Uncle Sam's Political Underground

Human rights violations are not just a Second or Third World affair. That, briefly put, is the message that will be beamed across America this month when the POV (Point of View) documentary series returns to public television.

The series opens with Through the Wire, a frightening look at a high-security mind-control unit for female political prisoners located in the federal correctional facility at Lexington, Kentucky. Produced and directed by Nina Rosenblum, and narrated by movie star Susan Sarandon, Through the Wire documents a genuine "it can happen here" horror story.

The Lexington High Security Unit (HSU) was opened in 1986 to hold prisoners sent there at the unilateral discretion of the director of the federal prison system. As the Lexington warden confirms to Rosenblum on camera, the HSU is not a punitive unit. For more than a year and a half in the late 1980s, the Lexington HSU was home to three women serving long federal sentences for politically motivated crimes.

The three women were held in underground isolation cells that are painted all-white, are kept constantly lit by bright-white fluorescent lighting, and are under constant video surveillance. They were sometimes awakened every hour or two during the "night." They were allowed out of the cells for only one hour per day and only one visitor per month. They were subjected to strip searches which amounted to sexual assault by another name.

None of the women on the HSU had had any disciplinary problems in their previous places of incarceration. One of the women, Alejandrina Torres, was a fighter in the Puerto Rican independence movement. The others, Susan Rosenberg and Sylvia Baraldini, were members of a left-wing group engaged in "armed struggle" against U.S. racism and imperialism.

The three prisoners and their attorneys believe that their time in the control unit was aimed solely at breaking their will and obliterating their political identity. One of the women was told by a guard that the only way she would ever get out of the HSU was to renounce her political affiliations. This the women refused to do even as their physical and psychological situations grew demonstrably shaky.

Through the Wire forces the viewer to think long and hard about the limits of America's supposedly boundless commitment to political freedom and human rights. The Lexington HSU was eventually closed down by order of a federal judge who found that the prisoners were in fact being punished solely for their political beliefs. But by then a great deal of damage had already been done.

CIVIL LIBERTIES ISSUES ARE sometimes problematic for religiously motivated political activists, even for those of the Left variety. Our political responses tend to be rooted in the prompting of conscience and in moral ideals informed by venerable pre-Enlightenment traditions. And that's good, as a rule. But people whose politics are formed by revealed notions of right and wrong are not always the best at upholding other people's right to be horribly wrong.

That can be a problem because the really important civil liberties fights must often be waged on behalf of characters whose views or behavior are not only unpopular, but sometimes unsavory, too. We're talking about the old-style atheistic, Stalinistic Communists of the 1950s, or, in our day, gang-warring drug dealers, right-wing hate freaks, religious cultists, or "looney left" flag-burners. Or, in the case of Through the Wire, we're talking about people who, through whatever mixture of personal and political circumstances pushed their legitimate political outrage over the line into deadly, destructive, and self-defeating violence.

A passion to stand up for people like that is probably not what drew most of us to political consciousness. It's not how we prefer to expend our time, energy, or meager reputation. But like it or not, it has to be done.

It has to be done because it is right, and also because in the larger and longer term our interests are, in fact, linked with those whom we may now see as "the other." One of our spiritual ancestors, Pastor Martin Niemoller of the German anti-Nazi Confessing Church, learned this lesson too late. He expressed his regret with the famous saying, "When they came for the [Jews, Communists, trade unionists, Catholics] I did nothing because I was not [one of the above]. And finally when they came for me there was no one left to do anything."

These questions are especially fresh these days. American civil liberties took a terrible beating in the Reagan '80s. In the '60s and '70s, federal courts waged war on the idea that "because I say so" is an adequate justification for the state's behavior toward its adult citizens. But that idea is making a comeback.

Today when the citizen fights authority, authority always wins. Police authority to stop and search, prosecutorial authority to concoct conspiracies and confiscate property, military authority to dragoon ships at sea -- all are rapidly expanding as a consequence of the drug wars.

And, as the last frame of Through the Wire informs us, the federal court order that closed down the Lexington HSU was overturned by a conservative judge in a higher federal court. The appeals judge ruled that political affiliations are a legitimate classification factor in the federal prison system. A new female HSU is operating in Marianna, Florida, and civil liberties groups have thus far been denied the opportunity to inspect the "facility."

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.