Locked In with Ian Bick - Activism, Bombings & 23 Years in Federal Prison | Laura Whitehorn

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Laura Whitehorn, a dedicated activist since the 1960s, shares her compelling story of radical activism, involvement in bombings, and serving over 14 years in federal prison. As a member of the May 19th Communist Organization, Laura participated in protests against U.S. policies, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Capitol Building. She discusses her motivations, the events leading to her arrest in 1985, and the challenges faced during her incarceration. Since her release in 1999, Laura has continued her activism, focusing on supporting political prisoners and advocating for social justice. #Activism #PoliticalPrisoner #LauraWhitehorn #USCapitolBombing #May19CommunistOrganization #SocialJustice #PrisonReform #RadicalHistory Connect with Laura Whitehorn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-whitehorn-08b54a33/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rappcampaign?igsh=NDh4aG52dDV0aDE3 Website: https://rappcampaign.com/our-people/ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Presented by Tyson 2.0 & Wooooo Energy: https://tyson20.com/ https://woooooenergy.com/ Buy Merch: https://convictclothing.net/collections/convict-clothing-x-ian-bick Timestamps: 00:00:00 Inspiration and Impact of Jose Salana 00:03:11 Reforming the Prison System: Release Aging People in Prison Movement 00:06:41 Advocacy for Change in the Prison System 00:10:19 Family Influences and Early Political Awareness 00:13:47 Choosing a Path: From Academia to Activism 00:17:25 The Resistance Conspiracy Case and Its Ideology 00:21:05 Parole Hearings and Racial Disparities 00:24:48 FBI Arrest and Charges: A Personal Account 00:28:25 Arrest and Pre-Trial Holding Period 00:31:56 Fighting for Justice in the Federal System 00:35:38 Understanding "Girlfriend Crimes" in Drug Conspiracies 00:39:00 Challenges of Communicating from Prison 00:42:37 Racism and Inequality in the Prison System 00:46:17 Human Rights Violations in Prisons 00:50:00 Impact of Incarceration on Generations 00:53:34 The Fight Against Racism and Political Power 00:57:06 Meeting and Introduction Powered by: Just Media House : https://www.justmediahouse.com/ Creative direction, design, assets, support by FWRD: https://www.fwrd.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Laura, welcome to Lockton. Thank you to Jeannie for connecting us. We just interviewed Jose, which was a great episode you got to listen to. And now you're in the hot seat. And now you understand why I say I'm the luckiest person in the world because go to prison, start an organization, and end up working with someone like Jose Salada and getting to listen to him and getting to be moved by him. His values, his principles, his strength. You know, it's really cool. Yeah, variance.

inspiring. Now, you guys work in the same organization together. Yeah. Now, can you explain that what that means to you and what it is? Sure. Well, you know, release aging people in prison is an organization that I was part of starting 11 years ago with another formerly incarcerated man who did time in New York State, Mujahid Farid, who died in 2018 right before Jose became director. Kathy Boudin, who also died a few years ago, who was a fantastic organizer and had done a lot of time in prison, and a lawyer named Sophia Elijah, who is still functioning as a lawyer and as an advocate in New York State and run something called the Alliance of Families for Justice. And we started rap because at that point, a couple of things were going on. One for me was that I was

involved with struggles to free political prisoners in New York State, who were people that Jose did time with, who did similar time or longer 50 years, and were being hit by the parole board every two years, similar to political prisoners and political prisoners, I mean mostly former Black Panthers, although, of course, there's no such thing as a former Black Panther, but they had been in the Black Panthers. And I was a political prison. There were many around the country, but especially in New York State. That was one thing that was going on. We were failing. They were getting hit at the board every two years. The other thing that was really massive that I had seen and been part of while I was in prison was the rise of mass incarceration

and the long sentences that Jose just talked about. And we were seeing that people like Jose, like Herman Bell, like a lot of incarcerated people were getting old and getting hit at the board over and over again, or getting life without parole sentences if they were younger and going to prison. And no one was paying attention to it. All of a sudden, there was a movement around prisons

because of mass incarceration, because so many people were affected. You know, millions and millions of people in prison means millions and millions of families on the outside. So people were paying attention to the question of mass incarceration, but they were talking about low-level non-violent crimes because they thought that that would be easy to win, that those people should not be in prison. But we said no one should be in prison. Number one, prisons are not something we want to perpetuate. But that people convicted of

violent crimes also should not be in prison for the rest of their lives. And so we started release aging people in prison because it was paying attention to that category of people in prison. And one thing that had just been happening is because of mass incarceration, there was a tension around the world to the fact that around the country that there were so many people over the age of 55, 50, 65 in prison. and that category was growing as at the same time that there were some low-level reforms that meant that the prison system itself was starting to shrink. And so we thought, let's take advantage of that awareness and say, do you want to do something about this? Here's something you can do.

