An American Radical Read online

  The man looked at him a moment before screaming back, “Fuck you! You go out there, you fat fuck.” The chain of command instantly broke. This only incited the prisoners to yell even louder. Now everyone was standing up and almost chanting, “Go, man, go!”

  The plane taxied to a stop and the marshals worked to retake control. Stun guns and batons came out. There was frantic running in and out of the cockpit, the copilot finally emerging with a pistol in his hand. The prisoners got quiet and sat back down. While the plane was still pulling into the gate, the marshals were giving each other orders to search the plane and all of us. As soon as the plane stopped, they were on the ground handing off the prisoners one at a time, shaking them down, and putting them on the buses.

  The sirens outside the plane began to blast. Alarms were going off everywhere. Paperclip had vanished. A team from the Federal Bureau of Prisons came out to meet us in full riot gear, loaded, vested, and now reorganized for a hunt. The buses drove off as soon as they filled up.

  I remained on the plane, watching it all happen, until they transferred me to a van that was serving as the communications post for the search. I sat in that van on the runway for hours and listened to all the radio communications, first from airport security, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the U.S. marshals, the Indiana State Police, the Indianapolis police, and finally from the FBI. After the first hour, two Jeeps drove up. A team of marshals emerged from the first Jeep holding a pair of handcuffs and a torn BOP uniform shirt. One held part of the plastic frame from a pair of standard BOP-issue eyeglasses. Out of the second Jeep came three men wearing FBI windbreakers. They were the forensics team. They took the items and drove off. While I watched, I kept thinking I would see bloodhounds. I had visions of Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier, in the classic movie The Defiant Ones, dragging themselves through the swamps with the dogs at their backs. But in the midst of all this manpower and activity, it took many hours before the lieutenant manning the radios realized that they had forgotten the canine unit. By then, Paperclip was long gone.

  The next day, I was taken on a small jet to my newest point of entry into the system. The Men’s Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Arizona, had transformed a portion of its segregation unit into a detention center for women. There were over a thousand men housed there and only three women. I arrived in the middle of the night. I was bundled off the plane and into a waiting van, accompanied by dozens of cars with agents of all types. When we arrived at the entrance to the prison, there was a line of correctional officers standing at the front gate. Every one of them was armed. I was rushed past them and into the prison, behind the walls. It was now early morning and I knew that there were many more staff people than there would usually be at that hour. I hoped that they were not all there to receive me, but they were. Even still, no one made visual or verbal contact with me. I was “the package” and I was being “delivered.” Even though I was surrounded by officers inside the prison building, which itself lay behind two barbed-wire fences, I was still not in a secure enough setting for them. I was still in my street clothes—a pair of jeans, leather shoes, and a purple long-sleeved shirt with a suit jacket over it. I was happy to be dressed in those clothes; they were mine and they fit, and although I was surrounded by people foreign to me and shackled to the hilt, I still felt familiar to myself. Still, I knew that the people around me would not be satisfied until I was in a jumpsuit and locked behind a foot-thick steel door.

  I was escorted into a large room that looked like a storage room, but it was devoid of any equipment or supplies. The officers locked the door and left me standing there. I was alone for the first time since leaving New York two days earlier. The reality of my situation was settling in, and I did not like it. I had seen too many cowboy hats on the way in and had felt lots of hostility. I had to assume that my reputation preceded me and that I was in for a bad time.

  The fact that so few other women were there would mean almost complete lockdown, and I knew that I might be in solitary confinement for a very long time.

  As I was dwelling on all these thoughts, the door opened and five female COs walked in. One of them was carrying an armful of jumpsuits, and another had a stun gun in her hand. None of them moved very quickly to remove my chains, but I did not make a sound. I really was in unknown territory and I did not know what was going to happen. I was afraid. The COs all appeared to be in their late twenties (my age), and they looked well fed and fit. All of them were white. The one carrying the uniforms dropped them on the floor. For a while we just stood there staring at one another. Then I stuck out my chained hands and said, “Can we take these off now?” The CO with the most stripes on her shirt nodded to the other officers and they flew into action. One of them uncuffed my feet; another removed the black box. But then the handcuff key did not work. Each one took turns trying to turn the key, but to no avail. It was ludicrous, but I was not laughing because the thought of their having to use metal cutters to break the cuffs made me anxious.

  The tension grew until one of the COs walked out and, after a few minutes, came back with several people in tow. One of them was the prison locksmith. He was a smiling, jovial fellow who thought the whole thing was funny. He was also the first person in Tucson who spoke to me.

  “Hey, girl, we won’t cut off your wrist,” he said, laughing. He took out a ring of keys and soon the lock fell open.

  When he was through I looked him in the eye and just said, “Thanks, man.”

  Once the cuffs were off, everything went into high gear. “Strip, bend, spread them, lift your tongue, lift your breasts, raise your arms, squat again.” And I complied—I had decided when I left New York that as long as I wasn’t having a cavity search I would comply. Finally, one of the COs picked up an orange-colored jumpsuit from the floor. It was enormous. I looked at it with disgust, particularly since the others were at that moment ripping up my own clothes and putting them into a plastic garbage bag.

