We climbed the stairs to the second floor, where a conference room doubled as a parole hearing room. It felt exotic and strange to be sitting with Mary in an open room with no police anywhere in sight. We were almost touching and that seemed odd, as well. Our prior meetings had been spent sitting face-to-face with a table between us. As we sat side by side, I could feel her nervous energy. We waited very quietly for an official to come talk to us. After what seemed like a very long time, the door opened and a tall, African American man gestured us in. He was Mr. Bell, one of the traveling parole examiners and the same one who had interviewed Silvia.
Mr. Bell sat down and ruffled through some papers and then reached across the desk between us to turn on a small tape recorder. He asked me for my statement. I had a prepared one that I half read and half said. I outlined my criminal acts and what I felt about them then and now. I talked about the political ethos of the 1960s and how it had led me and my associates into thinking our activities were acceptable. I detailed how sorry I felt now, how I accepted responsibility for my past actions, and how I would never commit any crimes again. I tried to put my life within the context of the historical period when many Americans thought they could change the world and end war and racism and poverty. I tried to distinguish between my core values and my embrace of the use of political violence. I stated that I now rejected the use of violence. I meant all that I said.
The examiner then asked me whether I was responsible for several deaths that had occurred during the Brink’s robbery in 1981. I told him no. He asked whether I knew where Joanne Chesimard was, and if I could tell him how she had escaped from her New Jersey prison. Again, I told him no. He also asked me if I knew Dr. Mutulu Shakur. “Yes,” I said. Mary answered him and said that there was no preponderance of evidence to suggest my actual involvement in the specific crimes that he was talking about. She pointed out that the government had dismissed the Brink’s conspiracy charges against me eleven years earlier. With each passing second the feelings of fear, anger, and sorrow all rose inside me until I felt like I would burst out of my skin. Then Mr. Bell abruptly ended the hearing by telling us to step outside.
A CO ushered us into a small office nearby and told us to sit down. I stared out the window at the leaves hanging in front of the window. Mary was staring, too. We were silent as we replayed in our minds the entire hearing. After ten minutes and then twenty and then thirty, we began to pace the room and Mary began to get angry. She stepped out of the room to see what was happening. The door to the hearing room was ajar and Mary was surprised to see the examiner engrossed in conversation on the phone.
Forty-five minutes later, we were ushered back into the hearing room. I did not want to live through the next few moments; I wanted to have an out-of-body experience. Mary and I repeated the same ritual as we had earlier. We sat, Bell sat, and then he reached to turn on the tape recorder.
He began by telling me that he was going to have to hold me accountable for the three deaths in the Brink’s robbery and murder case. He said he didn’t doubt that I was a very different person now, but he reiterated that he was going to have to hold me accountable for the three deaths.
Mary turned absolutely white and I heard the air go out of her lungs. I heard the rustling of her clothes and I felt her gathering her energy to rebut. I knew I was not supposed to speak, although I wanted to start screaming at him.
Mary asked what was the evidence to show this. Bell responded that there was enough evidence from the Southern District to indict me and that all the federal parole commission needed to deny parole was an indictment. He pointed out that they have broad latitude in determining no release on parole. Mary shot back that there wasn’t enough evidence for a trial and that the charges had been dismissed. She asked how could they hold someone without trial. Her voice was steely and she was annunciating into the tape recorder.
Bell replied that all they needed to determine was whether there was a preponderance of evidence and since there was an indictment, he said there was more than a preponderance of evidence. He went on to say that the Brink’s robbery was an attack on the community and if they released me on parole, it would reduce the seriousness of the crime, and they could not do that.
Mary interrupted him and pointed out that Tim Blunk, my codefendant, was out on parole and that he had the exact same conviction. Bell replied that Tim wasn’t indicted in the Southern District. He obviously knew all the details of my case. He acknowledged that this wasn’t right or fair and he advised us to appeal this decision. He finished by looking directly at me for the first time since this interchange had started. He told me he was sorry but he was recommending a fifteen-year set-off point. Then he ended the hearing, stood up and turned off the tape recorder.
We moved into the hall and just stood there. Mary was furious and anguished at the same time. Even though we both had expected this outcome, it was another thing to actually experience it. I thought, That man just took fifteen years of my life using less energy than it took to break a pencil. I felt as if I had just been thrown against a brick wall and every bone was shattered.
Mary said, “We’ll appeal; he said it wasn’t fair. He was on the phone for a long time. We’ll appeal.” Mary went home and I had to return to my unit and my job and my prison life. I had to act as though another fifteen years was water off my back. I could not crumple under the weight of another fifteen years, but I was devastated.
