations of sentence length are the main device the government employs in its war on drugs, a total corruption of the system prevails. That the government, through its law enforcement agents, can say to a woman, a mother, a person with hopes for a future, “Your life means little to us, and your freedom nothing at all,” it is a fundamental betrayal of human rights and one that degrades the life of every individual.

  This disregard for the value of life, and particularly nonwhite life, is part of the fabric of American social relations. This was confirmed for me again and again during my time at Danbury. I had to come to grips with it even while it broke my heart. I could not find peace and live with this.

  I found that the poem “Four Quartets” by T. S. Eliot helped me to think about the terrible quandary that Belle and others found themselves in:

  In order to arrive at what you do not know

  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

  In order to possess what you do not possess

  You must go by way of dispossession.

  In order to arrive at what you are not

  You must go through the way in which you are not.

  And what you do not know is the only thing you know

  And what you own is what you do not own.

  And where you are is where you are not.

  Chapter 16

  AIDS Epidemic

  AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS at Danbury, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, two years after the death of my father, eleven years into my incarceration, I fell in love with Frin Mullin, who had overlapped with me in Marianna for almost three years, but to whom I had barely spoken during that time. Frin, who had not liked me at first, but who was good friends with Silvia Baraldini and had a premonition that we would become lovers but never told me for years and years. Frin, the elusive, beautiful, disdainful “Brit” with all the dry wit, cynicism, and sophistication of the infamous drug dealer to the English counterculture that she had been, who sold drugs to prominent musical celebrities. Frin, who when we were in Marianna had avoided me like the plague until right before my father died, when she decided to tell me her story.

  She had been born to an Irish mother and an English father stationed in the colonial service in Uganda, was raised in India, sent to Catholic boarding school in Europe and then to school in London, and at last brought back to India in the late 1960s. Frin was one of the people in the 1960s who had trekked through India and the Himalayas, worshiped the god Shiva, followed the Bodhisattva, and lived on the beach in Goa. In the 1970s, she became a mother and a businesswoman. She did eighteen months in an Indian prison for selling drugs until her sister arrived and bribed the authorities to release her. Although I never was privy to the story of Frin’s drug dealings, I learned that she was enterprising and successful, with an exceptionally long run in the business until she got arrested in New York in 1982.

  She brokered a deal and got a ten-year sentence, but her young daughter needed her. And so she escaped by walking away from the federal prison camp for women in Alderson, West Virginia, in 1984. She lived on the run in Europe, with her daughter in tow, until someone recognized her and reported her whereabouts to the British government in 1990. Having shamed and angered the U.S. authorities, she was extradited quickly and deposited into maximum security in Marianna. She was moved to Danbury in 1994 and had been there a year before I arrived.

  Frin and I danced around our affair for months—yes, no, maybe, should we, could we, what if, what if not, who would be upset, who would not care. Our back and forth was in some ways irrelevant because the sheer energy that consumed us in the discussion was the very beginning of our loving. She finally made it happen, after we consulted the I Ching over and over, both of us being long-standing adherents to that ancient text, the Chinese Book of Changes, which melds thousands of years of Chinese philosophy and wisdom. I had first been exposed to the I Ching when I was in high school and later again when I was studying traditional Chinese medicine and the application of the five elements and yin and yang to the treatment of illness. Later, in prison, I used the I Ching as a form of meditation, as a way of reading text and using the text to bring a new perspective to whatever situation I was confronting. The Book of Changes is one of the world’s great books and to me was as important as the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran are to their adherents. It always helped me. So in the matter of loving Frin, when the I Ching kept advising yes, in multiple hexagrams with multiple interpretations, I took it seriously.

  I was in awe of the way I felt. I had often thought that I would not or could not love again, and so I felt lucky to have another chance. Without passion, it is most difficult to maintain hope and I did not want to become deaf to a joyful noise. The passion I felt for Frin gave me a reason to keep on going and her love gave me power. She gave me power to create in the midst of a destitute reality, power for my own soul, and power to love her back. Even if my joy was tinged with a feeling of guilt—I had made “doing time” a most serious way of living and to fall so completely in love seemed frivolous—but I couldn’t help it.

  Frin was an artist. She was a photographer, a writer, a chef, a conceptual artist, a woman of taste, and a woman who could fix things with her hands. She could craft and create; she could design and sew and make things grow. She worked in the education department in what we both thoug
ht was the funniest position possible: she was in charge of the pre-release program, the set of steps prisoners nearing the end of their sentences must go through so that they are “prepared to re-enter society.” Since Frin was a European who knew nothing about American benefits, the health care systems, social services, or employment and educational opportunities, having her in charge of pre-release was like having a blind person lead a mountain climbing expedition. But Danbury was like that, an alternately absurd and deadly place. In order to survive years of it, I had to understand both aspects. I already knew about the deadly part; Frin showed me the lunatic side, and lightened the atmosphere all around her.

  We read poetry together and her poetic imagination took us far and wide. She helped start a program called Poetry for Prison Walls, in which she and others selected several poems a week, graphically laid them out with bars superimposed over the text, printed them on bright-colored paper, and posted them (with approval, of course) all over the compound. Frin’s picks tended toward John Dunne, William Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Bishop, but she allowed others in the program to incorporate into the mix more contemporary poets, including poets of color. You could be using the toilet in the gym bathroom or walking across the yard and you would run across June Jordan, Maya Angelou, Pablo Neruda, Roque Dalton, Adrienne Rich, and on and on.

  One day someone got the idea of putting up Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” (his seminal poem about his experience in prison) in the center of the education building bulletin board in large-size type. The head of the education department, Ms. Cotter, could not help but notice it, although she did not read it until it had been up for a week.