Jailbait
Jen and Jean Talk About Prison
by Jessica Karp |
 Sunday Night to Monday Morning: the Arrest
Jean: Sunday night after the big protest there was a spokescouncil meeting for everyone who was left in DC. We decided that on Monday, instead of doing massive direct action, we would do a march around the no protest zone because we didn’t have very strong numbers, but we still wanted to maintain a presence.
People planned to meet at 8am Monday morning. We got downtown a little later, at about 10:00, and we heard that for a while the police had let the march go but then they cornered it off and tear gassed and arrested people. It seemed like the cops on Monday were much more prone to using pepper spray and arresting mass amounts of people, because they were like, “okay, you had your time, now leave,” and there wasn’t as much media there to observe what was going on.
Everyone who was left after the first arrests gathered at the Ellipse- there were about two thousand people, and we just took to the streets spontaneously. It was really moving. We marched for a while and then came to. . . I think it was 14th and Pennsylvania, where there was a police line and metal gates blocking off the no-protest zone. You could see the World Bank building from where we were.
For a while there was kind of a stand-off between protesters and the police. People were giving speeches and chanting and filling the intersection, but the police had already blocked traffic so we weren’t really disrupting anything. After a while a lot of people in the front wanted to cross in to the no-protest zone to make a statement, in part about how it’s really ridiculous to just declare a zone where people have no first amendment rights.
Jen: Also another important reason we crossed the line was that people had been arrested that morning but probably not enough to do solidarity so it was important to flood the jails to have enough people so we could get our demands.
Jean: At first people tried to push through the blockade but the police just pushed them back. I was near the front and when the police were trying to push us back they pepper sprayed, so I got pepper sprayed but not that badly. After that we called a spokescouncil meeting and decided to try to negotiate something with the cops, because we were obviously upset about the violent turn things were taking. We made an agreement that the police would open their blockade, take off some of their riot gear and gas masks and people could cross peacefully into the no-protest zone and get arrested. Lines of people crossed the barricade every minute or so. Some people went limp when they were arrested but I was too scared. It was pouring rain and we were all soaking. Rows and rows of people crossed the line and were just arrested.
Jen: I wasn’t planning beforehand to be arrested. I was thinking Sunday that I might be, but I was still avoiding it up until an hour before the arrests on Monday. At some point, though, I just decided that crossing the line was something I had to do. I don’t feel like I just got swept up, I really just decided it was something I had to do.
Before I had been kind of critical of getting arrested because I was thinking that there’s so much stuff to be done and it’s not worth it to be in jail. I definitely questioned people who were planning to be arrested and I was worried that other people wouldn’t understand what we did and would think it was stupid. But being there and watching people cross the barricade brought out a spiritual motivation for me. It felt right in a real deep down kind of way to stand up and cross that police line.
Jean: For me it was a step I needed to take, to be willing to put myself and my body on the line and really take a stand for what I thought. It really brings things to a whole other level.
Also I think getting arrested is a really good tactic to start drawing more attention to what’s going on. I know while I was in jail people would come up to my friends and ask, “why is Jean in jail, what’s going on?” Through their concern about people in jail and curiosity about why they were willing to be arrested, people get drawn into the issues.
Jen: I was talking to my friend about how people need to be talking about the issues more and we were talking about how policy is separate from peoples lives and by doing direct action being on the streets with your friends talking about policies that seem so big and academic it makes it real and it seems like this is part of our person and we are part of it. And bringing that together is really really powerful.
The Trip to Jail
Jen: Right after we got arrested we were put on a bus with a lot of other women and only a few men. When we got on people were already holding consensus meetings, but we really didn’t have enough time to come to any decisions.
The bus took us to this holding facility, where they went through and asked if we were gonna give our names, had us take everything out of our pockets, and took our shoelaces (so we wouldn’t hang ourselves with them). Through all this our hands were cuffed behind our back in the plastic cuffs. The police fingerprinted us and then they handcuffed our hands to our ankles, which is not the most comfortable thing, especially when you’re cold and wet.
Jean: This is not normal police procedure, and they didn’t do it to the guys. They claimed they did it because the woman earlier in the day were rowdy but it was really uncalled for. They wouldn’t even take them off when you had to go to the bathroom and they were really tight
Jen: And there were seventy-year-old women like this too, women who had trouble sitting down.
