Violence in prison: one woman’s experience

I was arrested for a non-violent action outside the School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia, in November 1998. The school trains foreign military from mainly Central and Latin America. The school trains these people in counter-insurgency, in torture techniques, and anti-terrorism. The graduates of the school have over the years been associated with some horrible atrocities, including the deaths some ten years ago of the six Jesuit priests and their two housekeepers in El Salvador.

I have just been released in July this year, but was held for a few extra days because I would not pay my fine until the School of the Americas was closed and provided they gave it to a women’s shelter or soup kitchen. I had received a one-year sentence, a $3200 fine and two years probation. I was to do two more years in lieu of the fine, but my friends paid the fine and I was released.

I was charged with five friends with destruction of government property. I defended myself and my defence was that I didn’t destroy property but enhanced it by telling the truth about it. What we did was to go to Fort Benning and bring the photographs of the murder scene of the Jesuit priests and two housekeepers, and we planted white crosses representing the different countries from which that the School of the Americas trains military officers. We had friends up in the trees with banners, we had flowers, and we removed a few minor letters on the sign that said ‘Welcome to Fort Benning’. We stencilled on the sign, ‘Close the School of Americas, School of Shame and Torture.’ This was the government property we ‘destructed’.

I had some bad luck because I returned to Syracuse NY to await the papers which would summon me to trial. When they never came, I went on a long-awaited cruise with my mother. Upon entering Florida, the FBI came on board the ship and arrested me as a fugitive, which I clearly was not. I was imprisoned in Miami for a short while before I got before a judge and was able to explain the circumstances. The FBI had taken everything I owned including my ID, my money, and my legal papers. I was released from court in Miami with just a jump suit on and nothing else - no shoes, money, papers, ID, under clothes. I was just dumped into the street, thousands of miles from home.

Eventually going to court was interesting, because our judge is infamous. His name is Robert J. Elliott, a 90 year old segregationist judge, who had prevented Martin Luther King from marching and had pardoned Lt William Calley from prison, the man responsible for the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam when 22 civilians were massacred. The marshals in court told me how much they loved this judge because he ‘saved the schools from integration.’ I had a very strong sense of irony appearing before this judge who had been on the bench all these years. I prepared myself by appearing before him in a shirt which had a picture of the My Lai massacre on the back and on the front a picture of myself, with the words ‘Pardon Me Too’. It was really powerful to stand in the place where so many people had stood in the past in their struggles for justice. My last words to the judge were that ‘it was an honour to stand in the court where justice had been denied to so many, for so long.’ I asked the judge to send me to prison where the poor are kept.

I was taken from court in chains, and my first stop was in Slogan County jail in Georgia, which is an old dungeon with steel bars, a high door and a tiny high window, where I did 29 days in isolation. I had no toothbrush. The place was crawling with roaches; there were bed bugs in this type of mattress thing I was to lie on. It was like straw, but it wasn’t straw. There was no blanket, no sheet, just faeces and blood on the walls, and total filth. Twice a day they would open the door of the cell and sometimes literally kick your food in on a metal tray. I was housed across from a drunk cell, where soldiers who had assaulted or got into fights were thrown in there naked to sober up. They’d scream and cry all night. One bellowed all night, ‘You can’t do this to me. This is America! This is America!’ He went on all night and when the door opened the next morning, there was blood all over the door where he had been banging. It certainly was America, all right.

I was removed after 29 days and started my journey through the system, which lasted four months before I got to my designated prison. I went from jail to jail to jail across Georgia, finally ending in Atlanta. Then it was on to New York City, New Jersey and Brooklyn before ending up in Danbury, Connecticut, where I was placed in a high security jail. Here at least one third of the women were from Central and South America, the majority being first time non-violent offenders. Many of them had not committed a crime but because they were partners or spouses of others accused, had been pulled into the frame and convicted. Most were serving 8-12 year sentences. These women suffered extremely from separation from children, from elderly parents, from friends. They just couldn’t accept what had happened to them. They mostly worked in prison industry for the Unicor factories, which were producing increments for Trident submarine and other military equipment. They were paid 23 cents an hour. They really were just slave labour for armament factories. Unicor is now a Fortune 500 company. On two occasions I saw the CE0s going over to the factories in pin striped suits. Pin striped suits!. It seemed to me to be a twisted form of the NAFTA Agreement with the Latinos doing the work inside the USA instead of at home in Colombia or Mexico or wherever. Talk about sick!