And so we started release aging people in prison. Mujahid Farid had been a brilliant jailhouse lawyer. and he taught us all about the regulations that govern the parole board, the systems that are behind it, and how those systems are based in racism. And Kathy and I, coming from a leftist background, and Sophia as well, understood how mass incarceration was actually a continuation of government programs to destroy the Black Panther Party, the young lords, other left. organizations. And so Co-Intelpro, the counterintelligence program, was meant to destroy the Black Panther Party and the leaders, some of whom were in prison for many years in New York State, Daruba bin Wahad, did a long time in prison and proved that he had been framed by the government and was released. Geronimo G. G. Jigga late in California was able to prove the same thing about his

case. So we knew what the counterintelligence program had done to the organizations and the leadership. And now we were seeing what that same counterinsurgency consciousness and plan was doing to black communities in general. And so we decided that we wanted to intervene. We were not a group of people who thought we were just like hold signs. And so we figured out how to fight on the level of the regulations and the personnel of the parole board. And we were able actually to make some changes, including the one that Jose just talked about that was responsible for his release. So that was the beginning of release aging people in prison. And then we started to find that family members like Jeannie were coming to us because for the first time their loved ones in prison

had hope. And so we became a larger mass-based organization. And when the Democrats won control of the two legislative chambers in New York State, as well as the governorship, we said, let's write some laws and try to change the actual system of parole in New York State to make it more fair. And that's where we are now. We're just on the cusp of getting those bills passed and we're about to go into the next legislative session. So if people would go to rapcampaign.com and look at the upcoming events, they will see that we're about to go to Albany and have a big advocacy day and they can join us. And anyone who's listening to this podcast can join us in making structural basic change to undo the racism of the prison system. Now, when you say

political prisoner, what do you mean by that? Well, for me, for a lot of us, it was people who are involved in political movements, political organizations, and in the course of their work for those organizations, get arrested either for actions that are illegal or in some cases for frame-ups because they're too powerful. That's what happened to Geronimo Pratt, Geronimo G. Jigga. Now, did you grow up in New York? I know you're based in New York now. I was born in Brooklyn. My dad, too. Oh, really?

Yeah, he was a Brooklyn kid. Oh, okay. Did he root for the Dodgers, I hope? I'm sure he did. I'm sure he grew up a Dodgers fan. Yeah, the saddest day of my life. And if I had been a little older, maybe I would have figured out a campaign, was when the Dodgers moved out of Brooklyn.

I didn't even know they were from Brooklyn. That's way before my time. I only know them as the L.A. Dodgers. Okay, well, my hero when I was a kid was Jackie Robin. And I once, when I was very young, my grandpa took me to Abbott's Field and I saw Jackie Robinson steal home. But unlike Jose, I never thought I could have a career in baseball because I couldn't see well enough to hit the ball. Who did you grow up with? Whom?

Did I grow up with my parents because they wanted us to go to public schools and the public schools in New Rochelle, New York at that point were really good. They moved to New Rochelle. And so I grew up in a fairly middle-class little enclave in a city that had many straight of society. And I think that that I had some privilege as white kid in the 50s in America. But around me I could see black people and some Puerto Ricans and more and more Puerto Ricans because there was the 50s. There was Operation Bootstrap, which brought a lot of people from Puerto Rico, forcibly, economically forcibly to the United States. So I could see the difference in what was available to me,

just the choices I was allowed to make. I mean, we didn't have that much money. It wasn't so much. We weren't rich, but we were white, and we were middle class, and people assumed that we would go to college. my sister and I. And so that was Neuershell. And that's, I grew up, you know, I was kind of a wonky kid.

I was always thinking about what things meant. I wasn't much of an athlete, you know. But I just didn't do very much of social activities that weren't involved with some kind of social justice. What did your parents do for work? My mother was a social worker, which is partly how I saw that there were many people in Neurochel living different lives from mine. And my father was a lawyer. What kind of lawyer? He was a corporate lawyer and also kind of did service work for different public institutions and charities.