So then they put us all together in one cell. We were in there for four or five hours, in a cement cell. It was a really confusing time because we were all uncomfortable and didn’t feel like making decisions, but we were trying to have consensus meetings about what we should be doing, whether we should be resisting, what was going on. . . It was just unfamiliar and they were saying they were gonna take us here, they were gonna take us there, and were we gonna go? I just remember being really confused and not wanting to do the wrong thing.
Jean: Then they put us on this bus that reminded me of something from The Fugitive, with caged seats in the front and back, and took us to Superior Court where we were put in the custody of the US Federal Marshals, who are really scary people.
Jen: Basically they’re guys who are too scary for the Marines.
Jean: So we’re sitting on this scary bus -women on one side, men on the other - and this big Federal Marshall guy comes on, and he’s yelling and whenever people don’t listen to him he calls “chains” and people are put into chains.
Jen: I was right next to this guy who wouldn’t answer one of his questions. The Marshal put his face right up in this poor kid’s face and he was screaming at him, saying, “you wanna get fucked up?”
Jean: My favorite lines of the marshals were: ain’t no democracy on this bus! the other thing they liked saying was that there were no cameras down there, we were done with our little protest, and there was no media so they were gonna just do what they wanted with us and we had better cooperate. And we were really scared, or I was really scared. From that bus we were taken into the court building and this was really the point where they tried the hardest to make us say our names because one of the main tactics of jail solidarity is that everyone refuses to give their names or sign out so that we can clog up the system.
Jen: But I think we got tortured a lot less than others. I feel like the men throughout got harsher treatment, after the first jail where they were fed and we weren’t.
Jean: Yeah, the main intimidation we got was verbal - guards telling us we were gonna get beaten up. When we were taken into court to be arraigned we either remained silent or refused to give our names and then the judge would say, “unfortunately then I will have to send you to the DC central holding facility.”
When I got up there and didn’t give my name she said to me, “I’m really surprised because almost everyone so far has given their names. You’re going to be one of the only people in jail.” She was trying to convince us there weren’t enough people to do solidarity. After I was arraigned I was given back to the Marshals and as they were putting cuffs on me one of the women marshals whispered to me: “Mark my words, this is the worst mistake of your life. The DC jail is no joke, it is not a fun place. This is not your fucking protest anymore.” So then we were taken over to the DC jail around midnight and put through the intake process. They took our clothes and our pictures, and gave us jumpsuits and identification bracelets.
Jen: And they finally fed us for the first time at 4:30 that morning. That’s what time jail breakfast was.
Jail Stories
Jean: After the first half day we were taken out from general population and put on our own separate unit. There were two to a cell. Jen and I were in our own cells, right next to each other. The rooms were 9 by 12 with a bunk bed, a sink , and a little desk. There weren’t bars, just a solid wall with a big metal door that had a little slit for a window. The only real variation once we were there was how much time we were out of our cells.
Jen: I guess the first day was the worst, before we got out for rec time, because people didn’t know what was going on and some were just yelling “We want our lawyers,” and were being obnoxious to the guards. There was nothing we could really do because we hadn’t met our lawyers yet, or set up a communication system. We hadn’t even all met each other and we didn’t know how many people were there.
Jean: Most days we were out of our cells for about 6 hours. We spent the time in a communal area on our block with pay phones and picnic-y tables and we could have our meetings, long drawn out consensus meetings. Sometimes though we were in our cells for longer, as much as twenty hours at a time. I passed the time making tons of paper cranes, it was the only thing that could keep me occupied
Jen: I slept a lot because the past month I hadn’t slept at all because I was doing so much work to plan for this and I knew coming back I would have so much work to catch up on. I did yoga one day with one of the mattresses. We did get pencils and paper from the chaplain at one point. We sang a lot. But you could hear when people sang. A lot of people sang really well and it was so beautiful because it would echo like in a cathedral.
Jean: And you just sat and thought.
I felt very vulnerable. I mean we always had in the back of our heads the idea that if it got really bad we could give our names and get out, but there was still the more immediate fear that they could take me out of my cell and beat me and I couldn’t do anything about it or they could lock us in our cells for three days or put us in solitary and I just had no control over the situation at all.
Jen: That’s a tool they have to make people acquiesce to their system and be silent. But we had such an advantage to have eighty women all together, and people watching outside. We heard that people from Tokyo were calling the mayor of DC. I’ve done solidarity before but I never realized how good it really feels when you know that people somewhere else are fighting for what you’re doing. And when I heard about the rally you had here on Wednesday I almost cried.
