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 then 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