  “What size is that?” I asked.

  “It’s a size forty.”

  I just looked at them. I was a size six. At last I said, “No way, you have to get a smaller one.”

  One of the COs blurted out, “We thought you’d be a lot bigger.”

  It turned out to be a men’s size forty. But there wasn’t a smaller one in the pile. And so they dressed me in it, walked me from building to building through a maze of halls and passageways, all of which led to a single cell with a steel door, and there I began my federal sentence.

  Chapter 6

  Tucson Federal Prison

  IT WAS NOT until dawn that I could look out the window of my cell and discern anything about my physical surroundings. In the morning light I could see past the wooden fence and through the wire up to the sky, and I got my first glimpse of the land.

  In Tucson, the federal prison for men is located in a valley surrounded by four mountain ranges. The arid weather produces a dramatic sky and that first morning I saw it transform from a wash of indigo into streaks of glorious purple before the darkness was gone and the clear blue looked like the hottest part of the inner flame of the sun. On an average day the temperature would reach 110 degrees. I learned later that if you touched a piece of plastic you’d blister.

  When my cell door popped open at 6:00 a.m., a small, thin, auburn-haired woman appeared before me. Her intense brown eyes checked me out from head to toe. “Susan?” she asked.

  “Alejandrina?” I responded.

  We both nodded and a thrilling current ran through me. Alejandrina Torres—Alex—and I had never met, yet we were comrades. She had known I was coming, and I in turn knew about her history. Seeing her was a relief beyond measure. I had been cast into a series of unknowns, handled by people who hated me without even knowing me, surrounded by men who emitted an ever-present threat of physical assault, and then dropped into a desert pit in the middle of the night. It had been a matter of honor, dignity, and integrity for me not to exhibit anything but strength so that now, in the midst o
f all that mental anguish, finding a comrade seemed like a miracle, an electrical jolt to the spirit and at the same time a soothing balm to the rage I felt.

  In my mind Alex was a courageous Puerto Rican freedom fighter. I hoped that we would become friends but I didn’t really know her. I knew that Alex was one of four people who had been arrested, tried, and convicted for seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government, in 1983. The four were part of a long history of resistance to domination and colonial occupation, a history that reached back to 1492 with the tragic arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. The most explosive expression of this resistance had come in the middle of the twentieth century with the rise of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party under the leadership of Don Pedro Albizu Campos and Don Juan Antonio Corretjer. Then came the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN). By 1985 twenty members of the Puerto Rican armed struggle had been locked up in the United States. They believed that their homeland was an illegal possession of the United States and that it was their right and duty to fight to free their island in a war for national liberation. Refusing to accept the authority of the U.S. government, they considered themselves prisoners of war. They were not criminals, not terrorists, but rather patriots and freedom fighters who saw their incarceration as another front in their anti-colonial resistance. They considered themselves counterparts of the Irish Republican Army in H-Block, or the South Africans on Robben Island. Their captors didn’t know what to make of them. They were collectively considered a grave threat to national security, and individually they were fierce. Alex was one of these independentistas.

  I walked with Alex to her cell. She told me: “With you here, we’re now four women in this desert prison with a thousand men. We’re in a corridor of the segregation building, and in daylight we’re allowed to move up and down the alleyway and to sit in a small day room with a TV attached to the wall. We’re locked back down at eight p.m.” She continued, “This is the place they will keep us until the experimental small group isolation unit is finished being built. They want to practice new techniques taken from the experts in England and Germany.” She was very formal with me.

  I said, “It seems like we’re already in small-group isolation right here.” She nodded.

  I told her what I knew about the plans for us, information that my lawyers in New York had been able to obtain from the prison administration and the prosecution. Tucson was just a holding pen. Alex and I would both be sent to Lexington, Kentucky, as soon as the Federal Bureau of Prisons finished building a new basement prison there. We were the only two women up to that point who had been identified for transfer to Lexington.

  We both knew that the BOP is part of the Department of Justice (DOJ), which has federal correctional institutions (FCIs), federal prison camps (FPCs), federal detention centers (FDCs), and administrative detention centers (ADXs). Within these, it has special housing units (SHUs) and high-security units (HSUs). The institutions are run by associate wardens (AWs), captains and lieutenants, physician assistants (PAs), and finally correctional officers (COs). Behind all the initials, the penological rationales and security designations are more than 110 forms of barbed wire, concrete, and watchtowers. At a cost of more than twenty billion dollars a year, the vast corrections network encompasses thousands of acres of land, employs thousands of people, and warehouses over 180,000 human beings. In 1985, there were just fewer than 5,000 women in federal prison and nine women on death row.

  “The administration is awful and they hate women. They don’t know what to do with us or how to deal with us.” As Alex explained what it was like in Tucson, I slowly began to understand that I had experienced only the first level of a wasteland.

