MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Wire’: Plight of Political Prisoners in U.S.

Nina Rosenblum’s documentary “Through the Wire” (at the Monica 4-Plex) has the furious deliberateness of a morally righteous political expose.

The condition it uncovers--the incarceration of the radical political activists Susan Rosenberg, Alejandrina Torres and Sylvia Baraldini for two years in a high-security “control unit” in Lexington, Ky.--has been reported in the press and on television, but without much fanfare. “Through the Wire” is, among other things, an attempt to reclaim the story from the slag heap of past penal injustices.

More important, it’s a caution, since the federal court decision that shut down this particular unit was subsequently overturned in 1989, less than a year after the women were moved to other prisons. According to the film, 16 American prisons containing similar sensory-deprivation control units are currently being planned or constructed.

The incarceration took the form of, in effect, a prison-within-a-prison in the basement of the federal penitentiary. The women were completely isolated from the rest of the prison community and from any outside visitors, and regularly strip-searched and rousted from their sleep. The block-like enclosure, continually lit, was, until political and human rights groups intervened, painted stark white; the women were under 24-hour video camera surveillance; the windows offered no view--none of the prisoners saw the sky, or a tree, for over a year. (Inexplicably, TV sets were provided. Is this a recognition that, in American society, TV deprivation is the most unthinkable torture of all?)

By any standard, the sentences handed down to these women were unusually severe: Rosenberg, a member of the May 19 Communist Organization, was sentenced to 58 years in prison for possession of weapons and explosives; Torres, a member of the radical Puerto Rican independence group FALN, was convicted of seditious conspiracy to bomb a U.S. military installation near Chicago; Baraldini, an Italian citizen who was radicalized in her ‘60s student days at the University of Wisconsin, was sentenced to 43 years for aiding the prison escape of a fellow radical. All show the effects of sensory deprivation: They’re bone-white and vacant-eyed, yet still fiercely resistant and eloquent in detailing their human rights.

Beyond recounting these circumstances, “Through the Wire” doesn’t provide too many more details in its examination of what exactly these three women stand convicted of. The facts are stated, but not the extent of the actual dangers to society that these women posed. Rosenblum accepts the women’s own verdicts--that they are political prisoners--without examining in any way the possible linkages between radical activism and social pathology. She offers up the glowing testimony of their families, home movies of Rosenberg as a toddler, etc.

The film (Times-rated Mature for occasional strong language) doesn’t explicitly negate the women’s criminality but, in effect, it sides with their political agenda. After all, the political-prisoner label has been co-opted by thugs from the far left to the far right. The violation of the prisoners’ constitutional rights is clearly not the sole issue here. Would the filmmakers have made a movie about, say, three Klansmen in a similar situation?

The film’s point, of course, is that in American society, it is only the radical left that undergoes the severest incarcerations, and Rosenblum points up examples to prove the point. (A Klansmen, for example, got 23 months for an offense similar to Rosenberg’s.) The movie doesn’t attempt to document whether these control units have a covert history in the American penal system stretching back before the ‘80s. It doesn’t get into why these units are possibly proliferating at this point in history, as opposed to, say the ‘60s, when radical-left activism was rampant. It doesn’t point up the irony, for these particular prisoners, that sensory-deprivation tortures have been practiced in Communist countries. (Only right-wing models are invoked.) It doesn’t explore the women’s psychologies, only the outrage of their predicament.

Except, perhaps, in one scene, where Rosenberg’s father reads, haltingly, a card his daughter sent him from prison. The card is full of noble, high-flown political sentiments, and the impersonality is a little spooky. But then we see the card, and scrawled on it is what looks like Susan’s drawing of a little girl.

‘THROUGH THE WIRE’

An Original Cinema release. Producer/director Nina Rosenblum. Screenplay Rosenblum and Carlos Norman. Music Nona Hendryx.