In the course of more than two decades’ imprisonment in New York, Kathy Boudin, who has died aged 78 from cancer, underwent a profound transformation, from political revolutionary involved in a robbery that caused three deaths to penal reformer acting as an advocate for women in prison, and in particular for reunification with their children. She came to realise that she needed to recover her own sense of responsibility and self, free from any sense of political justification. This process became a path to seeking restorative justice – bringing people harmed by crime into contact with those responsible for it, to find a way forward – and eventually, clemency, parole and release from prison in 2003.
The decisions that she came to regret came out of a passion for justice – against racism in the US, by demonstrating in favour of civil rights, and against imperialism abroad, as represented by the Vietnam war. In March 1970 she and other members of the Weather Underground, a breakaway group from Students for a Democratic Society, were in a house in West 11th Street, Greenwich Village, when three of the group were killed by the explosion of bombs that were being constructed, believed to be intended for an anti-war protest at a military base. Kathy and another SDS militant, Cathlyn Wilkerson, who were in another part of the house, survived and fled the scene.