I was an old hand at maintaining my composure and not showing anything to the corrections officers who surrounded me. The sadistic ones took glee in the setbacks that many of us faced. I was always saddened by the gratuitous mental brutality that guards unleashed at us. They knew the outcome of the hearing before I had said good-bye to Mary. But I was determined to remain calm and cool regardless of what I felt inside. I also believed that it was important to be strong for the people on the outside. I didn’t want them to be devastated. My greatest fear was that my mother would die before I got out of prison. Now that I had gotten the worst decision that I possibly could have gotten, I was in a struggle with myself not to become immobilized by fear.
I knew that I would have to do two totally opposite things at the same time in order to live: I would have to detach from my fears and desires and many of my own human needs. At the same time, I would have to keep struggling to be free. I would have to come to terms with the fact that no matter how sorry I was about past events it would never matter to the parole board. It was not about remorse. Telling the commission that I knew that I had been wrong would have no impact whatsoever. The option of saying that I had lost my mind for a decade between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine was not something I believed, and it would not have made any difference if I did.
I knew I had to find a way to persevere. The only good I could find in my recent parole denial was that preparing to go before the board had forced me to journey inward to my core as a human being more deeply than I ever had before. I had found my core self, I had looked at it and held it up to the light in a most serious way. While my soul was tarnished and frayed, I felt it to be essentially good. I had been tested. My principles had not cracked. To this extent, I felt liberated, which given everything that had happened was totally unexpected.
I went back to work. One day several weeks later it was late morning, hot for the season, and the nine o’clock work break was over. The last stragglers were stamping out their cigarettes and returning to their jobs. Lieutenants were all milling about in front of their stations, sporadically yelling at people to clear the compound. Classes had started again and I was working in the adult education program one day a week. All the prisoners who worked there were sitting at their workstations killing time until classes began later in the day. I was reading a magazine when the whistle blew. We all looked at one another.
The whistle meant lockdown, no movement, repeated counts, and a host of other possibilities. A whistle could mean an escape, a shakedown, or a national emergency. I always hoped when the
whistle blew that it was an escape. We all rushed to the windows to look out on the compound. We saw several women running to get back inside and out of the open. Once they disappeared, the whole compound was empty and strangely quiet. Out of nowhere, we heard boots slapping on concrete. A team of about fifteen men came out of the control gate at the front entrance of the prison, marching and chanting in step. In helmets and black jumpsuits, carrying plastic shields and clubs, they broke rank and swarmed toward one of the long-term housing units. This was no usual shakedown where a small number of officers would go room to room. This was a bust of some kind because of the sheer number and power that was displayed. As the officers entered the building, the captain, the warden, the two associate wardens, and a slew of other officials converged at the front of the unit. All the women who were in the unit were brought out one by one. I hoped that they all had permission to be there. They were in varying states of undress. They had been sleeping, or taking a shower, or watching TV, or working. They were in their bathrobes or pajamas or sweatsuits.
Each woman was put up against the wall, spread-eagled, and pat-searched. We could see all the interchanges between the cops and the women. Standing in her nightgown and curlers, Phyllis didn’t want to be searched by a man and refused to spread. As my friend Lisa and I watched a lieutenant push Phyllis against the wall, Lisa said, “That bastard! You know Phyllis is telling him, ‘I could be your mama. Would you do this to her?’ “ He was rougher than he needed to be. Phyllis was fifty-eight years old and had severe lung problems. As the other women were searched, she was led off to the side of the building to stand at attention.
I asked Lisa, “What is this? Why the SWAT team? You live in that unit—what’s going on?”
She looked at me with a raised eyebrow as though to say, “You can’t be that stupid.” But she did not answer me.
Our boss, Mr. K., one of the few educational officers who had a sense of humor, came into the room and yelled, “Get away from the window, and move to the hall—we’re having a count!”
Everybody started in all at once: “What is this shit?” “Why is the warden there?” “We just had a shakedown.” And on and on and on.
By the time the education crew was counted and we were allowed back into our area, all the women in the besieged unit had been put up against the wall. The SWAT team was running in and out of the building. I kept trying to find someone who could tell me what they were searching for. Was it drugs, knives, perfume, food? Finally, Lisa turned to me and said, “Susan, you are so out of it.” Then one of the lieutenants strutted out of the building and whispered to all “the suits” who were standing around. The warden shook her head, clearly angry, as were several other staff members. Then another lieutenant emerged from the building gingerly holding a large plastic bag with his fingertips. Everyone in our room moaned. I could not see what was in the bag. The officer walked right over to the warden, opened the bag, and with his plastic-gloved hand took out a cylindrical object and started waving it around.
Lisa started laughing and finally blurted out, “They got it. It’s the dildo factory. They busted it.”
“The dildo factory?” I couldn’t believe it. “They brought in the SWAT team for that?”
“Hey, I didn’t know they were selling them,” someone else said. “If I had, I’d have bought one.”
Then several other helmeted COs came out all holding plastic bags. The women at the side of the building were all laughing. Everyone fell out, except the warden. They shook down that unit from one end to the other. We were all locked down for four hours while they did it. Nobody worked, nobody moved. Even the kitchen ceased to function. We knew that we would be punished for this.
