An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  Shirley Cloyes visited as frequently as her schedule allowed. Shirley was the person who had always had a plan; she led the formation of the committee that had been organized to defend me at my parole hearing. Shirley was deeply committed to social justice and to a radical transformation of the prison system. She had not been in the same part of the left as I had, but she was politically progressive and understood why I had made the choices I had made. We became friends through the prison walls. Over the years she left publishing and became a human rights activist, a writer, and a highly skilled congressional lobbyist who had built strong ties to people with political power on both sides of the aisle.

  Shirley strongly believed in working behind the scenes. She did not confuse publicity with actual organizing or strategy. I loved her visits, because the scope of our conversations always took me out of the prison, and I felt that her political connections, immediacy, and willpower would energize everyone else’s efforts to obtain my release. She had this amazing high-speed energy that she slung over me like a blanket in the visiting room. I trusted her.

  Howard Gutman wanted to go to court in the Southern District in front of Judge Haight, the original judge, in whose court the Brink’s conspiracy charges were assigned, and ask him to rule that the Southern District of New York could not instruct the U.S. Parole Commission to use the Brink’s case against me in obtaining parole.

  This unique strategy was a long shot because it meant that we were asking a judge to step beyond his normal procedural boundary and curtail the prosecution’s power. More than anything else, I thought that it was a way to build support for me and to expose the fact that the Parole Commission had used its discretionary power based on prosecutorial positions, not on the specifics of my case and my conduct. After a case has gone on for years and years, it is difficult to sustain activity around it. Languishing either in court or in prison is in effect a delay of justice, and there is great truth to Dr. Martin Luther King’s statement that “justice delayed is justice denied.” The prosecution has the power and the resources of the state behind it and can almost always outlast and outspend the individual. Even people who love you and support you cannot sustain their support through years of defeat or inactivity. And so both the people who had been on my side from the beginning and those who were new brought light and movement right through the prison walls. It helped me to sustain my resistance.

  Howard filed a motion, got oral arguments scheduled on the motion, and then went to court to argue it. I only heard about it afterward. My mother and people who were working in my defense went to court to support the effort. Howard’s strategy was to push the sitting judge, Judge Haight, by using the original judge, Judge Lacey’s decision to drop the case against me as a way to limit and put a check on the power of the prosecution in the parole process. It was an attempt to push the very boundaries of jurisdiction and it was a strategy that recognized that the court of public opinion was an important place to court favor in order to one day be in a position to win. This was because even if the court didn’t have jurisdiction over the implementation of the decision to have a federal judge on record saying that the BOP was wrong to use charges that had been dropped as the reason for denial of parole, it would be a part of the record on my side. The prosecution took it for granted that they would win this new motion and therefore did not really address the merits of our argument. No one knew how long it would take for Judge Haight to write a decision.

  When he did rule several weeks later, it was a mixed decision, a common result within the legal system. Judge Haight agreed that it was unfair for the prosecution to direct the parole board to use the same case against me in which he himself had declared nolle prosequi (meaning he would not pursue it further) fifteen years earlier. He said it was not “decent,” but he also said that it was beyond his jurisdiction and he could not legally order the Southern District of New York not to actively oppose me and instruct the Parole Commission to use the Brink’s case against me. Even so, because the language in the decision was a strong rebuke against the government’s abuse of its power resulting in my continued incarceration, my side was able to use the decision on my behalf. It was the first crack in the government’s use of the Brink’s case against me.

  But I had run out of legal options. Howard wanted to appeal the ruling, but to whom could we appeal? I felt we had reached the bottom of the legal process.

  Chapter 19

  Cancer

  SPRING CAME EARLY in March of 2000. Sitting outside the housing unit before the bustle of women left for work and feeling the warmth of the first rays of spring was one of those fleeting pleasures that made me happy to still be alive. The work bell would ring and then hundreds of women would stream out of their units, all moving in the same direction toward the back of the main buildings leading to a gate that opened into the factory. The only way you could get out of work was to be placed on the “callout,” a list that detailed where everyone was supposed to be while not at work. Medical callouts, educational callouts, and recreational or legal callouts were the only things that could get you out of work. That day I was on the medical callout list.

  Once a month, a mammogram technician would come to the prison to see as many women as she could fit into a day interrupted by meals, counts, and other routine disruptions of orderly institutional life. With a population of more than seventeen hundred women, whose median age was thirty-seven, the callout list for mammography was never ending. The room that held the mammography machine doubled as the visiting eye doctor’s exam room. Occasionally, there would be a scheduling mistake and both the mammogram technician and the eye doctor would arrive on the same day.