  Suddenly a face peered around the cell door and I saw a woman holding a dog-eared Bible in one hand and a romance novel in the other. She stepped into the cell and out again as though she were dancing. Her energy was frenetic. It spread out scattershot like pellets bouncing off a bulletproof vest. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her long limbs swung with a contained rage that I felt could explode with a fist faster than a breath. She told me her name was Debra and that she was twenty-four years old. She had grown up in the Cabrini-Green housing project on the North Side of Chicago. A gap in her teeth flashed in what seemed to be a rare smile, when she said she had heard about me. After a few minutes she waved good-bye and retreated to her own cell, where she remained the rest of the day.

  Over the next few days I learned Debra’s story. She stood convicted of multiple murders committed during a rampage across four states. She and her boyfriend had gone on a robbery run that turned into a killing spree, taking the lives of two children and three adults. She had two death sentences, one in Ohio and the other in Indiana. In addition, she had a federal conviction for taking a kidnapping victim across state lines. The court had ordered her to serve the thirty-year federal sentence first and then to die by lethal injection in Ohio. Her boyfriend, in the Marion, Illinois, federal penitentiary, was also waiting for execution. First, though, they wanted to get married, and Debra wanted to get baptized.

  I didn’t know her or get any good feelings from her, but as I watched Debra I felt a kind of anguish that I had never experienced before. Once in a while she would put on lipstick and do her hair, and I could see her as she had once been in the world, acting the grown-up and hanging out with her crew. When she was feeling okay she would watch TV and laugh, and for a moment she would seem to forget where she was. But those moments were few and far between. For the most part, she lived in absolute internal agony that breathed through every pore. She was in Tucson because the BOP considered her a high security risk. We lived side by side for over a year.

  The BOP bureaucrats claimed that they were not in the business of punishment; they were only doing what the courts ordered. Their quick answer to everything was, “We didn’t sentence you; the judge did.” In their official rhetoric, they were neutral toward prisoners. But I could see that with Debra “neutrality” took an odd form. It wasn’t even subtle. They spat at her and threatened her, taunted her constantly about her impending death, and denied all of her requests (none of which was ever unreasonable, not one).

  The daily exchanges between Debra and the associate warden, Gibson, were unbearable. Gibson was a career prison administrator with ambitions of becoming warden himself. He was the one who signed off on everything to do with any of us. But it was clear from the start that he hated us without knowing us, believed that we were our crimes and that we were the worst of the worst, and he treated us accordingly. When Debra would ask him to allow a minister to baptize her, Gibson would simply smile and shake his head, and then he’d let loose. “There’s no God in this world who will forgive you,” he’d say, or, “It’s too late to save you. If you want to get clean, take a bath.” Then Debra would get mad and start yelling at him, which only made him smile more.

  He would remind her of the obvious—that he, too, was African American—and would taunt her unmercifully: “You being black makes me think black is ugly.”

  Sometimes in her frustration Debra would scream, “Send me to the death house!” Gibson’s response was always, “Don’t worry—we will when we’re ready.”

  There was no relief from the monotony of the routine, or the small amount of space. There was nothing to do except sleep, get up, eat, read, watch TV, talk with the other prisoners, gaze out the window, and go back to sleep, day in, day out, every day. We were a bored and unhappy lot, and I soon grew tired of hearing myself repeat the same things over and over.

  Eventually I realized that I needed to fight the numbing sameness and isolation. I asked for and, miraculously, got a phonebook. I looked up the addresses of all the bookstores, women’s groups, and any other organizations that I thought would respond to a letter. I wrote to all of them, explaining why I was in prison, how it felt to be two thousand miles from home, and how much I needed books and friends.

  I began a correspondence with Peggy Hutchison, who herself was the
n on trial for transporting and harboring fugitives, along with fifteen other sanctuary workers from the Southwest. They were all part of the sanctuary movement, a type of Underground Railroad that provided aid to people from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other parts of Central America who were fleeing state-sponsored repression but had been refused refugee status and then entry into the United States. Connecting to her and her codefendants made me feel less like a stranger.

  Peggy’s letters made me realize how vital writing would be in helping me survive imprisonment both physically and mentally. I started to read, study, and write. I began with Thomas Merton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and others who had created relationships and deep conversations through correspondence. It helped. Reading them opened up mental vistas about making change, the impact of violence, and being accountable.

  Then I met a University of Arizona law professor named Jane Aiken who had worked with other political prisoners. She had been given my name by an attorney in New York with whom she had interned. The attorney had said, “Go visit, she will need it.” Jane was my age and had been raised in the South. She was beautiful and smart. She had a large easy laugh and was one of the tallest women I had ever met. She matched the guard eye to eye as he escorted her to the visit. She was, as she put it, a former member of the Junior League who had rebelled and transformed herself right out of her past. As we sat across from each other at the table, I with my leg irons and she with her legal books, we tried to imagine each other’s lives. For me, meeting Jane was a great relief. She was a new friend, not a fellow prisoner or former associate, and her support gave me hope that I could still communicate and grow. She visited when she could and tried at points to intervene on my behalf with the prison. She didn’t say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” a thing that many people said, trying to be helpful, but that wasn’t always easy to hear. What I came to represent to Jane I am not sure, but I surely came to trust and love her. I would later realize that having relationships with people on the outside had its own particular type of intensity and high emotions. I understood how women who began to write to men doing life in prison could fall in love, despite the barriers and problems.