This year’s Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer Risk-Taker Awards recognize a range of individuals and organizations who are fighting to make America's criminal justice system live up to the word 'justice'. Some, like Robert Meeropol and Cardozo Law School's Innocence Project, have focused on righting the wrongs endured by young activists or the children of activists and by those falsely convicted. Others, like Dr. Alan Berkman, Susan Rosenberg, and Laura Whitehorn, have been forceful agitators from within prisons for humanitarian changes in the treatment of inmates, all three having pioneered AIDS education and counseling and the push for other healthcare improvements while they served sentences for their militant anti-racist actions. And one group, Youth Force, focuses on progressive alternatives to the criminalization of New York's young people. JFREJ is proud to honor these activists who, with shared commitments to fairness, humaneness, and justice, lead a burgeoning movement against America's politics of vengeance.
A lesson from the social movements of the 1960s strongly affected Dr. Alan Berkman: human solidarity across national, racial and gender lines can only be realized through action. This led him to a life-long involvement in radical politics and community medicine. He was part of a medical team inside Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973, when Native Americans were besieged by armed federal troops; worked with Civil Rights Movement activists to establish a community medical clinic in Lowndes County, Alabama; treated survivors of the Attica prison rebellion, exposing poor medical care throughout the New York City and State prison systems; and acted as medical advisor to many political prisoners. While himself imprisoned as a defendant in the Resistance Conspiracy Case*, Berkman had two bouts with lymphoma. He and his co-defendants waged a battle for adequate care that led to an expose of the prison health system on "60 Minutes" and to a Congressional investigation into abuses by the federal Bureau of Prisons. Released in 1992, Berkman became the medical director of the Highbridge-Woodycrest Center, a residential facility for homeless people with AIDS. He is also on the faculty of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and has been a consultant on HIV-related issues to the South African Directorate of Mental Health and Substance Abuse since 1998. In 1999, he co-founded Health GAP (Global Access Project), an organization spearheading U.S. efforts to expand access to AIDS medications to poor countries around the world.
The Innocence Project of Cardozo Law School, founded by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, has led the way in the use of DNA to win acquittals of those wrongly convicted by our justice system. Staffed by 18 law students and Scheck, with the help of Neufeld and other lawyers, the Project has saved 11 innocent people from death row, and acquitted a total of 99 people from nearly every state in the country. They are establishing a national Innocence Network of law students to address a growing number of cases in the courts, and inside the academy, to fundamentally challenge conservative notions about the wrongfully convicted. Their efforts have significantly bolstered the movement for a death penalty moratorium.
The son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert Meeropol has dedicated his life to fighting for the fairness and justice his parents were denied, acting for 30 years as a progressive activist, author and speaker. He founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children in 1990 to provide for the educational and emotional needs of targeted activist youth and of children whose parents have lost jobs or died or have been harassed, injured, or jailed in the course of their progressive activism. In the past ten years, the RFC has awarded grants totaling $750,000. Meanwhile, over the last decade, Meeropol has spoken widely in support of efforts to abolish capital punishment. He is a founding endorser of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, and an Advisory Board Member of the Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty.
Susan Rosenberg worked as a path-breaking peer advocate against HIV/AIDS while she was a prisoner, initially sentenced in 1984 to 58 years in for possession of weapons and false identification, by far the longest sentence ever for such crimes. By all accounts, the severity of her penalty was a result of her involvement in the anti-racist and anti-war radical left of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with Berkman and Whitehorn, she was a key leader of the white anti-racist organization the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee in the late 70s and early 80s. Rosenberg spent more than 16 years in various U.S. prisons, including the infamous Lexington High Security Unit, America's first control unit for women political prisoners. The unit was eventually shut down under massive pressure from human rights activists—a movement in which Rosenberg played a major role. Despite long stretches of isolation and solitary confinement, Rosenberg retained her commitment to justice and also developed a powerful voice as a writer. She completed a Master's degree in writing from Antioch University, won a PEN award, and worked as a teacher in adult continuing education. She also served as a member of the National COINTELPRO Taskforce on Research and Information. With the help of activists including Rabbi J. Rolando Matalon, she was granted executive clemency by President Clinton in January 2001. Since her release, she has been writing and working as a human rights and anti-prison activist.
During her more than 14 years in prison as part of the Resistance Conspiracy Case*, Laura Whitehorn served as a leader in lifesaving AIDS education and counseling work for other prisoners. From inside the bars, she also fostered opportunities for prisoners to develop art, made her own compelling works, and helped organize several art shows featuring pieces by prisoners to generate support for Mumia Abu Jamal and to build a movement against the death penalty. An out lesbian, Whitehorn also helped generate interest and support for political prisoners from gay activists. She became an activist in 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements in Chicago, working in solidarity with the Black Panther Party. In the 70s, she started the Boston-Cambridge Women's Liberation School, participated in protests against Harvard's exploitative community policies, and defended black families attacked during the school busing controversy. In the 1980s, Whitehorn joined other white anti-racists in actions to support the black and Puerto Rican movements, particularly standing up for those targeted by COINTELPRO. Since her release, Whitehorn has been working at POZ, a national AIDS magazine, focusing especially on covering AIDS in prison and the criminalization of HIV transmission.
Created in 1994 by young people, Youth Force engages the city's youth as activists for social justice. One of the group's central organizing principles insists that youth "are not powerless; we should be seen and heard, and we have the ability and the right to act for change." Working on multiple levels, Youth Force established the South Bronx Community Justice Center to serve as a community-based alternative to arrest and incarceration for hundreds of youth each year. Their fearless street activism protesting juvenile jails and the criminalization of youth has garnered Youth Force national recognition, and they are looked to as a leader in the nationally growing movement of youth activists. Based in the South Bronx, Youth Force helped spearhead the statewide fight to repeal New York's Rockefeller-era drug laws and have successfully fought to halt prison expansion and close detention centers. JFREJ has been privileged to collaborate many times with Youth Force in recent years, on campaigns against police brutality, the expansion of juvenile jails, and the decision to put the NYPD in charge of school safety.
*Prosecuted in 1985, the Resistance Conspiracy Case charged a number of underground activists with conspiracy to change, protest and oppose policies and practices of the US government in domestic and international matters by violent and illegal means"-- specifically the bombing of property (in which no one was killed or injured).