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.