Did that intrigue you at all as a kid? No. What intrigued me was that my grandfather, who died before I was born, had been a socialist. And I later found out was one of the socialist delegation to the New York State Legislature, which the legislature refused to seat in, I can't remember what year. And I was brought up with kind of the sense that there was socialism in the realm of possibility, even though my parents themselves became upwardly mobile and wanted me to go to college and get married, have kids, and do all the things you're supposed to do. But I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that there was, you know, like you said, another world is possible. There was a different system than the kind of competitive, horrible things that I saw about capitalism. So it was always a possibility. And I joined all kinds of little clubs and stuff that what do we call it, the debate club, which, where we would set up debates between someone

talking about Cuba who had been there and knew about it and someone like the, I'm sorry to do this, but it was the wrestling coach who was a terrible right winger and didn't know anything about Cuba. So we put them on a debate together. It was a setup. Would you say you were kind of like a black sheep? I had not. like abiding by the norms of society, wanting to go to college, all of those types of things? Yeah, but I, you know, I sort of played both ends against the middle. And I did go to college, and it was there that I joined, that was during the 60s. I wanted to go south. My parents wouldn't let me for Freedom Summer in 1964. But I became part of, I built a local chapter of friends of

student nonviolent coordinating committee, which, as you probably know, was the organization in the South that fought for voters' rights for black people. And there were three civil rights workers in 1964 who were murdered viciously by the Klan. And one of them was from my high school. One of them was the son of my biology teacher. So it was very close. All of it was very close. There was a consciousness at that point, especially among progressive Jews, which was what my family were, non-practicing, but just culturally Jewish. And we had lost family into the pogroms before the Holocaust. And growing up in that moment, because of the Holocaust, because of the war, and because of the United Nations, which was at that point, you know, the Geneva Convention, the human rights

Declaration of Human Rights, there was a sense that there would be justice in the world. And I think that as a little kid, I had no sense of how you build collectivity, organization, power, anything like that. But I had a sense that it was possible, even if I didn't know what it was. So it gave me sort of juice to go forward and bat my head against the wall for many causes. What were you planning on majoring in college while you were doing? I majored in English and I was going to be a professor. I mean, that was sort of like just, I loved to read. I loved to teach. I loved to write at that point. And I was going to, I started teaching to get a fellowship to graduate school and then the war in Vietnam flowered and I became involved.

in the anti-war movement and left school. Do you think looking back on it, that was a good decision to leave school? Yep. Well, I don't know. You know, yes, I do. I mean, I look, I have a lot of friends now in academia, friends who are much younger than I, whom I've made through political work

and through work against mass incarceration. And they do great work. and some part of me sometimes feels like there's so many books about prisons there's so many studies and sometimes at night when I can't sleep because I'm thinking of like Jeannie's husband or Teresa's

husband or Lizette's brother or all the people that should be home shouldn't be in prison there is no not there's no reason for them to be in prison. There's no reason for prisons to exist. And I think, is this a little like the Tuskegee experiment where people are studying a problem while people are dying from the problem? And so that's why I am happy that even though I think many, many much smarter people than I are doing really incredibly important work in academia.

glad I'm not because I can't do that and I can do this. What did your parents think about the route you chose? You know, they've been dead for many years. My father, my mother died before I started my prison sentence. My father immediately came to visit me. You know, I was pretty notorious. Our case was pretty notorious, anti-government, leftist. We were called terrorists.

It's not a new thing to call people who struggle against racism, capitalism, imperialism, terrorists. We were called terrorists in the early 80s. My father was proud of me, and he said that because his father had been a socialist, and he had taken a different path, but I think he always questioned it. And so he was proud, even though I don't think he loved what I did, but he was proud that I did something I believed in. Did you know that it would lead to prison following that path? You know, I never really thought about it.

I mean, of course, you know, I didn't think it was legal to put bombs in government buildings. But I didn't expect, you know, I wasn't surprised. when I got arrested, but I was a little shocked because you don't think that you're going to walk into a trap. You don't think that you're going to get arrested. You think I'm fighting and I'm going to wake up tomorrow to fight another day. Now, what was the ideology or the mentality behind using, like, say, a bomb in a government building? What does that achieve that aspect of it? Well, we were the moment when we started doing these actions, in the case,

was called the Resistance Conspiracy case. If anyone wants to look it up, we started doing our actions at a moment when the Joint Terrorist Task Force of the New York City Police Department was hot on the trail of the Black Liberation Army and the Forces Armada de Liberation Nacional, FALN, which was the Puerto Rican Independence armed unit.

