Records
Demonstrate — International Women's Day 1983, In Solidarity With All Freedom Fighters
1983 International Women's Day demonstration flyer in solidarity with women political prisoners and freedom fighters, in the political tradition of PFOC's solidarity work with the Black Liberation Army, the FALN, and the New Afrikan Independence Movement.
The Insurgent, Vol. 4 No. 1 — International Women's Day Special Issue (Winter 1988)
The Insurgent was the newsletter of the Committee to Fight Repression, a 1980s publication produced by friends and families of U.S. political prisoners and prisoners of war. It covered the federal prison control units (Marion and the new women's unit at Lexington), Puerto Rican independence prisoners, Black liberation, grand-jury resistance, and anti-imperia...
The Women of the Ohio 7
Zine of statements and autobiographical writings by Patricia Gros Levasseur, Carol Saucier Manning, and Barbara Curzi-Laaman — the three women among the seven United Freedom Front / Ohio 7 defendants tried in 1989 in Springfield, Massachusetts on federal sedition and RICO charges. The zine reproduces their pre-trial statements (including Manning's account of...
There Are Women Political Prisoners in U.S. — Shut Down the Lexington Women's Control Unit
Single-page organizing flyer issued in 1986-87 demanding the closure of the Lexington High Security Unit (HSU), a basement control unit at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lexington, Kentucky opened in October 1986 specifically to hold women political prisoners under conditions of sensory deprivation. The flyer profiles the three women then incarcerat...
Wimmin Prisoners Survival Network — No. 2, Winter 1988/89
Second issue of the Wimmin Prisoners Survival Network newsletter (Winter 1988/89). One of the most consistent late-1980s vehicles for women political-prisoner and prisoner-of-war support work in the United States, in close political alignment with the PFOC prisoner-support tradition and the campaign against the Lexington High Security Unit (the federal contr...
The Case of Silvia Baraldini
Out of Control Lesbian Committee to Support Women Prisoners audio program on Italian anti-imperialist political prisoner Silvia Baraldini, held in the U.S. from 1982 to 1999 (including in the notorious Lexington High Security Unit) before her transfer to Italy. Sourced from search.freedomarchives.org.
NPR Report on the Lexington Control Unit
NPR radio report on the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Women's High Security Unit at Lexington, Kentucky — the underground control unit Amnesty International condemned as violating UN minimum rules and that was eventually closed in 1988 after sustained national and international human-rights pressure. Sourced from search.freedomarchives.org.
Lexington Prison Interviews (1987)
1987 interviews with the women held at the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Lexington High Security Unit — Susan Rosenberg, Silvia Baraldini, and Alejandrina Torres — documenting the underground control unit's sensory deprivation, 23-hour cell time, strip searches by male guards, and other conditions condemned by Amnesty International. Sourced from search.freedoma...