Address to Friends and Supporters

by Clare Hanrahan

On the occasion of the Welcome Home concert and dance
featuring many fine musicians and good dancing and
standing room only in the hall.
I've been set free!
Liberated, released,
expirated,
dismissed and discharged.
I am unhindered,
unshackled,
unbound
and loosed
upon the community once again.
And it is so good to be home!!
Thank you.
Thank you to all the incredibly supportive friends
here in Asheville and around this country and beyond
who held me up throughout my prison ordeal with over
1,000 letters, many visits, telephone conversations,
and the work you carried on here at home to raise the
voices of resistance to yet another War.
Let me tell you something about the nearly 900 women
with whom I shared captivity for six months in
Alderson Federal Prison.
We were urban women and country women, from the
streets of Detroit, New York and DC to the mountain
hollers of Tennessee and West Virginia;
from Puerto Rico and Colombia, the Netherlands,
Taiwan, Nigeria, and Iran.
We were educated in the finest of universities or had
little formal schooling.
Night after weary night we slept closely stacked
in our concrete cubicles
breathing together in the dim florescence.
We endured the deadening monotony and demeaning
control of prison routine.
But the roots of our beauty and courage were deeper
and stronger than the system that sought to divide us,
to denigrate, disempower, contain and control us.
We were ordinary and extraordinary
and nowhere else, I think, but prison
could I have shared living space with such a diversity
of American women.
We captive women laughed together with abandon,
especially when tears were near.
And each day we found, somehow,
the simple grace to endure
the indignities and privations.
But oh, if we could have wailed in unison with the
grief of our confinement
those Allegheny foothills that surrounded us
might have crumbled with the sound
of our keening
at the loss of home
and family
the freedom of our youth
or the ease of old age
And the cries of the children
torn from a mother's arms after a too brief visit
were especially painful.
Over one and one-half million American children have a
parent in prison. And for many, the journey is too
distant to ever make the visit.
While we were confined
our husbands and sons were off
to America's new war;
or were themselves held as prisoners
of this war on drugs;
or were home waiting,
but how long waiting?
Among us were convicted embezzlers, thieves, forgers,
and bribers, schemers and con artists. "Money
crimes," we called them. But most, as many as 80
percent, were convicted violators of America's
Draconian drug laws, accounting for an over one
hundred percent increase in women felons in the past
ten years.
These were the addicts, users, or low-level dealers
taking a rap for a kingpin or a boyfriend.
Some were just the families and associates of drug
dealers,
caught in the wide net called conspiracy cast by
zealous prosecutors
and held, most as nonviolent first offenders, for
5-10-20 years, or more on Mandatory Minimum
sentencing. At a cost of $22,000 per person, per
year.
Our innocence
or guilt
was irrelevant to our keepers.
We were a profitable commodity,
especially to UNICOR, the prison industry, where many
captive sisters sewed army jackets for a pittance in a
locked and loud factory, hunched over the machines day
after day, only to have the prison rob them of their
pennies to pay outrageous fines.
We were caught in a system, a snare that now imprisons
two million U.S. citizens. And still we build more
warehouses to hold our own in this land of the free.
America's women prisoners are mothers, grandmothers,
great grandmothers;
of Hispanic, Asian, African and European heritage.
Women who have known lives of comfort and security;
women who have known only struggle.
Muslims and Christians, Native Americans, Baptists and
Catholics, Buddhists and pagans;
Gay women and straight women,
old and young women, pregnant and dying women;
In that prison in the mountains of West Virginia
where the Greenbriar river flows
the natural beauty embraced and sustained us
despite the abusive power and control
of the Bureau of Prisons.
We shared the journey with laughter, compassion
and love; often unspoken, but always felt.
Our keepers could not diminish that.
Billie Holiday, a Heroin Addict and Alderson inmate in
1947 wrote in her book, Lady Sings the Blues: "People
on drugs are sick people. So now we end up with the
government chasing sick people like they were
criminals...the jails are full and the problem is
getting worse every day."
Little has changed with that, except the numbers.
Yet when Billie Holiday served time in Alderson, much
still remained of the "noble experiment" of the women
who founded this first federal prison for women.
They saw it as a "community of women working together
under the guidance of other women." The first Warden,
Mary Belle Harris, a Sanskrit scholar, believed that
women should "build within them a well of
self-respect" and should learn skills that would
enable her to earn her own living without dependence
on a man or the community."
Before that "noble experiment," abuse by male guards
of their female prisoners - physically, mentally, and
sexually - was considered normal in American prisons.
And, sadly, today, it is again. In Alderson and other
women's prisons in America, male "correctional
officers" and administrators dominate. They devise
and enforce the petty and demeaning rules, patrol the
corridors, guard us while we sleep, and walk in and
out of the sleeping quarters, showers and bathrooms of
captive women at will.
We are called "Ladies," dressed in men's military
discards, expected to follow a military chain of
command for "administrative remedies" and can be
stopped and patted down by any officer, male or
female, at any time.
Mrs. Willa, A Black grandmother, nearly 60, from
Baltimore, shares her 10X8 foot stall with one of her
daughters. Both were netted in a drug conspiracy
charge.
One day she returned to our warehouse quarters in
tears. She had been roused from sleep for a surprise
urine test (She is neither an addict nor a user). She
said she was held in the Lieutenants office over four
hours by officers demanding urine. "I was so upset, I
just couldn't produce any," she said. They only gave
me four ounces of water to drink and then they
threatened to send me to Beckley (a higher security
punishment prison) I prayed and prayed...I finally
passed enough water and they let me go."
Breathing in and out
we listened to each other ,
shared our stories and our grief.
We worked in the Greenhouse among the
Mother plants
and in the Kitchen, on our feet for hours amid the
noise and rush --cooking, cleaning, serving
the ample and insipid meals
that filled us with pasta and sugar and every kind of
way to serve white flour.
We worked in the sewing factory, on the landscape
crews, and as painters, plumbers, clerks, and
electricians, even firefighters, in the only all-woman
fire brigade in the country.
As a kept woman at Alderson
doing Time
sometimes there were expansive moments
of exquisite beauty or long, long nights where the
collective despair of our circumstance seemed to hold
me in frozen time.
Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish writer from Holland who
was murdered in the Auschwitz death camp wrote of some
of the many sorrows and sad circumstances that a human
being can experience:
"I do not cling to them," she wrote. "I do not
prolong such moments of agony. They pass through me,
like life itself, as a broad, eternal stream, they
become part of that stream, and life continues."
A line from a gospel song I heard this summer in an
outdoor prison ministry revival seems appropriate now:
"Take these shackles off my feet so I can dance!"

JANUARY 26, 2002

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