Breaking the walls of silence: an extract from ‘A History of the World in Six Plagues’

Edna Bonhomme’s ​A History of the World in Six Plagues is an original, revolutionary new social and scientific history, examining the role that confinement has played in fostering and hindering epidemics, from Cholera to COVID-19. In this extract, Bonhomme explores the history of HIV/AIDS in the US prison system through the work of Kathy Boudin, a poet, anarchist and co-founder of far-left Marxist group, the Weather Underground. Given a severe prison sentence for her alleged involvement in a failed heist, Boudin set her radical vision to work on advocacy for HIV-positive incarcerated people.

Bedford Hills is a typical northeastern American town. With lush rolling hills, colonial estates, and garish strip malls, the Westchester hamlet is home to three thousand people. Midway between the Hudson River and the Connecticut border, the settlement is a menagerie of dense woodlands sprinkled with oaks and cow pastures. Some would assume that Bedford Hills, by virtue of being along the Metro North train line, is an extended suburb of New York City. Near the edge of the municipality, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility is the largest penal institution for women in the state of New York. In the 1980s, like many women’s detention centers, 20 percent of the women at Bedford Hills were HIV-positive. Incarcerated women were one of the most vulnerable risk groups for the virus at the time.

During the first decade of the HIV epidemic, the virus’s blight at Bedford Hills prison was far grimmer than in civil society. Between 1988 and 1994, AIDS-related deaths were the leading cause of death for African American women in New York State, which impacted incarcerated and formerly incarcerated members of this group. Bedford Hills was not unusual. By 1989, New York State had more AIDS cases than any other state. Like the women at other prisons in New York State, the women at Bedford Hills were disproportionately HIV-positive. While the disease was associated with the gay community during the 1980s, incarcerated women suffered. Some of them believed they acquired the virus through intravenous drug use, while others believed the transmission occurred from an HIV-infected partner – either a husband or a john. What was clear was that some of the inmates were segregated by prison guards, without clarity about when they would be re-integrated with other inmates. Others wanted more information about the life cycle of the HIV virus. In the late 1980s, at the height of the epidemic at Bedford Hills, several of the prisoners took action to get clarity about the ailment and the impact it would have on the women in their facility. At the height of the epidemic, the AIDS Committee for Education (ACE), an organization at Bedford Hills that educated and counseled women who were living with HIV, was founded by three ardent activists: an HIV positive person and two former Weather Underground comrades – Katrina Haslip, Judith Clark, and Kathy Boudin.

When she first found out that she was HIV-positive in 1987, Katrina Haslip was afraid to tell her fellow Bedford Hills inmates. That year, she was more than halfway through her five-year sentence for pickpocketing. Like many of the African American women at Bedford Hills, she felt that her prison term did not match the crime, but her conviction paled when compared to her HIV status. The prognosis was a death sentence. A former sex worker, intravenous drug user, and recipient of a blood transfusion – three risk groups benchmarked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – Haslip worried that Bedford medical authorities had not tested her previously. Early on during the AIDS epidemic, HIV-positive women at Bedford Hills, like herself, were initially segregated from other inmates, even though people knew that HIV could only be spread through blood and sexual fluids. Another issue that upset her was that she and other HIV-positive women prisoners believed that they were being denied treatment. In the beginning, she admitted that she knew very little about the disease, but for Haslip, she was motivated to be an AIDS educator because she felt that ‘Women were dying in their cells and in the hospitals. They were dying because they were giving up and because they felt there was no hope.’ Co-founding ACE was a way to challenge that disenchantment.

In the early 1990s, Judith Clark described herself as a ‘red diaper’ baby, an epithet for children of Communist activists. Growing up in Brooklyn in a Jewish intellectual household, she was ingrained early on in an anti-racist fray. In 1963, when she was a junior in high school, African American parents in New York City demanded that schools be integrated, asking white teachers and students to join their boycott. Clark and several of her peers joined the boycott, the genesis of her involvement in the US Civil Rights movement. Like Boudin, her fervor grew from the moderate activities in the Students for Democratic Society into more zealous actions with the Weather Underground, which included the Brink’s truck robbery. By the time she went to trial, she defended herself and exclaimed to the jury, ‘Revolutionary violence is necessary, and it is a liberating force.’ Judge David Ritter, believing that she was unfit for society, sentenced Clark to a minimum of seventy-five years in prison. Between 1985 and 1987, she was placed in solitary confinement, after prison guards discovered her plans to escape Bedford. Bereft of her essence when she was in severe captivity, she slowly assimilated into a communal life through HIV advocacy. When describing her motivation for co-founding ACE, Clark noted: ‘Sometimes when you’re handed something on a platter, you don’t understand what it took to get it. Perhaps that is part of what led me to realize, when AIDS became a crisis, that we had to do something ourselves.’ Like the two other founders of ACE, Clark went back to her roots by assuaging the alienation HIV inmates felt from their family, friends, prison community, and society at large. 

A duty to family was a central feature of why some Bedford Hills inmates joined the ACE Program. At its height, there were 800 people at Bedford Hills. Still, given how women disproportionately provide childcare – within and outside of prison – by the 1970s, the facility had to reckon with another factor: 85 percent of the 450 women at Bedford Hills had children. Many of them relied on an extended family to take care of their children while they were incarcerated. Others went through a metamorphosis, when they recognized some relatives were HIV-positive. 

