Kathy Boudin

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Kathy Boudin (born 1943) is an American radical, who was convicted in 1984 for her involvement in a robbery that resulted in the killing of three people, and who became a public health expert while in prison.

Contents 1 Early life and family 2 Weather Underground 3 1981 Brinks Robbery 4 Prison and Transformation 5 Parole 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading

[edit] Early life and family

Kathy Boudin was born in 1943 into a Jewish family with a long left-wing history, and was raised in Greenwich Village, New York. Her great-uncle was Louis Boudonovitch Boudin, a Marxist theorist. Her father, attorney Leonard Boudin, had represented such controversial clients as Judith Coplon, Fidel Castro, and Paul Robeson. A National Lawyers Guild attorney, Leonard Boudin was the law partner of Victor Rabinowitz, himself counsel to numerous left-wing organizations. Kathy’s older brother, Michael Boudin, is currently the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Kathy Boudin attended kindergarten at the Little Red School House and its high school, the Elisabeth Irwin High School in Manhattan. Although she went to Bryn Mawr College to study medicine, her interests quickly turned to politics. Her last year at Bryn Mawr was spent studying in the Soviet Union. In 1965 she studied for a year in the Soviet Union, was paid 75 rubles a month by the Soviet government and, according to her resume, taught on a Soviet collective farm. Kathy Boudin also attended receptions and functions with her parents at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York. During this period it has been reported that the CIA intercepted correspondence between Boudin and her father in which he made arrangements for her to participate in one of the World Festivals of Youth and Students. She also attended Case Western Reserve University School of Law for one year.

[edit] Weather Underground

In the 1960s and 1970s, Boudin became heavily involved with the Weather Underground, which described themselves as a "fifth column" of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. The Weathermen bombed the Pentagon, the US Capitol, the New York Police Benevolent Association, the New York Board of Corrections, as well as the offices of multinational companies. Boudin, along with Cathy Wilkerson, was a survivor of the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the premature detonation of a bomb that had been intended for a soldiers' dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Boudin was 27 at the time. Both women were awaiting trial, out on bond for their alleged actions in Days of Rage in Chicago several months earlier. Wilkerson had been released on a $20,000 bond and Boudin was out on a $40,000 bond.

A declassified FBI report on foreign contacts of the Weather Underground Organization produced by the FBI’s Chicago Field Office reported that, "On February 10, 1976, a source in a position to possess such information advised that Leonard Boudin ... had indicated to a friend that Kathie [sic] was presently in Cuba." Kathy Boudin’s father had connections directly to Fidel Castro: Leonard Boudin was Castro’s lawyer.

[edit] 1981 Brinks Robbery

Main article: Brinks robbery (1981)

In 1981, when Kathy Boudin was 38 years old, she and several members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brinks armored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York. After Boudin dropped her infant son, Chesa, at a baby sitter's she took the wheel of the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck. She waited in a nearby parking lot as her heavily armed accomplices took another vehicle to a local mall where a Brinks truck was making a delivery. They confronted the guards and firing immediately broke out, severely wounding guard Joe Trombino and killing his co-worker, Peter Paige. The four then took $1.6 million in cash and rendezvoused with Boudin.

An alert high-school student called the police after spotting the heavily armed gang abandoning the getaway vehicle and entering the U-Haul. A police officer spotted and pulled over the U-Haul, but they could only see Boudin in the drivers seat. Boudin then got out of the cab, and raised her hands.

The police officers who caught them testified that Boudin, feigning innocence, pleaded with them to put down their guns and got them to drop their guard; Boudin said she remained silent, that the officers relaxed spontaneously. After the police did lower their weapons six of the men in the back of the truck armed with automatic weapons came out of the back of the truck, surprising the four police officers. A police officer, Waverly Brown, was killed instantly. Boudin and David Gilbert, a Weatherman radical and the father of Boudin's infant son, allegedly acted as decoys as well as getaway drivers: The Brinks robbers the police were searching for were all from the Black Liberation Army and drove a red car. Officer Edward O'Grady lived long enough to empty his revolver, but as he reloaded, he was shot several times with an M16. Ninety minutes later, he died on a hospital operating table. The other two officers escaped with only minor injuries. The occupants of the U-Haul scattered, some climbing into another getaway car, others carjacking a nearby motorist while Boudin attempted to flee on foot. An off-duty corrections officer apprehended her shortly after the shoot out. When she was arrested, Boudin gave her name as Barbara Edson.

Three other Black Liberation Army members failed to escape that day. Weatherman David Gilbert, Samuel Brown, and Judith Alice Clark crashed their own car while making a sharp turn, and were arrested by police. Two days later, Samuel Smith and Nathaniel Burns were spotted in a car in New York. After a gunfight with police that left Smith dead, Burns was captured. Three more participants were arrested several months later.

The majority of the defendants received three consecutive sentences of 25 years to life, making them eligible for parole in the year 2058. Boudin hired Leonard Weinglass to defend her. Weinglass, a law partner of Boudin's father, arranged for a plea bargain and Boudin pled guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for one twenty years to life sentence.

