An American Radical Page 7

  Things were not good among the four of us in the unit—me, Alex, Debra, and Rosita, a Mexicana who had been convicted on drug charges. We were all going stir-crazy and getting more and more uptight. We spent a lot of time bickering with the COs. Rosita, especially, was going off the rails. She had grown up in Los Angeles and had been dealing in drugs much of her life. She was quick-tempered and mean. She had earned her reputation by walking away from a minimum-security prison, so now the BOP was holding her indefinitely as an escape risk. The isolation of Tucson was new to her (before she had always been “in population”), and she sought release from the tension and boredom by flirting with the cops.

  One day I woke up and looked out my cell window, which opened onto a ten-by-twenty-foot stone enclosure that doubled as our recreation yard. Rosita was wedged up against the fence with a CO, whose pants were down at his ankles. I shut my eyes, but when I opened them the picture was still the same. I shut my eyes again, not wanting to watch; when I looked once more, the CO had his pants back on and, smiling, was handing Rosita a small plastic bag. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I thought. Cops all around us and snitches among us. Alex had seen it, too, and we couldn’t believe how blatant the whole thing was. Rosita having sex with the CO meant that she would tell him anything he asked her. We should have known, especially since the CO was in charge of our little unit that our having witnessed this exchange would put us in danger, but we didn’t.

  The next day Alex and I were ordered to share a cell. There was no reason for this, since there were plenty of empty cells, but we were given no choice. Several days later the prison SWAT team swooped in after lunch. Debra, Rosita, Alex, and I were all shoved into the day room. Alex and I noted that during the shakedown, the team stayed in our cell longer than in the others'. When at last one of the guards came out, he held in his gloved hand a knife from one of the lunch trays. The same CO was smiling.

  “They had it stashed in their garbage can,” he announced, gesturing at Alex and me.

  “No we didn’t,” we said in unison.

  What ensued was one of the stupidest and most devastating series of events during my year at Tucson. Alex and I were charged with the possession of “high contraband,” immediately stripped of all our property, and placed in detention pending a disciplinary hearing. Detention meant a different cell, with no personal property, no visits, and no outdoor recreation. It meant being locked in an even smaller space. It was a bad set of circumstances. First, someone had set us up and we had no way to prove our innocence. Second, our being “convicted” of this charge would not only mean the loss of phone, mail, and visiting privileges, but also serve as a justification for further enhancing our security restrictions. This would conveniently make our transfer to high security in greater compliance with so-called policy.

  We were ushered through a series of locked doors and put in strip cells in the men’s segregation unit. All prisons are a series of increasingly smaller spaces engineered to achieve greater control over and punishment of the individual prisoner. A strip cell has nothing in it but a metal slab attached to the wall and a toilet of some variety. At first we were placed in cells facing each other, which allowed us to pass books back and forth. Alex, though inwardly furious, remained calm. Things like this were to be expected, she said, recalling how guards in Chicago had injured her shoulder to the point where she was left with limited use of one of her arms.

  Still, she was unbroken. I heard Alex tell the captain that she might be under his control but that she recognized neither his authority nor that of the U.S. government. This captain was a squat, sandy-haired cowboy in his mid-thirties. I couldn’t tell whether it was his drawl or his slowness of mind that made him take minutes to complete a sentence. He called us his “favorite little bitches” until the day Alex told him he was a mere peon and therefore irrelevant. Then it dawned on him that he had never run across prisoners like Alex and me. He began to get angry every time he saw us. He seized our pencils because they were more than three inches long and could therefore be used as weapons. He took away our toothbrushes for the same reason.

  Although there was a special hearing officer just for institutional infractions, the captain himself usurped the job. Alex and I were chained and escorted to an office. We stood before the captain, who sat with his feet on the desk, chewing a cigar. His hat, tipped back, was held on by a strip of rawhide around his neck. I started by telling him that what Alex and I were being subjected to was pure political harassment, that everyone knew we had no reason to possess a knife, which was, anyway, a butter knife that had been brought to the unit on a food cart, and so on.

  The captain laughed and kept repeating, “Horseshit.” At one point, though, he got angry, pushed his chair away from the desk, and fell backward onto his head.

  Alex and I tried to muffle our laughter, but we couldn’t, even though we knew the whole procedure was not funny at all.

  The captain jumped to his feet and said, “This is crap. You’re guilty.”

  Our “conviction” carried a penalty of forty-five days in segregation. For the first ten days, we were placed in cells on the men’s tier. I never actually saw the parade of men next to me, but I heard every word each one said in that excruciating week and a half, the most difficult period I had yet endured. The man housed right next to me cursed me and spent hours describing—in the minutest detail and at the top of his lungs—what he would do to me if he could.

  I asked him to stop, but that only made it worse. I sat there with tears streaming down my face, unable to block out his screams. It was impossible to rest, eat, read, or think. The only relief came when they brought him his meds, which made him fall asleep for an hour or two. It was no consolation to know that farther down the tier Alex was getting similar treatment from other men.