“What are they made of?” Elsa asked.
“Plastic,” someone answered. “Wow, check it out, they’re different colors.”
“What were they going for?” “Thirty bucks a piece.”
It seemed that almost everyone knew something about this business. I dragged Lisa off to a corner of the room. “Okay, tell me,” I said, laughing.
“It was a UNICOR thing, a sophisticated operation to be sure,” she said with a grin, referring to the federal government work program in which many Danbury inmates were employed. “Between the plastic cables for the wire mounts—you know, the ones the Army contracts—and the molding shop, someone collected all the scrap plastic, snuck it out of that shop, and got it into the molding shop, where it was poured into those cylinders. Then they moved it to the paint shop, where someone else painted it according to the order. I can only assume they got them out of the factory and through the security points one at a time, presumably hidden inside someone.”
It turned out that a prisoner in the gym had been caught with one of the dildos while showing it to another prisoner in the bathroom. Both prisoners had been taken immediately to segregation, where one of the SIS lieutenants had threatened them with a new charge of stealing government property. One of the women cried, “It isn’t mine! I just borrowed it.” The other whispered, “It’s from the factory.” These two women were left in the hole while a full-scale investigation began. The work supervisors at UNICOR were taken to task for a failure to police the prisoners and threatened with “days on the street” disciplinary charges. This meant days without pay and a warning, where three warnings resulted in termination of employment. Allowing the smuggling of plastic out of the prison factory was a serious charge, especially plastic that belonged to the program manufacturing U.S. Army radio mounts and air force cables. One factory supervisor turned in a list of prison workers he assumed to be “butches” with a use for dildos. They investigated anyone who had received over thirty dollars on their books from an outside source—the form of payment for services or goods inside.
And so a virulent and vicious round of attacks against lesbians began. In the end, the charges included possessing contraband, stealing government property, lying to an officer, possessing government property, and of course engaging in sexual misconduct. Despite the fact that no one was ever caught making the dildos or using them, thousands of hours of staff time were expended on the incident, hundreds of files created, and numerous women placed in segregation. The internal name of the security investigation was BTB—some said it stood for “bust the bitches” and others said it meant “bust the butches.” Like the original incident, it was so emblematic of the institutional cruelty and contempt that the BOP has for women. This campaign was ugly and went on for months and months. It made doing time even harder.
Chapter 18
Political Prisoners
THE YEAR HAD been filled with so many profound emotions, problems, and changes. I had carried my shattered heart with me every day, and at times it made the pain of living beyond relief. I had allowed my broken heart to define my consciousness, reducing myself to only wounding sadness. I had been unable or unwilling to give up my grief. It had become my protection from my loneliness. But because I had had a relationship in which I had loved and been loved, I now had the courage to examine my past. As long as I did not bring bitterness or blame into this process, then it would be strengthening. Loving Frin had helped me find the humor and the light in myself, and that humor replaced the old ground that was crumbling and giving way to a new ground to stand on.
Yet my desires had overwhelmed me, and that fed my obsession with grief. The two poles of my life I defined as “self” and “service to others” had swung too far toward the self. I resolved to balance the two poles, to make amends not only in the abstract, but also in the present.
I decided that I would write poetry and that I would serve people. I would engage in the business of living in the prison community. But first, I would write poetry. The first poem that I labored over and finally liked was this one:
Distant Milford saw breathless New England fall
A valley green turned to a dazzling array of variation.
Red leaf, gold, orange, and maroon became a yellow wood.
Whipped by winds ma
de deathly stark.
It was only the natural order of things.
Then winter arrived expectant with dread; lightning did not strike the tree.
The ancient oak, upper branches bent by time, lost nothing of its grandeur.
Surely the season would stand still, and dew turned to crystalline droplets
crunched under thick-soled boots. But the earth failed to shatter; everything kept on,
nothing dramatic from one day to the next.
The only thing cleaved was my soul.
This altered state has clothed me with
your absence.
My best, most intimate friend through which
I see the seasons.
Your absence is my coat of leaves that I dream of
falling into and dying while wrapped in,
surrounded by your scent, your laughter, your very self.
A natural progression of the natural order.
I began to observe things again. If I was going to fully live in the prison community and live successfully, then I needed to be a participant again. What I saw was an ever-worsening set of conditions. Prison life was becoming terribly bleak, with more and more regulations, an increased institutionalization of control, and less and less solidarity. The idea of solidarity among the prisoners seemed almost nonexistent. There were moments and smatterings of hope and resistance—for example, the constant pat-searching by male guards had been temporarily halted because a number of women had filed grievances against the administration—but overall, life was a repetitive round of work, control, television, people wasting time by screwing around, and then finally “scamming.” Unfortunately, people reverted to behavior that they knew from the street because there were no programs—no schools, no sports, no interventions to provide alternatives. There was only punishment for infractions.
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