A LIFE ON HOLD IN CALIFORNIA PRISON

Sara Jane Olson has gone from SLA fugitive to suburban mother to
low-key inmate. Now, in 'enforced idleness,' she awaits her 2009 release.

CHOWCHILLA, Calif. -- Shortly after 8 each weekday morning, Inmate
W94197 reports for work on the prison yard. She earns 24 cents an
hour emptying trash cans and tidying up. She is grateful for the job.

Caught in 1999 after living as a fugitive for 23 years, she was
convicted of murder and other crimes stemming from her link with the
Symbionese Liberation Army, a violent band of radicals best known for
kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.

Then Sara Jane Olson went to prison, and turned invisible.

At the Central California Women's Facility here, Olson -- whose name
was Kathleen Soliah in the heyday of the SLA -- is now a white-haired
woman of 59, serving out her seven years.

Her experience, related in letters and a series of conversations,
reveals much about punishment and survival in a state system that
holds 11,730 women.

She fears falling ill and landing in the prison healthcare
organization that experts say claims one life a week through
malpractice or neglect.

She laments the absence of anything meaningful to do. She craves
privacy. And she tiptoes nervously through each day while awaiting
that moment in 2009 when she'll go home to her husband and daughters
in Minnesota.

To be famous is no advantage. The savviest convicts strive to be
unremarkable, undeserving of concern. Olson does not discuss her
past, and few women living alongside her in this San Joaquin Valley
town are aware of it. There is, inmates say, an unwritten rule behind
bars: You do not ask an incarcerated sister what she has done.

Still, there are rumors, the marrow of prison life. Prisoners often
peer into Olson's face and insist they know her. One said she'd heard
Olson belonged to Al Qaeda.

Amid the crowd, Olson's posture is nonthreatening, a semi-slouch. Her
expression is blank. To show emotion is to attract unwanted attention
- -- or, worse, risk causing offense.

Anonymity is best.

A Fugitive Is Caught

Olson's entry into California's criminal justice system began June
16, 1999, when her minivan was pulled over by police near her home in
St. Paul, Minn. After more than two decades, she had been found,
living openly as a doctor's wife and mother of three girls in an
ivy-covered Tudor home.

"I had a really good life," Olson recalled. She acted in community
theater and taught citizenship classes. She volunteered for groups
aiding African refugees, the poor and other causes, and recorded
books for the blind.

Friends were stunned to learn that she had been associated with the
SLA, a short-lived group whose slogan was "Death to the Fascist
Insect That Preys Upon the Life of the People." Many, however,
rallied around her, raising $1 million in 10 days to win her release on bail.

Olson had been on the lam since 1976, when she was charged with
conspiracy to murder Los Angeles police officers by planting bombs
beneath their squad cars the previous year. The bombs did not explode
and no one was hurt. The eldest of five children from a middle-class
Palmdale family, she was indicted -- and then disappeared.

While accounts of her involvement with the SLA vary, she and others
say her link was forged after a close friend and five other SLA
members were killed in a shootout with Los Angeles police in 1974. In
previous interviews, Olson said she then provided shelter, food and
other aid to SLA members hiding from police but never planted any bombs.

After Olson was returned to Los Angeles for trial, prosecutors
amassed 23,000 pages of documents, fingerprints and other evidence
against her, and lined up 200 potential witnesses. The trial promised
high drama -- the saga of a fetching high school pep-squad member
turned fugitive -- and a revisiting of the social tumult of the 1970s.

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Olson decided not to
take her chances in court.

"For the first time," she recalled, "people started referring to me
as a terrorist."

Instead, she pleaded guilty to attempting to explode a destructive
device with the intent to commit murder. In another plea agreement in
a separate SLA case, she and three others were convicted of
second-degree murder stemming from a Sacramento-area bank robbery in
which customer Myrna Opsahl was killed.

"We were young and foolish," Olson said at the time in a letter to
the court, and "in the end, we stole someone's life."

Today, she doesn't want to discuss the events that landed her in
prison, but she has expressed remorse more than once in the past.