  We were allowed only one shower every third day. The first time, we assumed we would be taken to the women’s unit, which was two doors away. But, instead, the guards paraded us past all the cells to the men’s shower. We protested and argued with them the entire time, but to no avail. It was impossible to take a shower. The verbal abuse, aimed at our very sex by fellow prisoners who hadn’t seen or been with women in who knew how long, pierced us like bullets. As we walked back, Alex whispered, “I’m going on strike—no showers, no food, no cooperation until they move us back to the other side.”

  The next day they took us outside to the recreation yard. It was a small dog run, but at least it was outside in a space bigger than any we had occupied since arriving in Tucson. We walked in a tight circle, almost march-stepping in our orange jumpsuits. I agreed to strike with Alex, to refuse showers, food, and even any further rec. The two of us then started singing as loud as we could: “La Borinqueña,” “Gracias a la Vida,” “This Land Is Your Land,” songs by Woody Guthrie, and on and on until they came for us. Our strike lasted several days. Finally, they moved us back to isolated cells—“segregation”—on the women’s side. This meant that we were no longer side by side with men in the next cell. They said it was because they needed the cells we were in.

  Initially, the month spent in segregation after those horrendous days in the men’s unit was a relief. It was possible in the quiet to think. But it was in that month that the full and terrible meaning of doing time hit me. It hit me so hard that I, in turn, fractured my hand banging on the cell door.

  Daily life was a kind of nothingness alternating with verbal abuse. There was absolutely nowhere to go; it felt like death. All that lay in front of me were the ruins of my life. I was losing everything—my dreams, visions, and hopes, my routine and my family, and even my favorite color, favorite food, and favorite season. I began to understand that the very small things, the details that are different for every individual, that make up the identity of each person, but that I had paid little attention to on the outside, get stripped away in prison until the days seem like hours and years like days.

  One day a guard walked by my cell wearing some new brand of cologne that I did n
ot recognize. It assaulted my nose and reminded me of a smell that I had once enjoyed. That one small whiff sent me back through a tunnel of memories, lined with images, but I could not recall the name of the cologne or the place I first found it or what it cost or who else told me they liked it. I began to panic—my heart beat faster, I started to sweat and shake, and I could not stop. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to move except within the box in which I had already counted every step back and forth ten thousand times, and nowhere to look because I already knew every single inch of every single surface, every single crack in the concrete. This panic, this terror, this unbelievably painful feeling that ran from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, from my inner being to the hair on my arms, had all been caused by a man walking past my cell. It was then that I knew that pieces of me were melting away; I was losing some things that I would never get back. I realized I was doing time, and it was endless.

  Then I adopted what is known as the thousand-yard stare, the convict glaze, or the impenetrable face. When in the presence of any official, show nothing, feel nothing, and try to ignore the broken shards of yourself that are falling at your feet. But when I was alone, I railed against my fate and beat at the bars, smashed my head and hands against the stones, to release the horror. Nothing worked, and I could only lament, What have I done? I wept until, finally, I lay curled up on the bunk, replaying the grief of being there, until sleep overtook me.

  When Alex and I got out of solitary confinement and went back to the unit, we resumed the routines of prison life, but things weren’t the same. We were angrier, and both of us were viewed as more dangerous and more hostile than before. The COs rarely spoke to us. The two other women were less friendly and less inclined to talk with us. I stayed to myself, read and wrote and inspected my garbage every day to prevent another setup. I waited for visits from friends and lawyers. I had a bleak feeling about the future.

  Visits from lawyers were important. One lawyer in particular, Mary O’Melveny, had been among the first lawyers to litigate Freedom of Information Act suits against the FBI and had been instrumental in exposing the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program. Mary had represented the Harlem Acupuncture Clinic when it had been under attack by the government and had agreed to do my appeal, although she had not been my lawyer at trial. (I had asked her to represent me when I was first arrested; her answer, however, had been an emphatic no. She said she knew I would not abide by her strategy and she did not want to be involved in a legal fiasco. She was right about that.) I was so happy that Mary had agreed to appeal my sentence and work on my case now, because I had great respect for her and knew I needed someone with fighting capabilities. Mary was a litigator and therefore a great advocate, but she also had a passion that always seemed to light her from within. She surpassed all the male lawyers that she was surrounded by because of her brains and her looks. Being in Mary’s company was always a great relief because she helped to shoulder the suffering. When she came to Tucson, she was shocked at both the conditions she saw and the stories she heard. I had been there only seven months, but the reflection in Mary’s eyes let me know that I looked terrible. Her visit helped, all her visits helped, and over time they became a lifeline—they meant that I was still in the world in some way—but in the end my appeal was denied.

  One day Debra, Alex, Rosita, and I were sitting in the outdoor recreation area the guards had made for us. Alex and I sat at one table and Debra and Rosita at the other. We called it our “patio,” because that was about how big it was. It was a fenced-off enclosure that ran the length of four cells along the side of the building. The chain fencing that formed the roof had a partial wooden covering and was surrounded by barbed wire. A wooden fence outside the chain-link blocked our view of the rest of the prison, but it also prevented the men out on the compound from seeing us. Still, our view of the sky was quite complete and magnificent. It was a sweltering day. The air was filled with the buzzing drone that comes when heat reverberates off asphalt.