they were literally hot on the trail and we were in New York City where they were hot on the trail and we decided to start doing these things to sort of give them a like a red herring you know to give them to try to get them off the trail um I don't know if it worked they certainly started paying attention to us but that was our thinking it was like we didn't have much that's what America's first pledge was freedom now jeep still carries that that's fighting spirit. With the Jeep Declaration of Deals, we're pledging our allegiance to the American people

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Jeep and the Jeep Grill or registered trademarks of XCAUS LLC. We had that ability. But you were aiming on hurting anyone. No, we were very careful. I mean, because, not because we think that there's, that when resistance movements do attack people, that it isn't sometimes justified when you're being attacked yourself. You know, Malcolm X. Someone puts his foot on my neck and I'm going to ask him nicely.

to take it off. No, I'm going to throw them off. But because we didn't feel like we represented enough of a deep movement that would support that level of struggle. And we didn't think that level of struggle was going on in the country. We were trying to make a point about the fact that power is not vulnerable, I mean is vulnerable, is not invulnerable, and that we could attack. and that people were believing the government's line somehow that the U.S. government was nonviolent and that anyone who fought it, i.e. at that point, the Black Panthers more than anyone else, but also indigenous movements.

You know, there had been the takeover of wounded knee by the Lakota people 10 years before we went to prison. but that there was somehow that this was a nonviolent country, everything was great, and why are these crazy Black Panthers and Puerto Ricans making trouble? Why are they fighting? Why are the Vietnamese killing American soldiers? And we were trying to say the government itself is the source of violence. And, you know, I still think that's true.

our work in RAP in New York State, when people go before the parole board, and you should read some of these transcripts of parole hearings, where the parole commissioner, some guy who used to be a sheriff or part of a police department, and we know, because we see it, you can't miss it. It's in the news every day about police killings of innocent, unarmed kids, if they're black or Puerto Rican or, you know, that same person who had been part of that police force would excoriate an incarcerated person going for parole about having used violence. And so there's this sense that somehow violence is a choice from some bad quality in an individual as opposed to a response. and the language that is spoken led by the government in this country. And so that's what we were trying to talk about.

The other thing was that for years, there would be a lot of white people because I do believe, as Cormitore, Stokely Carmichael, said that white people have the responsibility to order. If we don't like racism, racism isn't the responsibility of black people to undo. It's the responsibility of white people. So we were trying to organize other white people. And there were a lot of white people who were supportive of the Black Panthers until after Fred Hampton was assassinated by the government,

which is not opinion. It's a proven fact. And yet there was never any, you know, no one ever had to take accountability for that. But he was assassinated because he was threatening to the government because he was such a great leader. People use the word charismatic, but I hate that word. He just, when he spoke, he gave, like Malcolm X, he gave voice to the desires and the suffering and the hopes of millions and millions of. black people, and so they killed him when he was 21. We had seen that happen.

The Panthers, after that, the Black Liberation Army had started to do actions. They did actions in New York City after Clifford Glover, who was 10 years old, 10-year-old black kid, honest way to his father was taking him to school. And the cops killed him yelling, die and die. when they were shooting him. And they said they confused him with a suspect and a robbery that they were looking for. So that kind of thing was going on all the time. And so the Black Liberation Army was taking action.

And a lot of the white people we had been organizing said, oh, no, I don't support that. And we were trying to say there's a continuum. And to support the end of racism means support. the people who have been resisting racism and now are resisting it in this way. You don't have to like it, but you can't condemn it and still think that you're, you know, playing a role in solidarity. So that's what we were trying to say. Tell us about how you got caught and sent to prison.

Well, you know, it's very hard when you're underground to remember every single rule of how to stay safe. So some of our comrades had been arrested. They had made a mistake. They had been arrested. And their arrest, the FBI, you know, did all this analysis of places and cars and found one of our cars and put a what's called a trap and trace in it. And found our apartment where I was arrested and followed two of my co-defendants, my dear lawyer. The long lost, rest in peace, Marilyn Buck and Linda Evans. They followed them in a car to New York and meanwhile arrested me in Baltimore, broke into the apartment. Now, when you say underground, you were wanted on a wanted list?

Yeah, I wasn't, but some of the people that we were, we were harboring them. We were keeping them safe. And what were the actual charges you were arrested on? Oh, God. Okay. I think harboring a future. I was in the apartment that I had rented under a false name, and there were guns there. There was bomb-making equipment.

