An American Radical:. Susan Rosenberg

An American Radical: - Susan Rosenberg


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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 of 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


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