An American Radical:. Susan Rosenberg
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.
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