Jen: During rec time in the consensus meetings we discussed our demands, the plea bargain, what were our priorities, what we were willing to give up. We talked about solidarity tactics within the jail -- were there things we could do to speed up the process?
Jen: One of the first things that happened was that someone explained some basic prison procedure. Like count. Three times a day we had to go into our cells for a few hours so the guards could count how many people there were, and some people had assumed that that was punishment and were trying to resist.
Jean: We also set up communication: doing Repeat After Me’s to pass information from cell to cell, and choosing spokespeople, especially for communication with the guards so it wasn’t just a lot of people yelling. But we never really just sat around and introduced ourselves. We all went by nicknames and it was weird to introduce ourselves for real the last day when we got out. I definitely didn’t get to talk to all eighty women. It was hard because a lot of the time we were out we just spent in these meetings. I was pretty introverted because I wasn’t comfortable enough to be outgoing. But as soon as we got outside I felt such a strong attachment to everyone, much more than in the jail. And I feel like if I ever saw any of them again we’d feel a lot closer.
Jen: As much as a lot of the emphasis was on sticking together and solidarity it was at the same time a really personal experience, partly because you were in the cell for a lot of the day by yourself. There was a lot of introspection. I definitely didn’t talk to people as much as I wish I had, though by Wednesday night and Thursday we knew we were gonna be out soon and some of the tension eased. It wasn’t just a bunch radical students there, there were at least four or five white haired women, the oldest was seventy-three, a great grandmother who’d been arrested forty times. There were a lot of middle aged women, and there were people from all over the country. A couple of times the older women spoke to us about how we were the young people, the new generation. And it was just really inspirational because so often older people are like, “Oh yeah I did a lot of stuff when I was a teenager but now I have a real job.” So for me it was good to be around people who’ve done stuff like this throughout their lives.
Jean: One experience that stands out in the week was our seder. It was Passover while we were in jail and we had a seder in this little gym. It was a freedom seder, which is a seder especially geared toward people in jail and fighting for justice, so everything was so pertinent. I think one of the chaplains or some official really supported what we were doing and had helped to get the service and contacted Jews for Global Justice.
Jen: It was really beautiful. We sat in the little gym, and we got celery which was the most wonderful thing because we hadn’t had fresh vegetables or fruit except for two oranges all week. Also they snuck in two new numbers for the legal team cause after you call a number five times from the pay phone in the jail it gets shut off. And we sang a song about solidarity and I just cried.
The Guards
Jean: We were friends with almost all of our guards. Once they warmed up to use they were really cool.
Jen: We talked to them about why we were in there, they were all curious. And we talked to the other inmates when we were in with them for that first half-day and they were very supportive.
Jean: But especially by the end the guards had warmed up to us and when they had to put us in our cells they were just like, “Come on guys, you know you have to go to your cells . . .”
Jen: And by the last day the guards were doing repeat-after-me’s and at the very end the warden twinkled her fingers, which is what you do in consensus meetings to show agreement. We heard she was really impressed with our consensus process and how it worked.
Jean: I think that in a way what I loved when I was in jail was that we would start to talk with other inmates or the guards and they would be like, “Why are you in here? What’s your cause?” And it was great because people would take the time to really explain the problems with the IMF and World Bank, to break it down.
Jen: And we had the time. I had tried to walk around Middletown one day before the protest and talk to people about it and they were in a rush but when you’re sitting in jail you have time to go through it.
Getting out
Jean: When we were arraigned we were all assigned public defenders, and some of them had been instructed not to let us do legal solidarity and to do everything possible to get us to sign out of jail without bargaining down the charges. On Wednesday some of these public defenders went to court and filed a bond review requesting that bond be passed over and people be released on their own recognizance. Normally you have to get references for this but they wanted to waive that. These lawyers were working against their client’s wishes. Their clients wanted to do solidarity and be represented by Midnight Special, a volunteer legal collective formed with the specific purpose of representing protesters. So a bunch of people in jail had to fire their public defender attorneys. The people with these attorneys had to be brought to the court and we were warned by Midnight Special that we should resist going to court if they tried to bring us. So we decided that when the guards came to take us we would strip because they obviously couldn’t take us to court if we were naked. The code word for this was “noodle.”