And luckily for me, the FBI did a totally illegal search. And I was taken to the FBI office. First, I got away for a minute, and they caught me back and took me to the FBI office and had me chained up to a chair. It was on a Saturday. So I was in the vicinity of this judge, this magistrate, whom they had called in to arraign me. And I wouldn't let them take my fingerprints.

I wouldn't say who I was. So it took them a while to identify me. So while they were trying to do that, all these FBI agents, because it was a Saturday, they had been called in to my apartment to search it. And so they were coming in there. I was saying, you should see the shit we found. Oh, man, we found it. So I knew they were telling the magistrate who then had to issue a search warrant. At that point, it's not illegal anymore, but it was still illegal to do that. So anyway, so then I was charged with possession of all that stuff. I was charged with assault on a federal officer because for some reason when they said, you're under arrest, I didn't say, oh, okay. and fought them and got away a couple of times.

And then I was charged with everything they found in the house. But because I knew that the search warrant could be invalidated, I was able to get a lawyer to get a mistrial because he could say on the first day of trial, when they started to introduce the evidence, he objected and said it's the fruit. of an illegal search. And the judge said, okay, approach, you know, whatever, he convinced him to have an evidentiary hearing. And so six months later, we had that hearing. We got the search

thrown out. And so I was held for a long time. Then I was held on contempt of court because I refused to give a handwriting sample. So that added another like year and a half. And then some of the ID, we had false ID. I mean, it was a bunch of charges. It added up to, the beginning to 78 years. So like Jose, I thought I was looking at a life sentence. And what did they end up sentencing you to? Well, it was more than five years later. I was arrested in 85 and I didn't get sentenced until 90. So you spent that whole time just in holding, waiting, no bail? Yeah, I was in, and I was in Baltimore City Jail and D.C. jail and a lot of county jails in the surrounding area because I tried to escape, which I think probably most people in prison do at some point,

whether they remember the exact details or whether they were busted for it or whatever, but they did notice that I had tried to escape. So they sent me around to a lot of county jails. But I did a lot of time in those two places, D.C. jail and Baltimore City Jail. Was it a serious escape attempt? Yeah, if someone else hadn't done the same thing the week before and gotten away with it, I probably would have. But you know what? I didn't have any backup plan.

And I remember one of my mentors used to say the escape is more important than the action. And I didn't have, I mean, not the escape, the aftermath. The plan after. Yeah. And I didn't have a good one. so probably I would have been caught. Yeah, I just watched Escape at Dan Amora, the TV show on Netflix, about the one in New York. Yeah.

Pretty crazy what happened. Don't believe everything you see on TV. Yeah. I mean, and in that case, you know, like every place else, the incarcerated man got punished for it. Not the guys who escaped everyone. You know, they took away hoodies. They took away all this stuff. whereas they were the ones

the cops were the ones who were too lazy to do the inspections so they didn't notice that there was a whole being dug in the wall. Yeah, and then the actual civilian employee that assisted to... She just got out of prison, I think. That's a pretty crazy story.

Yeah. So how much time did you get sentenced to after those five years? 23 and a half. And that was partly, I mean, it's a very complicated story because my ultimate case was a conspiracy case, the resistance conspiracy case, where six of us were charged with all these actions that we did. And they, that's so complicated. We were all like wonky by that time. You know, you get to be a jailhouse lawyer.

And we discovered an old case that gave us the ability to argue something you can't really argue in conspiracy, which is that there was double jeopardy. Usually with conspiracy if the overt acts are different from the conspiracy act, it's not double jeopardy. But anyway, so we got three people cut from the case temporarily. one of them, Alan Berkman, who also has died, had a really serious cancer, and he had it twice while he was in prison. And at the point after the Supreme Court was going to hear the case because we had won on lower levels and the government appealed and won the appeal. So then it goes to the next court. it was about to go, we would have been in for another five years. And Alan was almost died to the point that there's actually a 60-minute show that was about

health care, quote-unquote, in the federal system that featured him because of how he almost died, how he saved his own life because he was a doctor. And he was at that point almost paralyzed from the, chemotherapy that he had gotten and the treatment. And we were offered, he would be sent to a good federal medical center in Rochester, Minnesota, as opposed to the horrible butcher shop in Springfield, Illinois, I think. and he and two others would be cut from the case if three of us pleaded guilty. So even though I was up until that point, we were ready for trial.

