1986-1988: THE LEXINGTON CONTROL UNIT
In this article, Molly Carlin examines women political prisoners in the US through a case study of the Women's High Security Unit at Lexington Federal Prison (1986-88).
A MICROCOSM OF PENAL POLITICAL REPRESSION
Photograph of Susan Rosenberg, Silvia Baraldini, and Alejandrina Torres, 1989. Lexington Penitentiary, Kentucky. The Freedom Archives.
The underpinning of the American penal state exposes a direct relationship between political repression and carcerality. Whilst the United States government has repeatedly iterated the non-existence of political prisoners in its penal facilities, activists have for decades sought to prove otherwise. Examining a period of less than two years from 1986 to 1988 in Lexington, Kentucky provides an excessively clear illustration of this relationship, and the use of gendered power dynamics as part of this suppression.
In November 1986, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP) opened the women’s High Security Unit at Lexington Federal Prison. The Unit had been the subject of much anticipation and more than a decade of planning, with those who would be housed there made aware of its purpose long before their relocation. Authorities had identified prisoners charged with politically-motivated crimes held at other institutions to be transferred to Lexington, isolated entirely in a space specifically designed for this. The Unit contained sixteen solitary confinement cells in an underground wing of the prison, with a separated courtyard and facilities. [1] Walls were painted bright white, and windows in the cells were covered with screens, creating conditions of near total sensory deprivation.
Lexington’s High Security Unit (HSU) incarcerated just five women, three of whom were political activists imprisoned for their actions in radical movements. Alejandrina Torres, a Puerto Rican independence fighter; Susan Rosenberg, a North American activist with involvement in the far-left May 19th Communist Organisation and the Black Liberation Army; and Silvia Baraldini, an Italian anti-imperialist who supported Puerto Rican and Black liberation movements, were all subjected to the extreme isolation, manipulation, and degradation of Lexington.
Prisoners at Lexington were held in small cells with no natural light, no access to books or educational programmes, and highly restricted communication. [2] The women were for extensive periods entirely isolated from outside interaction, with no contact visits permitted, no interaction with other prisoners, continuous guard presence and surveillance. Only one ten-minute phone call was permitted each week, from a small list of contacts that had to be approved by the unit manager. [3] Rosenberg and Torres resisted by refusing to submit a list, eventually overturning this regulation. Whilst the High Security Unit’s political prisoners could see each other for short periods, they were entirely segregated from other inmates held in the wider Lexington Federal Prison and their interactions were highly monitored. Communication, actions, and reading habits of prisoners were consistently recorded, building a profile of each prisoner to support their politically motivated confinement.
Out of Control: Committee to Shut Down Lexington Control Unit, ‘There Are Women Political Prisoners in the U.S.’, (1988). The Freedom Archives.
The guise of the HSU as necessary for security, and the narrative of those inside the unit as immediate and dangerous threats, falls apart quite quickly. Both Torres and Rosenberg had received sentences vastly longer than the average for their non-violent crimes, and their placement in maximum security institutions was inconsistent with both the crimes they were charged with and their disciplinary record whilst in prison. FBP documents outlined selection criteria for Lexington’s inmate selection as ‘violence-prone’ or ‘escape-prone,’ yet in the cases of Torres, Rosenberg, and Baraldini, their previous actions far from aligned with this criteria. What the three did have in common, however, was alliance with radical left political organisations and crimes associated with political activism. Rosenberg and Torres were explicitly told by the unit manager ‘You can be transferred out of here if you renounce your associations, affiliations and your… uh, err, uh… views. You can have the privilege of living out your sentence in general population.’ [4]
The prison authorities’ explicit rationale for isolation as their ‘views’ and ‘affiliations’ firmly places Baraldini, Torres, and Rosenberg as political prisoners. Despite reports from Amnesty International and the ACLU condemning the psychological and physical implications of the conditions at Lexington which ‘reduce[d] prisoners to a state of submission essential for their ideological conversion,’ the Federal Bureau of Prisons insisted these were necessary. [5] Whilst conditions of solitary confinement had been used against political prisoners before, with key political activists or entire prison populations after uprisings such as at Attica State Prison in 1971, the construction of a facility with the intended purpose of separating political prisoners marked a tightening of federal policy towards radical activism. The decision was no longer to respond to each prisoners’ record and determine their security status or treatment on the basis of their actions, but to anticipate actions and punish on the basis of their political affiliations and beliefs.
Out of Control: Committee to Shut Down Lexington Control Unit, ‘There Are Women Political Prisoners in the U.S.’, (1988). The Freedom Archives.
Where the treatment of the political prisoners at Lexington was further distinguished from prior instances of suppression and isolation was in the gendered acts which amplified the feelings of oppression and degradation experienced within the unit. At a period when women became increasingly prominent in radical activism and revolutionary political movements, the establishment of a women’s only unit with such transparently political underpinnings represented a significant shift in this penal-political relationship. [6] The women faced repeated instances of sexual assault, and surveillance of their bodies through video cameras in showers, which Rosenberg caught when guards were frustrated about others ‘blocking the view.’ [7] When granted their one hour per day exercise, prisoners were strip-searched. Rosenberg and Torres experienced violent and invasive searches before entering the prison, searches that could otherwise have been carried out through x-ray. [8] The experiences of the HSU’s political prisoners were characterised by the intimidation and manipulation they experienced in attempts to diminish their political beliefs. Part of this intimidation, however, was distinctly gendered in the sexual objectification, intimidation, and assault that each activist at Lexington was subjected to.
The Lexington High Security Control Unit provides a microcosm through which to understand this penal-political relationship, and exhibits political repression as a form of gendered state violence. In the words of the Lexington women themselves, prisons are ‘a series of increasingly smaller spaces engineered to achieve greater control over and punishment of the individual prisoner.’ [9] Lexington’s regime centred not only arbitrary mechanisms to heighten security and prevent violence or escapes, but fostered intimidation, censorship, humiliation, and isolation as a form of political control and manipulation. The hostile environment that was created to pressure political prisoners represented both a physical obstacle to political organisation, and mental obstruction through extreme conditions and manipulation.
[1] Gilda Zwerman, ‘Special Incapacitation: The Emergence of a New Correctional Facility for Women Political Prisoners’, Social Justice, 15(1), (1988), pp. 31-47.
[2] Susan Rosenberg, An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country (Kensington Publishing Corp, 2011), p. 77.
[3] Rosenberg p. 77
[4] Rosenberg p. 79
[5] Jan Susler, ‘The Women’s High Security Unit in Lexington, KY’, Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, 1(5), (1989)
[6] Women made up 66% of Black Panther Party membership, and were pivotal in anti-imperial movements (as well as setting up smaller organisations such as Women Against Imperialism).
[7] Rosenberg, p. 80.
[8] Rosenberg, p. 70.
[9] Rosenberg, p. 61.
Molly Carlin is a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex. Her thesis, titled ‘How to Jail a Revolution: Theorising the Penal Suppression of United States Political Voices, 1964-2022’ looks at the use of mechanisms such as solitary confinement and censorship as politically-motivated forms of suppression.