"I'm incredibly sorry," she told the state parole board in 2002. "Of
course, I can't take it back, so I have to take responsibility, and
that's what I'm doing now."

Earlier that year, Olson -- who had formally changed her name after
her arrest -- had been dispatched to Chowchilla, 260 miles north of
Los Angeles. Her community now is a warren of squat, sand-colored
buildings circled by an electrified fence. Beyond the barrier, almond
groves stretch for miles, colliding at the horizon with a sky of blinding blue.

A Steady Diet of TV

Olson's days pass in a locked, 18-foot-by-18-foot dorm-like cell
shared with seven other women. She spends hours on her metal bunk,
writing on yellow legal pads to 30 friends and relatives. She also
watches more TV than she ever has before.

The concrete room is sterile, with shower and toilet doors that have
cut-outs at waist level so inmates are always visible. Prison rules
forbid homey touches, save for pictures of family taped here and there.

While she can expound for hours on current events, history and myriad
other topics, Olson prefers not to talk about herself. She has inmate
friends but says that, aside from the many women who form lesbian
relationships, prison is not a place for sharing confidences.

"There is some sort of sisterhood in here, I guess," she said. "But
people really can't trust each other.... You can only throw so much
on other people, because they are dealing with their own isolation
from their lives."

Olson's straight hair falls just below her jaw. Thick bangs top a
narrow face bearing a thatch of wrinkles and bright blue eyes behind
large oval glasses.

A lifelong runner, she remains lean with arms tanned dark, the result
of working outside in a place where the sun slams down hard from dawn
to dusk. She is 22 years older than the average woman behind bars in
California.

In the beginning, Olson went through a period many newly incarcerated
people describe -- wondering whether she could survive. Some scream
and yell; others stare out the window day after day.

"I grabbed a shovel and dug and hoed and raked on the yard for a
couple months," Olson recalled. "Some people thought I was crazy, but
the old-timers understood."

Surviving in prison meant accepting what she called "enforced
idleness," with one monotonous day sliding into the next. The noise
is ceaseless, the facility packed to twice its intended capacity.

"We live on top of each other," she said. Anything private "has to be
done inside your head."

To escape the din and pass the time, she walks obsessively -- hour
after hour, loop after loop around the prison yard.

Her custody status is "Close A," meaning she is among the most
intensely supervised inmates. She has challenged the label because it
limits privileges, prevents her from joining certain prison programs,
requires her to be counted seven times a day and eliminates any
chance of transferring closer to home.

So far, those appeals have been denied. Her attorney, David
Nickerson, said corrections officials view her as an escape threat
who would be a danger to society if she got out. A prison spokesman
described her as a quiet inmate who caused no trouble, but would not
comment further.

About 10 times a year, Dr. Fred Peterson journeys from St. Paul to
Chowchilla to see his wife of 26 years. An emergency room physician,
Peterson tries to bring at least one of the couple's three daughters
each time, though family finances, depleted by Olson's legal bills,
are stretched thin.

The rules allow one kiss and one hug at the start of each visit, and
a second round of affection at the end.

"We make the most of it," Peterson said. "Visits are what keep
everything going, so we consider ourselves exceedingly fortunate to
be able to go."

The future, Peterson said, is a favorite topic, although plans are
vague. Nibbling on food from the visiting-room vendor, Olson receives
a run-down on her husband's work with the Inmate Family Council -- a
group that meets regularly with the warden about prisoners' concerns
- -- and enjoys detailed reports on her daughters, including their
latest boyfriends, jobs, hopes and disappointments.

Her oldest, 25, graduated from college this year and is talking about
law school. The youngest is 19 and a budding actress, while the
middle daughter, 24, is a student and singer, with a regular gig at a
jazz club.

"It was very hard on all of them," she said of her girls, "in
different ways and for different reasons. Being cut off is the worst
thing. Everything else you just deal with."

Politically 'Invigorated'

While she keeps her past private inside prison, Olson said
incarceration has "invigorated" her politics and led to an addiction
to talk radio. In one conversation over several hours, her topics
skittered from the Iran-Contra scandal to theater, poverty, African
politics, the future of the Internet, bankruptcy law, the music
industry, the war on drugs and the civil rights movement.