  That morning I was getting a mammogram. There were five of us waiting for the technician and ten waiting for the eye doctor. The technician and the doctor were taking turns seeing patients. There were empty rooms nearby and I kept wondering why they just didn’t move the eye doctor into one of them.

  Whenever I was having a medical test or exam, I tried to put the practitioner at ease. I went out of my way to be friendly and compliant. I kept in mind that the practitioner was in an unfamiliar environment, and I preferred to make it easy for him or her to do the job well. The mammography technician was a woman I had seen before. She was from the Danbury Hospital’s radiology department and she always wore a flowered smock and pink cancer-awareness ribbons from head to toe. She took the pictures, stored them, and carried them back to the hospital, where a radiologist read them. She knew that our care was substandard, telling me that the mammography machine was outdated and that it was terrible how “we girls” were treated.

  A week later I was standing in the yard, about to walk to work, when a female officer named Ms. Karel, from the security detail, walked up to me and said, “Rosenberg, come with me.”

  “Why?” I asked, not wanting to go anywhere with her.

  She moved to take my arm and I stepped back.

  “Where?” I asked.

  She nodded toward the building that housed receiving and discharge (R&D) and said in a lowered voice, “Don’t give me a hard time. I told them you would come with me.”

  I turned to a fellow prisoner and said, “Tell Jane that I am being taken to R and D.”

  I followed Ms. Karel through the labyrinth of normally out-of-bounds doors into the empty dressing room. No one was there except us. She threw me a jumpsuit and then a pair of laceless blue canvas boat shoes and said, “Strip.”

  “Can we move to the back, away from the front door?” I didn’t want to be naked if someone else came into the room.

  Ms. Karel nodded affirmatively and we went into the back area, where a curtain divided the space. She had me strip completely, bend over, and then squat and cough. She inspected my ears, nose, and throat. I put on the jumpsuit. “Where are we going?” I asked again.

  “The hospital.”

  “Oh no. Why are we going there?” “Don’t have any idea,” she said.

  I thought that she was lyin
g and just refusing to tell me. “I want to see a lieutenant,” I said.

  She laughed and said I would see one shortly. She told me we were going to “cuff up” and wanted to know if I would comply. I stretched out my clasped hands in answer. She cuffed me, chained my legs, and ran a chain around my waist and between my legs and hands. I was trussed. As we stepped outside the front door and into the parking lot, I surveyed the scene awaiting me. There were six cars, a van, a row of shotguns, and all of it was for me. I looked at them and thought, When will this end? They pushed me into the van and off it roared. As we drove down the hill to Route 37, I looked out the window and saw a helicopter above us. I was livid. It seemed that moving me was just an excuse for them to practice their high-tech security routine and show all their guns. I was tired of having my very being used as a justification for repression. We drove the brief distance between the prison and the hospital, the same hospital where my father had died seven years ago.

  We drove into the delivery area at the back entrance. The COs picked me up and sat me in a waiting wheelchair, covered me up to my neck with a blanket, and wheeled me into the hospital. Two of them, brandishing rifles, led the two pushing me, who in turn were followed by more rifle-toting officers. The whole route along which I was taken to the eighth-floor radiology department was locked down. Patients and staff had been told to remain behind closed doors until the coast was clear.

  It was only in radiology that I learned the reason for this hospital visit. My mammogram was suspicious, and a technician was going to take more pictures. As Ms. Karel uncuffed me, the technician shook from anxiety. She told the lieutenant to keep the guns out of the room. As soon as the film was out of the machine, I was cuffed again. An hour later a doctor came in carrying a clipboard. He didn’t look happy. He introduced himself and without further ado said, “We want to do a biopsy on your right breast.” He pulled out an X-ray and showed me the area that he wanted to probe.

  “Now? You want to do a biopsy today?” I said.

  “Well, no, but since you are here …”

  I don’t know why I complied. Maybe it was because I had been so accommodating already, or because I was scared or just exhausted. With my wrists still cuffed, I signed the permission forms.

  Everything else happened in rapid-fire fashion. The radiology technician took measurements and inserted a needle, and then the COs wheeled me into a surgical room. They administered twilight anesthesia, and I vaguely remember the surgeon having a loud exchange with the lieutenant in charge, demanding that he uncuff my right hand, which had been cuffed to the side of the bed. I also remember that there was some kind of altercation about the rifles in the operating room. I woke up and asked when they would start, and they told me they were almost finished. I lay on a gurney for an hour, and by four o’clock that afternoon I was back in my prison cell.