We were going to go to trial. We were going to make it a political trial. I was totally opposed to taking a deal. But to save Alan's life, yeah. So we did that and we were able to plead, I think, to two. I ended up with a total sentence of 23 and a half years. It was, you know, in the feds, there's a lot of, they put cases together. There aren't many guarantees in life.

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I can't remember. They probably gave you some type of time served. I'm not sure they did, but they should have. I got to go back and check them. Yeah, so when someone searches, you know, your name on Google, there's a lot of, like, you're pretty high up on the Google list with your story. Oh, I didn't know. You never searched your name on Google?

No. But, you know, I did, I went to jail before these arrests. I went to jail in Pittsburgh for an action that I was in Weatherman, and we did an action at a high school there. We ran through the high school yelling jail break. bring the war home and, you know, trying to organize young white working class youth to not go into, you know, to resist the draft. And I did some time in Allegheny County Jail for that. I did some time in Cook County Jail for another thing, you know, mostly mess. But the first really real sentence was the one that I served starting in 85. How old are you when you got that sentence?

I think I was already 40, so I couldn't even say, oh, I was young. What's it like to go in at 40 with that amount of time? You know, when I went in, that was a huge, I was looking at 78 years. It was a huge sentence. When I would talk to the other women, I was in Baltimore City jail. They'd say 78 years. By the time I got released, 78 years in the feds was nothing. Because women were coming in with triple life sentences on drug conspiracies.

And many of them were girlfriend crimes, meaning they had taken messages for a boyfriend or husband. And because of the way conspiracy law works in the federal system where you don't actually have to show the drugs, you can just say, oh, yeah, it was five key. People got these huge sentences. So that was what Jose was talking about before, about the long sentences in mass incarceration. You know, the only thing I remember about looking at that time, the first night that I was locked up after they took me out of the police lockup was I am not going to, two things. One, you're going to prison for political reasons. You better be damn sure you really believe those things. So I did a lot of thinking. and the other was you're not going to let these fools take your sense of humor

because if they do that, you're lost. So, yeah, it was worth it. And, yeah, they didn't take my sense of humor. Did you decide that you believed in the cause? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It wasn't a question, really. It was just, I better be sure, because I had seen, you know,

in our case there were no snitches. And it's something I'm very proud of. But we had seen in a lot of political cases where people who weren't really ready, you know, we said, I'm a revolutionary. You better know what that means and what you really believe in in order to take that on. On the other hand, I've seen people who stood up to grand juries because they just knew that snitching is wrong. And that if you go to a grand jury, you know, people used to say, oh, if you don't know anything, go to the grand jury. What can happen? Well, what can happen is they say to you, Joe Blow, did you ever go to any of these meetings? No, but you live with so-and-so, right? And didn't they go to those meetings? Oh, yeah. You know, you're all of a sudden, or just by not being someplace, they know, okay, cross that person off. So it wasn't that person, then it must be that other person that looks sort of like them. So we had a whole, from years ago, we had a movement in the women's movement.

don't talk to grand juries. And I have very good, dear friends who, they didn't even know why they were being called to a grand jury, but they resisted it and they did time without, you know, I have the highest respect for people like that. People who really believe the things that you get all weepy about when you see other people do them about, you know, really caring about your neighbor as much as you care about yourself. Do you wish you advocated for those causes in a different way looking back on it now? Like not using pipe bombs or anything like that? You know, do I think we were so effective or something?

No. But I'm just not sorry for any of it. You know, I am sorry for what I put my sister, whom I adore, who's still alive and we're very good friends. And she had to nurse my father when he was dying because I wasn't there and I would be calling her from prison saying, I have 15 minutes. Can you tell me how he's doing? I'm sorry for that. And I'm really fortunate that we were really careful.

But, you know, my partner, Susie Day, writer, is always saying to me, you know, people try really hard not to make mistakes, but they still make them. So I do know that we were taking a huge responsibility for potentially hurting someone. And I take that all really seriously, but I don't really spend a lot of time worrying about it because I did it. And I believed in it. And we created a record. I mean, I read some of our communiques now. They're not really widely available. And they're pretty, you know, we have to say exactly the right thing about what the U.S. is doing in Central America.

So they're kind of boring. But I'm kind of proud of them that we worked so hard to say what we thought the government was doing to people around the world and still is. So would you say it was the wrong way to go about things, whether you regret it or not, Was it still wrong? Like you wouldn't want to tell kids today to go out and do that. No. And I, you know, the movement had been at a certain high level of resistance. And it wasn't any longer when we were doing those things.