For many members of ACE, their participation was a form of mutual aid, an opportunity to acquire information and camaraderie. Aida Rivera, a vital leader in ACE, saw her life transformed in ways she could not imagine prior. When Aida was arrested in 1983, she wasn’t aware that she would be sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Raised in Brooklyn, she navigated a bilingual life, hearing her parents speak Spanish and responding to them in English. Her working-class Puerto Rican parents did everything they could do to sustain the family – taking jobs as they came, whether on an assembly line or in the junkyard. At sixteen, Aida dropped out of high school and took work at a factory.

As a mother of five children, her earnings were not enough to support her family, so she began a flexible occupation where she could make more money: She turned to selling drugs. Eventually, she was arrested for drug possession. Sentenced to fifteen years to life, Rivera knew she would miss her children’s school plays or graduation ceremonies. The first three years in Bedford Hills were quiet, but when Rivera’s sister tested positive for HIV in 1987, her subdued nights were replaced with work and study. As a result, she joined the ACE Program to learn about the virus and reconnect with her sibling. ‘ACE changed my life,’ she’d say. ‘I began to look at things differently. I started caring about other people, even people I did not know and might never see again in life.’ The sororal community at Bedford Hills provided the means to self-educate. After earning her GED and associate degree from prison, she eventually earned a bachelor’s in education, but what mattered more at the time was the community and counsel Rivera could provide to those otherwise isolated and abandoned with what was, at the time, seen as a medical death sentence. Moreover, she had the ardor and determination of a Carthusian monk, and one of her first duties as a leader on the inside was to build relationships with HIV-afflicted inmates who could not advocate for themselves.

There is a chain of events that brought these women to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, and what stitched their lives together was their eventual commitment to justice. People in the group were seeking different things. For some, HIV campaigning was the goal, and for others, it was prison reform. Similar in objective to their well known and public-facing counterpart, ACT UP – the 1980s grassroots political group that sought to end the AIDS epidemic – ACE called prison authorities to account for the illness and death that thrummed through the queer and incarcerated communities. Unlike ACT UP, where members could stage massive street demonstrations and seek platforming from celebrity supporters, ACE predicated its work on patient empowerment and prison reform. Although both were difficult to achieve, they were able to provide group counseling for HIV inmates, they published newsletters to inform inmates about HIV, and they held educational workshops. But there were limits.
The members of ACE found numerous faults with the prison system, which was taxing physically and psychologically, especially for people living with HIV. They ate, rested, and labored in the same facility, forming kinships that provided a balm against the new plague.

Although the exact figures were not fully known to ACE members, they gathered, implicitly, that the HIV-positive people at Bedford Hills were not getting the full medical attention they deserved, nor was there adequate emotional support to navigate through the fragmentary and elusive information about HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s. Boudin encouraged us to have ‘a sense of efficacy and agency developed to all of us.’ The sheer compassion within the walls among inmates vastly contrasted with what New York State prisons exemplified during the 1980s. To even confirm a diagnosis was a hurdle. Access to HIV testing in prison was limited, meaning that those who’d wish to protect their fellow inmates, or themselves, lacked the basic resources to do so.
Education and writing were central features of ACE’s work, a mild palliative in captivity. For example, Boudin described teaching a class at Bedford Hills where the incarcerated were asked to reflect on what they knew about HIV and whom they would talk to if they tested positive for the disease. Despite being an emotionally charged issue that brooded somewhere between perplexity and shame, there was perspicacity. ‘Instead of seeing AIDS as an individual problem,’ Boudin wrote, ‘people began to see it as a common one, and one they could work on together.’ Their publication, ​Alert to AIDS, was a marriage of their literary ambition and an acknowledgment of the emotional heights that fell when telling a lover that they were HIV-positive, but more than anything, more than anything, it broke ‘the silence so that people could together begin to deal with the [AIDS] epidemic.’

As a group, ACE did not just have the intuitive sense to address the HIV pandemic through their peer support program, they also challenged the racial palette of Bedford Hills and concluded that the US prison system was inherently racist. The New York State Correctional System, with fifty-six facilities, was the third largest in the United States. Of the forty thousand inmates, eighteen hundred were women, and nearly 70 percent were from New York City. Roughly half were Black, and slightly over one-third were Latina. The demographics themselves do not explain why these people were in prison. Half of the women at Bedford Hills were convicted of drug offenses, often because Black and Latino people were more likely to be searched and seized. Boudin, who at the time believed that she would spend the rest of her life at Bedford Hills, cared less about what brought people to prison and more about how to make them healthier and happier. Boudin sought to answer the question: How does one reclaim sovereignty over one’s body when sequestered from the free world? For HIV-positive people in prison, this was nearly impossible to conceive.

The African American artist Lorraine O’Grady once wrote, ‘What alternative is there really, in creating a world sensitive to difference, a world where margins can become centers?’ Although intended to describe the subjectivity of African American women, this question also echoed what the women at Bedford were doing when they established the ACE Program. The question of who the nucleus of social justice is, both within and outside prison, forces one to think about the state of health in prison. Something happens when people see each other, not as individual subjects facing a chronic and life-threatening disease but as someone worth living and being documented – outside of a prison ID number. The history of the ACE Program at Bedford isn’t just the story of Boudin, Haslip, Clark, or Rivera, but it is a chronicle of the history of the prison itself.

​Extracted from A History of the World in Six Plagues ​by Edna Bonhomme, published by Dialogue Books.