  I had been an HIV/AIDS advocate for years, and so I knew the procedures and schedules that the medical system followed in patient treatment and denial of treatment. I knew the medical staff at Danbury, from the administrator in charge of medical services to the head doctor to the rotating physicians’ assistants. After my biopsy, no one from the medical department called me in for five days nor did my name appear on the medical callout list. I finally went to the medical department and walked into the director’s office. The director was on the phone, but when he saw me he whispered into the receiver, “I’ll call you back.” I could see over his shoulders, past his big desk and through the window, a sharp image of hundreds of uniformed women standing around waiting for work call. It was a familiar image, but I had never seen it from a second story. I thought, Remember this, remember this view because it looks like every prison work camp all over the world in the twentieth century.

  I looked back at the director, and his eyes were like little black holes that ended in a pinprick. He was sweating and his thinning hair was plastered across the dome of his forehead. I stood there. “Yes, ah, well, ah, yes, Susan, yes, you well, you have breast cancer, and it’s lobular, and we are sending you to the Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, for a double mastectomy.”

  He didn’t say “Sit down,” or “I am sorry to tell you this,” or “Can I get you some water?” or “Do you want to make a phone call?” No, his pronouncement was the sum total of his words to me. Did I expect kindness or sympathy? No, not really. I had seen him display just such a cavalier attitude before with other prisoners. But, nevertheless, his complete lack of compassion jolted me.

  “Admirable bedside manner, Doc,” I retorted. My heart was pounding, but I kept my composure. “I want to see the pathology report, and I want a second opinion,” I managed to demand.

  “Yes, by all means, we will get you the path report,” the director said.

  “I want to see it now, and I want a copy to show my lawyer. I am sure I have a right to see it.”

  But I didn’t see it that day, or the next, or the next. I kept going back to the director’s office, and he kept lying to me. I knew that the administration was simply planning to ship me to Texas, where I would never be able to call anyone, and that I would not get back to Danbury for months and months, if ever. I told the director that if they sent me to Texas, I would refuse medical treatment and so it would be a waste of money. He said the matter was out of his hands.

  On the fourth day, by which time I was running ragged, the director was not in his office; a visiting doctor was there instead. I very calmly told this doctor that I was supposed to pick up my pathology report and asked her to look for my file. She said of course, found my file on the pile, photocopied the report, and handed it to me. I went to the pay phone in my unit and called my friend Barbara Zeller, a doctor. I read her the report. It was a single piece of paper that said I had “lobular carcinoma in situ” and that the recommended treatment was mastectomy. And that was it.

  Barbara said that she would investigate this and call Mary, Shirley, and my mother. When I called the next day, Barbara said, “Susan, what the director told you is not reflected in this pathology report. If the path report is right, you don’t have breast cancer at all.”

  I was thrilled, yet also stunned. “What do I have?”

  “It’s a genetic marker that indicates a higher risk or maybe a predisposition, but it certainly isn’t cancer.” I could hear the relief in Barbara’s voice.

  “So why are they saying I need a mastectomy?” Barbara didn’t know.

  I didn’t know what the whole process—from the unannounced biopsy to the director’s delays—was about. But I knew that Mary and Shirley would try to prevent my transfer to Texas. They got New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler to write to the prison officials, asking them to halt the transfer and allow a second opinion. Several days later, I was called to the medical department, where a surgeon from the Yale School of Medicine was sitting and reading my file. He confirmed what Barbara had said on the phone. He said that he would recommend “watchful waiting” as the least-invasive treatment, but that there was a drug, tamoxifen, that had proved useful as a preventive. Only in extreme circumstances would a double or single mastectomy be called for. I thanked him, said that I would choose waiting as my treatment option, and danced out of the office.

  No one in the Bureau of Prisons or the medical department ever explained the misdiagnosis and miscommunication, nor did the director apologize. I knew that if it hadn’t been for those on the outside who loved and cared for me—and whom I had come to think of as my “citizens’ committee”—I would have been immersed in “diesel therapy,” the BOP’s favorite form of neglect. And my body might have been butchered.

  I went back to teaching to regain my equilibrium. Having left the chapel, I had taken over Silvia Baraldini’s job in the education department after she was transferred to Italy. I was now teaching African American history and HIV/AIDS prevention as my prison job. It was difficult and challenging, but I was having more fun teaching than I’d had in a long time. Also, I had finished the graduate
program at Antioch and gotten my master’s degree and was now writing stories and revising a screenplay.

  I had not wanted to teach African American history because I felt that as a white person it was an overstepping of my role, even if I was a committed anti-racist. I had grown up in a time when black people fought to teach and take control of the interpretation of their own history. But after much back and forth, I was convinced that it was more important to share what knowledge I could than to let the course die. My solution to my conflict over my role was to build a small group of coteachers who could then make the course theirs. I worked with Kemba and Jackie to build upon Silvia’s curriculum and update it.