It was just we were, we still thought we were in a historical period that we were just passed. So no, no, no. But what I do think is that the cleverness that we had to do, to do the things we did can also be used. That's why I love what we did with RAP, with changing the regulations of the parole board or looking at and taking the data that the state creates and using it against them.

One person dies every three days in the New York State prison system and the average age of death is between 57 and 58. I mean, that's outrageous. And they just, you know, oh, here are the data. And we take that and try to use it against them. We try to take a situation of enormous suffering of families with, you know, as your loved one in prison is getting older, you're getting older too. And so there was one mother of a man.

He died in prison and she died recently. But you could see in the pictures that, of her visiting him, her aging and towards the end, you know, in New York State, a lot of families get on these buses that leave from New York City at midnight and drive, you know, to different prisons around the state and mostly women, because that's mostly who visits the men and the women. It's another question. Get on that bus after work on a Friday night and get dropped off in the freezing cold outside like Clinton, which is 45 minutes from Montreal, freezing in the winter. They get dropped at the hospitality center, which is like a shed with lockers. And they have to

stand there until, what time does visiting start probably eight. And then they get mistreated by the guards and, you know, going to see their loved ones. And that's what this woman's life was like until she was 90. So we take that kind of its brutality, its violence, its suffering. And we try to turn it into ammunition to change a system, which is. which is about nothing other than racism. Because, as I think I heard Jose said, say, and Farid used to say this too. If this were happening to white people, it wouldn't be happening.

There would be changes. And that's what I grew up seeing. My friends who would mess up, they didn't get arrested. Or if they did, you know, they got out the next day. They would be sent to some, like, you know, not a reform school, like in the old 40s movies, but, you know, a nice little reform school, or they would be sent to a military school. You know, I wouldn't want it. You might not want it. I can't imagine anyone wanting it.

Better than prison, I think. So all of those opportunities, which were there for white kids, because when white kids messed up, it was like, oh, there's something wrong with the kid. They need, you know, therapy, they need this, they need that. But for black kids and Puerto Rican kids, they were in prison. What was your experience in federal prison, a woman's federal prison like, compared to what we see in the media and on TV right now? Well, first of all, I mean, right now in the media, we are seeing some true stories of what goes on in the federal system for women, which is rape by guards. and then mistreatment. The women, Dublin, California, which when I was in it was an FCI,

so it had maximum security and minimum security prisoners. And now it apparently got turned minimum. But it had then and still does, I think, well, it's being closed, a lot of immigrant cases, a lot of immigrants, and a lot of people who didn't, who's first, language versus English, and they had an extra vulnerability. And the guards took total advantage of that for sexual favors, for just horrendous kind of treatment.

In the last few years, there was a scandal about it, and the prison now has been closed, along with some other federal prisons. But the women have been shipped out in terrible conditions to other prisons. around the country, where, of course, they're targeted by the guards because they're the ones who blew the whistle. So that's what's actually happening. You know, I don't watch a lot of prison drama on TV. It makes me angry because I think there's a lot of, like, kind of icky fascination. I mean, for me, the worst thing about prison is it takes away your, totally your agency. in each moment, you know that, and we have friends who were beaten almost to death by guards in New York State,

and they can then get out and sue and maybe get a lot of money. But in that moment, they could die. And you are aware of that, that in that room, with that you and that one guard, that you have no recourse. And that is part of being human is feeling like you have the ability to affect what's going to happen to you next. If you don't walk out in traffic, you won't get hit by a car probably. The difference, I think, is that, you know, as Mumia Abu Shemal, a really great black political prisoner who should be out and has done, I think, 50 years now, in Pennsylvania used to say that the thing about prison is the sameness, is the unrelenting routine,

the same thing over and over again, the same lack of connection to the outside world, all of that. So that's one thing. The other thing is that for women, because there are fewer women in the federal system than man, when we got moved from one prison to another, there was always cross-country. And that cross-country trip chained up and black-boxed,

as I always was, because I was high security, on a plane where if you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to go in chains and black-box with a marshal. And you couldn't close the door of the bathroom because there's no room in there for a marshal to get in there with your plain bathroom. I mean, the whole humiliation and dehumanization of the transfer. But I guess for me, the thing that doesn't show up is that what I saw in the women's prisons was genocide. And I mean that, you know, people think genocide. They think massive killing.