In the privacy of an interview, away from guards and other convicts,
the quiet inmate's voice becomes lively, her manner almost merry. Her
hands flutter to and fro, punctuating speech that reflects an avid
reader with a wide vocabulary. After a monologue of several minutes,
she stops and lets out a loud, ringing laugh, apologizing for
"standing on my soapbox."

For a year, she served on the inmate advisory council, organizing
special events and bringing grievances to the warden. She said the
experience amounted to "mostly beating one's head against a wall."

A three-year effort by inmates and their relatives to win permission
to plant a vegetable garden is one example. The project would give
inmates something to do, said Olson, one of a handful of prisoners
promoting the idea, and the harvest would be donated to local food banks.

A prison spokesman said the warden was still evaluating the
suggestion but that if approved, the garden would be limited to
flowers. Fruits or vegetables could be sneaked in and used to brew
pruno, a crude alcoholic beverage some inmates concoct behind bars.

At ground level, Olson says conflict with fellow inmates is best
borne silently. Let harassment roll off your back, because responding
could lead to an argument, followed by a disciplinary citation to mar
one's record.

The wild card is the presence of so many inmates who are mentally
ill. "They have no idea how to behave, no ability to get along," she
said. "It just adds to the anxiety of the place."

Some guards are helpful, some not. "Some staff want to be reasonable,
you can see it in their eyes," Olson said. But within the officer
corps, it doesn't pay to be inmate-friendly. "It's seen as weak.
Still, everyone knows who you can get a kind word from now and then."

Before she arrived in prison, Olson thought the experience would be
"educational." She recalled that Father Philip Berrigan, an activist
priest from Baltimore who was arrested more than 100 times before his
death in 1993, once suggested that all middle-class people should
spend time in jail to "know what goes on."

Today, Olson said, "I can still see his point, but I wouldn't wish
this experience on anyone."

California's correctional system, she says, treats all incarcerated
females as if they are "violent predators" and puts them in
high-security lockups. Yet the majority -- about 66%, according to
state figures -- are serving short terms for nonviolent crimes.

In her frequent writings for newsletters and other publications, she
elaborates: "Develop programs that place female lawbreakers in
communities where we can maintain strong ties with our families and
our homes. Help us to learn to become assets to our society, not its
outsiders."

In January, the Schwarzenegger administration offered a model
anchored in that sort of philosophy, proposing that 4,500 nonviolent
women be moved out of prison and into private, locked facilities in
their own communities.

The plan has not found enthusiastic support in the Legislature, but
it will be debated this month as part of a special session on corrections.

Olson worries most about the growing number of older women in prison.
Younger inmates prey on the elderly, stealing their belongings,
extorting food and favors.

Prison medical care, recently seized by a federal judge and placed in
the hands of a receiver, is another concern.

In 2003, Olson said, her mammogram showed a suspicious lesion, and a
follow-up biopsy was ordered. Months later, the test still hadn't
been done. Olson was not given a reason for the delay and did not
consider it unusual, given the waits routinely faced by prisoners
with more serious diagnoses.

Back in Minnesota, her husband fired off an e-mail to then-Gov. Gray
Davis. That cleared the way; the biopsy was done and all was well.
Prison officials would not comment, citing the confidentiality of
inmate records.

'That's the Old Life'

Olson says she does not stay in touch with her co-defendants, only
one of whom -- her brother-in-law, Michael Bortin -- has been
released from prison. Two others -- Bill Harris and Emily Montague,
his former wife -- are due to be released from other California
prisons within a year.

As for the SLA days, Olson says: "For me to come forward with some
kind of spiel about what I did in those times, and what was happening
from a political perspective, it's just not a discussion for public
consumption right now. That's the old life."

Has Sara Jane Olson changed in prison? The question prompts a pause.
Hard to say, she finally responds, "because I don't see myself
reflected on the outside.

"I'm older -- oh, who am I kidding, I'm old -- and I've become really
paranoid," she said. "I've also become very good at masking my
emotions. It scares my daughters, when they see my face, but in here,
it's just what you do to survive."