At Danbury I was having mobility issues because I have two artificial knees and I also have to sleep with a machine because I stop breathing when I’m asleep. So the decision was made to send me on a prison plane to FMC Carswell Prison in Texas. At 5:00 am I was taken to a tarmac with about 200 other prisoners, men and women, all in chains. When we arrived we were stripped and searched, no property was allowed to be taken with you. Even things like lists of phone numbers and addresses of family and friends were taken and trashed. I felt dirty, I had lice from the Georgia jail still in my hair, I had no headband. When I put a piece of old plastic in my hair to hold it in place, even that was taken. When we arrived at the tarmac, all we could see were these few hundred prisoners, all chained together, no human inter-action, heads down in total despair, just shuffling from one plane to the next, being herded just like cattle, with US marshals holding rifles on them.

One of my travelling companions and new friends from Danbury was having health problems. She had been in prison for 24 years, was 46 years of age. She sought medical help, was told to return to her unit. Five hours later she had a massive stroke and was taken to hospital, where she remained in a coma, close to death. They decided to ship her out to Carswell with me. At 5:00 am, after a strip search, I was placed in a van. With two police escorts and two prison guards, we drove to the hospital to pick up Juana Atkins, the sick woman who was still in a coma. They expected her to die in flight. They removed her to a small Lear jet and we were all packed in. She had had her oxygen removed at the hospital. She was shackled to a stretcher, had a belly chain around her connected to her feet, and she was also had restraints from the stretcher, even though she was paralysed right down one side and still in a coma. This trip took us to Carswell, the only Bureau of Prison institution geared to women with medical problems. All told I was stripped and searched about 60-70 times in the course of this prison sentence.

I pray a lot in prison. There is a lot of prayer that goes on in prison as women try and support one another. It was very beautiful and moving in that regard. I read a lot too. But basically just trying to remain human in such an evil situation is what I was about each day. Chaplains are sometimes helpful and it is always great to get to Mass. But most chaplains don’t get to spend much time on the floor of the prison. The one who came to me to tell me of my brother’s death was very kind, but only stayed about three minutes. Too many of them are too much a part of the administration system of the prison, which is really sad.

My brother died when I was in prison when I was in prison this last time, aged 51. I asked about going to his funeral. They said I could provided I paid the airfares for myself and two guards, their overtime allowances, accommodation, meals, a rental car and other expenses, including the cost of my accommodation in the local prison overnight. I would have to go in chains to the funeral. It could cost close between $5,000 and $10,000. I chose to not go, to stand in solidarity for those who can never afford to go from prison to the funerals of loved ones, to stand with the families of the disappeared in Central and Latin America and for those who ‘disappear’ from our own streets.

Last week, after release, I was again in Texas, testifying to the number of women who had been in prison, who were allowed to die despite their deaths being preventable. At least 700 of the women had health problems of one form or another. I remember a woman coming from Danbury to Carswell who had been sick for months. She arrived undiagnosed and was given two weeks to live. So many women in the system are undiagnosed and get sicker and sicker until it is too late. I remember another friend, a nurse, who discovered a lump. It took her three months to get it biopsied, and another four months to get any treatment. By the time she got to Carswell, she had terminal cancer. This would be a typical case. Another died at 31 years old of undiagnosed cancer. There are a large number of elderly women, grandmothers, some in wheelchairs. In February, a woman came in who was 78 years old, shackled, stripped searched. Her kids who were supposed to be involved in drugs. She refused to co-operate and testify against them. She was put in prison. Some of these women were doing serious time. I mean years. The women need chaplains on the floor but it so difficult to get to them. They stay stuck in their offices.

These people were not put in the system to die. Their sentence does not include the death penalty. Yet for so many, when they are in the system, they face that prospect because of medical neglect. Most of the women were desperate to live long enough so they could be released and be with their children. I have been in prison many times for non-violent peace actions. Having just come out of prison yet again, I cannot yet put words to the horror of what I saw and experienced this time. I am so raw from the savagery of this evil and sinful system. It is going to take some time to heal.

Kathleen Rumpf, a veteran CW worker and peace activist, was released from prison in July 1999.