They think rightly what is being done right now to the Palestinian people. But genocide is the attempt to destroy in whole or in part of people. And if that people is black people in the United States, Latino people in the United States, indigenous people in the United States, the ones who have survived the original genocide. And I was in prison with all women of color in their child-bearing years. So they were between like 20 and, you know, on up. But if you get arrested at the age of 20, any children you have, you can't parent,

and you can't have more children. I mean, in the state, they actually have in some states, very few. They have FRP family reunification program and trailers. But in the federal system, there's nothing like that. At least there wasn't, I got out in the end of 99, so there may be some camps where they have trailer visits now, but there weren't that. So that's a whole chunk, a large number of women who are being prevented from having children,

taking care of their families. And to me, that totally meets. And then if you double that triple quadruple by counting all the black men in prison across the country, that's cutting off a generation. And that's another part of the definition of genocide, is separating, removing a generation from, like in South Africa, during the AIDS, the height of the AIDS crisis when a whole generation of people were dying of AIDS before it was before the drugs were available.

So that's what I saw and that's what I don't think. Because we are in this country, this is what rap is dealing with. We are addicted to punishment and we think that that's justice. We think that

people say just, even we in the movement, you know, justice for someone who's been killed by the cops. Justice does not mean the cop going to prison. Justice means no more killing of black people by cops. So with rap, we are trying to upend the parole system and make it look at people for who they are now and not who they were when they first came to prison. If we could do that, that's part of overturning the incarceration system because then you're saying, oh, okay, don't put people in.

prison and just throw away the key. Let them be part of rehabilitation programs from the beginning. Well, I should restorative justice start when people get out. It should start from the moment that interpersonal harm is created. So that's what we're up against because we all, and we're, it's bred into us, you know, punish him. What year did you get out of? a prison? I got out towards the end of 99. How has the world changed upon getting out in regards to the way people who have never been to prison would look at someone like you who went to prison and who was also a woman? Well, I think because of people like you who want to tell stories of people who've been incarcerated who see that the population of the United States doesn't stop at the prison

walls. More people aren't shocked or aren't horrified or don't go like that. I think there's, some of that is great and some of that I think unless people decide to do something about it, it's just, it can become present company accepted. It can become entertainment. And that's a danger now. But I think there is more awareness. I think there's a tremendous movement right now around international issues and genocide, which is very, very moving to me to see just from every age group. Working in rap is, for me, a continuum but a re-emergence of a moly

of a movement that I was motivated by in the 70s. I mean, when I said when I was a little kid, I just wanted things to be fair, and I wanted everyone to have the same choices. So I was against, I hated racism. I wanted to do something about it. But what really organized me was in the 60s, when I saw the Black Panthers and others talking about power,

political power, that if you have political power, then you can end the crime of racism. Then you can end the suffering of hunger and homelessness. And then, you know, there was a long period when so many organizations were destroyed or people became, you know, burnt out. And now I'm seeing in rap, it feels like that same energy of, of people who say, you know what, we might as well try to change things because this is not, this ain't living. This is not acceptable. And we can't turn away from it.

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So don't wait. Shop Wayfair's Memorial Day clearance now through May 25th. Wayfair, every style, every home. Because then we lose our humanity. What do you think is the one takeaway you want people to get from listening to your story? prisons are part of state violence. So if you think hunger is bad, if you think it's bad, that there are people, I don't know, here in New York City, you can't walk anywhere without seeing people sleeping on the street. If you don't like that stuff, fight to end the racist punishment system.

because as long as we have a system that thinks it's okay and legal to keep people in prison for their entire lives for something that they did when they were very young, then nothing else can change. That's the kind of justice we're talking about to overturn that so that we have different systems of holding each other accountable. for interpersonal harm, that we have systems that are capable of holding this state accountable, that don't involve a trial and prison, but involve more disarming of those who misuse their power. So don't turn away. And, you know, people say it could happen to you. I don't really think that. I don't think there's, you know, it doesn't happen to you.

Daniel Penny just got away with killing a black man in New York on the subway because we still have a system that sees white people as having sort of the right to take power into their own hands, whereas black people don't. So I don't think it can happen to anyone, but I think it can happen to you because it's happening to me. Laura, thank you for coming on the show today. and sitting down. I think you did great.

You were worried you wouldn't have to save voices. Well, I'm not. But I will say go to wrapcampaign.com and join our work. Please, if you're in New York State, we need everyone.

Definitely. We'll have the link to everything in the description of both of your guys' episodes. Great. I hope you have a great holiday season. Thank you. Thanks.

It's great to meet you. You too.