[edit] Prison and Transformation

Boudin was incarcerated in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility where she worked with AIDS patients and in adult education. While there, she had a central role in creating five formal programs: ^[1]

• the Teen Program, supporting teens and pre-teens whose mothers are incarcerated, strengthening the mother-child bond during their separation, and helping the teens become positive, healthy, young adults;
• the Parent Education Program, helping inmate mothers to learn to be responsible parents to pre-school, grade school and teenage children while separated by prison;
• the Adult Literacy Program, which used an innovative curriculum that Boudin wrote, was an outgrowth of the work she did for her Masters Degree in Adult Education, earned while at Bedford Hills;
• the AIDS and Women’s Health Program is the first peer community health program devoted to AIDS among prisoners; and
• the College Program, which provided courses and degrees to incarcerated women. Boudin helped organize a consortium of private colleges to offer this program after New York State cut all public funding for higher education in prisons.

While incarcerated, Boudin published articles in the Harvard Educational Review ("Participatory Literacy Education Behind Bars: AIDS Opens the Door," Summer 1993, 63(2)),^[2], in Breaking the Rules: Women in Prison and Feminist Therapy by Judy Harden and Marcia Hill ("Lessons from a Mother's Program in Prison: A Psychosocial Approach Supports Women and Their Children," published simultaneously in Women and Therapy, 21),^[3] and in Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum-Security Prison.

She co-authored The Foster Care Handbook for Incarcerated Parents published by Bedford Hills in 1993.^[4] She co-edited Parenting from inside/out: Voices of mothers in prison, jointly published by correctional institutions and the Osborne Foundation.^[5]

Boudin also wrote and published poetry while incarcerated, publishing in books and journals including the PEN Center Prize Anthology Doing Time, Concrete Garden 4, and Aliens at the Border.^[6] She won an International PEN prize for her poetry in 1999.^[7]

Boudin continued to pursue her education as a doctoral student at the City University of New York (CUNY), which included participation in the CUNY Graduate Center research team that produced the study Changing Minds: The Impact of College in a Maximum-Security Prison.^[8]

[edit] Parole

Boudin was granted parole on August 20, 2003 in her third parole hearing, and released from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility on September 17, 2003. She accepted a job in the H.I.V./AIDS Clinic at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, meeting the work provisions of parole that required active job prospects.^[9]

A controversy arose as the victim's family and others disputed whether she was truly contrite for her crime or instead was masking her radical politics in order to gain her freedom. Supporting this allegation was a statement, years earlier, from William Kunstler, a law partner of Leonard Weinglass, Boudin's attorney. Kunstler had explained Boudin's evolution from political activist to violent revolutionary: “I went to Bedford Hills penitentiary a few weeks ago and talked to Kathy Boudin. Kathy had reached a point where she thought, along with others, that non-violence was ineffective, and that you have to take the next step, into violence.” ,^[10]

After her parole, Boudin published in the Fellowship of Reconciliation's publication Fellowship ("Making a Different Way of Life", May/June 2004).

Kathy Boudin and her family are the subject of the book "Family Circle", published in 2004.

[edit] See also

• Cathy Wilkerson

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• New York Times - Topics: Kathy Boudin collected news stories including commentary and archival articles since 1983
  • New York Times; October 1, 2006; It has been a quarter-century since a group of self-styled freedom fighters, including Judith A. Clark, carried out an armored-car robbery in Rockland County, New York. The holdup was a final eruption of Vietnam-era extremism and a shattering event for Rockland County, which lost two local police officers and a Brinks guard.
  • New York Times; November 2, 2003 Underground Woman. Some mistakes are so big, so damaging, so predictable and dumb that in the end the only decent response is silence. Kathy Boudin's big mistake, last of many, was to help an armed gang of black drug addicts rob a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York, in the hope it would hurry a new American revolution and make life better for everybody. This strategic program was the culmination of a debate beginning in the mid-1960's among certain young American radicals about the proper response of the left to racism, imperialism, the war in Vietnam and other ills loosely identified as "the system." By the time Kathy, then 38 and a new mother, signed on for a role in the robbery, the debate had driven away all but a few dozen hard-core cadre. When the shooting stopped on October 21, 1981, a Brinks guard and two patrolmen were dead and the police had handcuffed most of the gang, including Kathy and her partner, David Gilbert, father of her 14-month-old son, Chesa, left with a baby sitter on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for pickup after the robbery.
  • New York Times; September 18, 2003; With Bouquet And a Wave, Boudin Is Free 22 Years Later. Kathy Boudin, a former 1960's radical, took part in an armored-car robbery in 1981 that left two police officers and a security guard dead.
  • New York Times; September 6, 2003; Housing Complicates Boudin's Release. When Kathy Boudin was granted parole last month after 22 years in prison for her role in a 1981 armored-car robbery and shootout that left three dead, her supporters thought it would be just a matter of days before she gained freedom.
• Letter from Kathy Boudin '65 written in 2001 after she had been incarcerated for 19 years
• Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Prisoner" The New Yorker, July 16, 2001
• Editorial, "Kathy Boudin's Time" The Nation, September 15, 2003
• Review of Family Circle The Nation, January 5, 2004
• “A Family Circle From Hell” 26 Thomas Jefferson Law Review 409 (2004), a review written by Arthur Austin
• Abby Luby, "Kathy Boudin's Impact" Bedford Record-Review, September 2005