  I heard it before I saw it: tse tse tse. Then in the corner where the fence connected to the building I saw a large coiled rattlesnake, its head moving off the ground, its rattle shaking. It was about five feet from me. Very softly, almost whispering, I said, “Nobody freak out, nobody yell, but there is a rattlesnake by the wall.” Unbelievably, the other women did not scream, but glided quietly inside. I measured the distance between the door and me. There really was no decision to make, though. I had read somewhere that they don’t bother you unless you bother them. I made it inside and stood with everyone else at the window, watching the snake. It was not moving. About three minutes later the cellblock door swung open and a group of heavily suited COs burst in. They looked like astronauts, down to the visors covering their faces. One of them had a large paddle. They pushed their way onto the patio and stomped the snake to death. They battered its head so hard that even from where we stood we could see how broken it was. One of the COs took off his helmet and held the snake up, shouting, “Victory!”

  Another officer took his helmet off and, with sweat pouring off his head, grinned at us. “Rattlers are our mascot,” he said, and he was serious. It was then I learned that every prison has its own animal, almost like a totem.

  Passover was approaching. After many lawsuits over prisoners’ religious rights, the BOP had agreed to allow every prisoner one ceremonial meal a year—Passover for Jews, Ramadan for Muslims, Vesak for Buddhists, and Christmas for Christians. I had been a “once a year celebrate” kind of Jew before I had come to prison, but as I spent more time inside I realized that fighting for my right to practice Judaism was a way to fortify my identity. I wanted to have a seder, but I could not do it alone. Knowing that there were several Jewish men in the institution, I made my request to the associate warden, who came to our unit every other day. He rejected it. I argued that there was a precedent (I had been allowed to attend a seder at the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center the previous year), it was my right, and so on. He merely ridiculed me, saying my request was a ploy to see the men, that I wasn’t a real Jew. As we stood face to face at my cell door time was running out.

  In jail there is an understanding that there are three things you never talk about: sex, politics, and religion. Those things are considered personal, and one’s beliefs about them worthy of respect, at least by old convicts and smart administrators. But the reality is that Christianity dominates what religious life there is within the BOP. Even if there are no other books to be had, there is always a Bible at hand. Even if the policy prohibits volunteers, they can get in if they are Christians. Other religions are seen exactly as that—other. In Tucson, there were not many Jews. In fact, Jews were more alien to the administration than other minorities. That’s why I was stunned on the eve of Passover to see the associate warden who had fought with me so viciously show up with two COs to escort me (though still in handcuffs and leg chains) to the Passover seder.

  The ceremony was being conducted in the visiting room. When I walked in, the twenty-two men sitting around the table stood up and started clapping. They made room for me at the table. As I sat down one man immediately said, “Hey, Susan, good Pesach.” It was Harv, whom I knew from the New York MCC. He was a short, burly man with an unkempt beard, intricate tattoos from head to toe, and an enormous smile. I liked him. A former head of the Connecticut Hells Angels, he had been convicted of conspiracy, bribery, and extortion under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, but I didn’t know the details. He moved to sit next to me.

  He said to the CO standing watch, “Take off her cuffs.”

  “No, orders are not to.”

  “That’s bullshit—this is a religious service,” Harv continued. “I want to see the associate warden.”

  Several other voices chimed in and I had visions of this small incident ruining the dinner. Harv whispered to me that he and the other men had been demanding for weeks that I be allowed to attend this meal. The men had not seen a woman prison
er be treated with such harshness before and they didn’t like it. I was surprised; the associate warden had certainly said nothing about it.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, “but I don’t want to be the cause of ending it.”

  He gave me a look. “What? Are you crazy, girl? This whole ceremony is about fucking freedom—you are not sitting here in cuffs. Besides, you’re a girl and we need one.”

  I smiled. “Okay, whatever happens will happen.”

  One of the men who was standing seemed to have an air of authority. He said his name was Levi and he was conducting the seder, because there was no rabbi. He added that he had to agree with Harv. I turned to a CO and said he had to call the lieutenant, the captain, the associate warden, or the duty officer—anyone who had not gone home.

  Levi, it turned out, was a devout Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, doing time for diamond theft. He said, “We will not have a seder with anyone in chains. It’s sacrilegious and we’ll sue for violation of our religious rights.”

  That got a response. Several minutes later the captain, my old nemesis, walked in, acting as if he had just ridden up and needed to leave to relieve himself or feed his horse. He looked at me with the same degree of hatred I felt toward him and said, “Rosenberg, you are one pain in the ass.”

  I responded, “Captain, take off the cuffs and chains. It’s ridiculous, and even you know it.” The captain was my personal Pharaoh at that moment.

  He removed my handcuffs but, as someone who always had to have the last word, refused to remove the restraints around my legs. Then, as abruptly as he came, he was gone.