Biography
Alan Berkman was a New York City physician and longtime member of the radical health-care collectives that grew out of the 1970s anti-imperialist left, including the Lincoln Detox program in the South Bronx. He was arrested on May 23, 1985 in connection with the failed October 20, 1981 Brinks armored-car robbery in Nyack, New York, and held without bond for the duration of pretrial proceedings. While held in federal custody he was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma; the failure of the federal Bureau of Prisons to provide adequate cancer treatment became an international campaign and is widely cited as a foundational case in U.S. prisoner-medical-rights litigation. In May 1988 he was named in the Resistance Conspiracy indictment for the 1983-85 Armed Resistance Unit bombings; the additional charges were dropped because of his pending sentence. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and released in 1992. After release he became a leading public-health figure in international AIDS activism and the founder of Health GAP, the U.S. organization that campaigned successfully for universal access to AIDS medication in the global South. He died on June 5, 2009 of complications from the cancer that had begun during his imprisonment.
Alan Berkman was a medical doctor and activist in the Students for a Democratic Society who in 1981 provided medical care to wounded fugitive
