Sara Jane Olson is ready to come home

A Ramsey County parole officer is scheduled to knock on a door in St. Paul's Highland Park neighborhood on Monday. He'll chat with the doctor who lives there and check out the living conditions. That site visit and some related paperwork will open the door for Sara Jane Olson to return home and bring to a close a 34-year saga for the 1970s revolutionary-turned-homemaker, currently California inmate No. W-94197.

Olson, 62, is to be released from a central California prison on March 17, nearly a decade after she was arrested in her minivan in St. Paul for militant acts committed during the tumultuous 1970s in California.

After hiding in plain view in St. Paul for many years, the onetime Symbionese Liberation Army radical spent the last seven years in prison for plotting to bomb Los Angeles police cars and for taking part in a bank robbery near Sacramento in which one woman was killed.

Whether she'll be on parole for one year or three remains under debate.

Olson was free for five days last March, before California corrections officials re-arrested her at the airport as she prepared to fly home. They blamed a clerical error for her early release.

"Obviously, she doesn't want to have a screwup like last year," her attorney, David Nickerson, said Friday from San Rafael, Calif. "She's worried some glitch will hold up the whole process."

Correction officials in California and Minnesota expect no such problems. They had approved her request last year to serve parole in St. Paul. Olson made the same request Feb. 9, citing the family resident criteria in the interstate rules that govern prisoners released in one state who request to serve their parole in another.

Minnesota corrections spokeswoman Shari Burt said if Olson meets the family resident requirements, approval is mandatory. Her husband, Dr. Fred Peterson, lives in the same house he shared with his wife and their three daughters before her 1999 arrest. In prison for seven years, she missed most of her daughters' teenage years.

Gordon Hinkle, a California corrections spokesman, said that this time he anticipates an unimpeded return for Olson back to Minnesota. "I don't see anything unusual," Hinkle said. "When we got the date wrong [a year ago], she was approved to go to Minnesota."

Burt and California officials said Olson is slated to be on probation for three years, but her lawyer said pre-1978 California law calls for one year of parole for her case.

The Los Angeles City Council considered a resolution last year, asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to make her serve parole in California.

"That is L.A., eternal vengeance," Olson wrote last year on the American Gulag prison reform website. "A bit more punishment for me and for my husband and my daughters."

Olson lived a quiet life in St. Paul as an actress, DFL activist and a mother until her 1999 arrest, when her true identity as 1970s revolutionary Kathleen Soliah emerged. She was convicted in a failed plot to blow up two Los Angeles police cars and for participating in the bank robbery. She also helped the SLA hide kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in one of the most celebrated abductions of the century.

She went underground soon after, living in Africa and Washington state before settling in the Twin Cities.

Calls to Olson's husband were not returned. In a letter from Olson to the Star Tribune last year, she declined an interview request because "my public persona has been defined in the mainstream media and I don't believe any modification is allowable."

Olson has been writing frequently from her prison in Chowchilla for progressive newspapers and websites, including the Community Alliance in Fresno. High prison suicide rates and racial disparities have been topics of her essays, which call for reforming "the non-corrective human warehousing of the American Gulag."

"I do what I've done before," she wrote. "I try to reach out through writing, talking with people within the prison and with the few allowed in to visit. That is what, it seems to me, any activist must, at the least, do: educate and organize as creatively as possible."

"Since every person and every deed impacts on another, my politics have intersected with many other struggles, dragging my family and friends, and people I didn't even know along with me," she wrote. "After I was arrested in 1999 for activities related to the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1975, people whose lives I may have brushed up against over 25 years before, had their worlds turned upside down in the ensuing investigation."

Of her brief release and re-arrest last year, she said California used a 1898 cattle rustling case to argue for locking up someone who had been mistakenly released.

One of her younger cellmates quipped: "Miss Olson, that's even before you were born,' " her husband recalled last year.