Jen: The four or five people the guards tried to take stripped in their cells and were carried out naked. The guards forced their jumpsuits on in the hall, but it slowed things down and showed they didn’t agree with what was happening. These people were put on a van with seven or eight male prisoners. In Court they explained to the judge that their lawyers had filed without their consent and that they didn’t agree and were going to sue for misrepresentation if they continued. The Court was embarrassed, and it made them want to expedite the process even more so we wouldn’t cause any more trouble.
Jean: The guards were pretty shaken up after we stripped and they kept us in our cells for the next twenty-one hours or so.
Jen: And that for me was one of the most nerve racking parts because they could’ve done something harsher, you just didn’t know.
Jean: But they were able to fire the public defenders and a few days after this we came to an agreement with the prosecutors. Our plea bargain was that the misdemeanors were lowered to a traffic infraction-jay walking, which has a $5 fine
Jen: We came out into a crowd of hundreds of people singing and drumming and they had warm food- like food! Nuts and granola and rice and soup!
Jean: It was nice. There were people there who’d camped out all week in the rain. A family friend of mine who lives in DC had picked up my car and came and got us and we stayed at his house.
Final Thoughts
Jen: One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot since we were arrested is how closely freedom and responsibility are tied. Because in jail we were totally taken care of. There’s no responsibility other than following orders and if you just turn your mind off and don’t resist you can sit there and rest all day, which in a way felt really good. Because you can’t have freedom without taking responsibility for taking care of yourself and taking care of the people around you, and I felt that really strongly coming out. A lot of people are talking about this growing culture of protest, where people are taking to the streets, and that’s great but I think its really important that we also accept or transition to a culture of responsibility. There’s a lot of things wrong with this world but its our responsibility, especially as elite college students, to use our education and position and freedom to make the changes we think are necessary and not just bash everything.
Jean: I think the most important lesson I learned was about what it was like to try to resist when you weren’t in an elite position. I think it’s pretty easy to do activism on college campuses - just to be like yeah, we’re gonna have a rally, we’re gonna go to a protest. But I was really surprised at how much I just wanted to be passive when I was in jail. I didn’t want to be seen as a leader because I was scared. And I didn’t want to go limp or do a lot of solidarity tactics because I was scared. I don’t think I was ever one to judge people who are in worse off positions for not organizing or fighting for their rights but I think it was a really good lesson for me to learn that it’s fucking hard when the stakes are that high, when its your physical being at stake. And I guess that goes along with what Jen said that when you are in a more privileged position its our ---I don’t want to say duty, but we need to take advantage of the fact that its pretty easy for us to stand up to things.
Surfing For Social Justice
by Kate Standish
The Mobilization of Global Justice http://www.a16.org
The main organizing website for the a16 protests. Very good starting place for the basics on the IMF and World Bank. Lots of info on protesting, legal solidarity, affinity groups, how to treat pepper spray and tear gas, among other things.
Global Exchange http://www.globalexchange.org
Grassroots globalization organization. Lots of info on IMF/World Bank, corporate accountability, what you can do. Co-founders are Julia Beck and Dr. Kevin Danaher, "leader" of the movement (both spoke at Wes in April before the protest.)
The World Bank http://www.worldbank.org
Their official website.
The International Monetary Fund http://www.imf.org
Their offical website.
Whirled Bank: We envision a world full of poverty http://www.whirledbank.org
Spoof on actual World Bank site. Full of info about how the World Bank. Full of info about how the World Bank actually adds to poverty.
Jubilee 2000 Coalition http:/www.jubilee2000uk.org/main.html
Site for the movement calling for the cancellation of debt in the world's poorest countries.
Global Arcade: The virtual empowerment center. http://www.globalarcade.org/home.html
Play games and learn about globalization and the third world online!
Independent Media Center (IMC) dc2.indymedia.org
A great site for the real coverage of the protests. Grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Articles (many just in letter/comment form), lots of pictures, videos, and audio clips.
Fifty Years is enough http:/www.50years.org/index1.html
The main organization opposing the policies of the IMF and World Bank.
The Direct Action Network (DAN) http://www.agitprop.org/artandrevolution
A growing netword born out of the Seattle protests.
The Ruckus Society http://www.ruckus.org
Learn how to create a ruckus! Or maybe even a global movement of the people! Ruckus teaches direct action, or civil disobedience. Ruckus folks came to Wes in April to do non-violence trainings for those going to a16.
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