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Joan Little says she wants to put her past behind herNEW YORK (AP) — Joan Little, a jailbreaker who became a symbol of racial and feminist oppression at her trial for killing her warder during a sexual assault, says she wants to put the past behind her.“I just want to be just another person,” the 23-year old convictedlarcenlst declared Wednesday in aninterview with The Associated Press at the Correctional Institution for Women on Hiker's island.Miss Little, who said she plans to change her name and that she sometimes gives a false one, added that people she meets invariably make the connection to her 1975 acquittal on charges of stabbing a white guard in a North Carolina jail.“One time I had a really bad complex about it, but it’s not as bad a it used to be, she said. “I sort of, like, learned to deal with it. I just sort of clam up. I sort of just don’t add to the conversation, in a very polite maimer letting them know I didn’t really want io talk about it.”• Miss Little escaped Oct. 15 from the North Carolina Corrections Center in Raleigh because, she said in the wideranging 2^-hour interview, “I was in such a depressed. mood, nothing really mattered to me.”At the time, she was serving a 7-to 10-year sentence on the larceny conviction that landed her in the jail where, she said, Clarence All igood tried to have sex with her.Turned into the police by a rejected suitor, she was arrested here during a bulletpunctuated chase on Dec. 6 and is awaiting an extradition hearing next month.She said she hoped Gov. Hugh L. Carey “acts right” to deny the extradition request and maintained that she would rather die than return to the prison from which she escaped or to North Carolina itself.“I made a decision that they’ll have to kill me before I go back,” Miss Little said, expressing a beliefthat authorities there would harass her continually, discriminate against her and provoke her to “do something I wouldn’t ordinarily do.” She continued:“I just don't want to go through the mental frustration, the harassment thing they’re going to be putting me through. I can’t take it any more.”Miss Little, who said she’s willing to finish serving her sentence anywhere but in North Carolina, sang the praises of the city facility where she is being detained on charges of assault, reckless ea-dangerment and resisting arrest pending her Jan. 6 hearing.“This is like a playhouse compared to North Carolina,” she said with a grin. “The officers here don’t harass us — they treat you like a lady.”Trading quips with a woman guard, pointing out the auditorium in the relatively new jail and exclaiming over the music available around the clock, Miss Little said she has enrolled in art class.“Here is nothing, she remarked. “These women doing time, they don’t know what prison is like.”Among other differences, she said, were the ways the institution handled the results of a tuberculosis test as well as her request for other than standard dress.Miss Little said that she had a positive response to a tuberculin skin test in the North Carolina facility in 1975 but that nothing was done about it. Here, the prisoner went on, she bad another positive test that, a doctor said, meant she was vulnerable to the disease.He prescribed medication for a year and gave her a form explaining the necessity of her continuing on the pills. In addition, a psychiatrist she consulted on Riker’s Island prescribed tranquilizers for her.Saying she had been unable toRATHER DIE THAN RETURN—Joan Little talks In an interview at the Correctional Institution for Women on Riker’s Island in New York where she is awaiting an extradition hearing next month that could return her to North Carolina. Miss Little said she was willing to finish her sentence anywhere but North Carolina and that she would rather die than retturi. ^J^^seiphoCo)'stop crying and shaking in routine conversations, Miss Little declared that “I just felt like I was cracking up” and that now “most of the time, I stay knocked out.”As for her dress, Miss Little said officials acceded to her request to■ •*wear a pink jumpsuit instead of the mandatory pink shoes and a pink shift with “escapee” emblazoned on it.“1 said, ‘I’m not going to walk around here in no f—pink shoes, like a Christinas tree,” she recounted. Miss Little, who wore her own red sneakers, continued:“I understand that I’m an inmate just like any other inmate, but I still have my dignity and my pride, andj’in not going to walk around here branded.”
Newspaper Details
Danville Bee
Danville, Virginia, US
Thu, Dec 22, 1977
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
CT, USA 13 Sep 2019
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