Secel Montgomery, left, who is serving a life
sentence, takes care of an elder prisoner at the California Men’s Colony in San
Luis Obispo, California, September 16, 2011. (Photo: Todd Heisler / The New
York Times)
Last Friday, the day the NATO 3 were arrested, approximately 35,948 people were arrested across the United
States. On Sunday, when at least 45 protesters were arrested at Chicago’s NATO
summit protests, approximately 35,948 Americans - the number arrested on a
daily basis in the US, according to FBI statistics - were handcuffed, read
their Miranda rights (maybe), carted off to jail and booked. The plurality of
those people were arrested for nonviolent drug crimes. Some of these people
will be charged, convicted, prosecuted and jailed.
When bond is posted, some of these people will have
relatives or friends who are able and willing to bail them out. Many will not.
For most, there’s no grassroots bail fund, no jail support team waiting on the
other side of the razor wire fence.
Unlike the NATO 3 (or the Chicago Seven, or the
Haymarket Eight), these people will go on to become part of a vast,
near-voiceless crowd of 2.3 million incarcerated Americans, most of whom are
visible only in the somber mugshots posted to their state’s Department of
Corrections web site. On this site, friends and relatives who know to look can
view their loved ones’ height, weight, race, tattoos, scars, offense, sentence
length and inmate number. No phone number is listed, because these people - let’s
call them the US 2.3 Million - no longer have a phone number (or email address,
or blog, or Facebook message box or Twitter account) that can be reached.
In stating these facts, I in no way aim to belittle
the significant civil abuses that anti-NATO activists have experienced over the
past week. Both the NATO 3 and the US 2.3 Million deserve civil liberties,
human rights and fair treatment. And I cannot overstate my support and
admiration for the veterans and peace groups that - in the face of Rahmian
threats and media scare tactics - brought thousands of people into the streets
to resist the NATO doctrine of endless war. Moreover, I know that civil
disobedience and a willingness to strategically risk arrest are crucial tools
for the success of nonviolent movements. (My consciousness as both a journalist
and activist was formed through my involvement with the direct action group
Voices for Creative Nonviolence.)
However, I wonder if these moments in the wake of
mass activist arrests - specifically, when vocal activists (some of them white
and middle class) are arrested by the dozen and thrust into the public eye -
might be an apt time to spread awareness of the stark injustices perpetrated
every minute, across the country, in the name of “criminal justice.” When folks
who aren’t usually arrested (and whose friends, allies and civil liberties
attorneys are enfranchised and outspoken) are subjected to civil liberties
violations, institutionalized brutality, dehumanizing jail conditions and the
sickening prevalence of moldy baloney sandwiches behind bars, a unique point of
contact is sparked. It’s an opportunity for true empathy and empathy is the
mother - or, at least, the cousin - of action.
In the interest of outing truth: I can’t claim even
remote journalistic “objectivity” when it comes to this topic. I’ve had two
close loved ones sent to prison in the past few years, one of whom is currently
incarcerated. When I worked as a reporter, I covered prison policy and
developed ongoing pen-pal friendships with prisoners, two of whom were serving
life sentences and would be forever relegated to pen-pal status. I dream about
the prison system. (Dream? This is one of those times that I wish “to nightmare”
were a verb.) When I pass the boloney shelf in the supermarket, my stomach
turns, even when its labels feature expiration dates well in the future.
But maybe all this is part of the point - if empathy
is critical for action, mass arrests provide the action-oriented among us with
a personally resonant jumping-off point to advocate for systemic
transformation. When our friends or high-profile activists are thrown in jail,
we’re struck with hard questions: what does jail do, for the inmate and for
society? What do people do in order to end up there? How do other people who do
those things avoid incarceration? Are there new, out-of-the-box ways of
accomplishing the societal goals that jail’s supposed to achieve?
There’s a precedent for this kind of
eye-opening-turned-advocacy. Kathy Kelly - co-coordinator of Voices for
Creative Nonviolence, three-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, probable
saint-in-waiting and my hero - was sent to prison for three months for her
nonviolent resistance at School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. Kathy
took the opportunity to write a detailed account of her experience, sharing the
stories of her fellow prisoners and her insights into possible alternative
justice systems. At bottom, Kathy wrote, “the cruel flaw in the prison system
lies in the intent to punish people instead of help them.” Her time in prison
prompted her to think deeply not only about the injustices perpetrated against
her and her friends, but also about the faulty pretenses and tragically bad
logic upon which the prison system as a whole is built.
“Entering the prisons offers an opportunity to better
understand how the once-lauded war on poverty has become a war against the
poor,” Kathy writes in her book, “Other Lands Have Dreams.”
It’s painfully true: Not only is poverty a primary
motivator for crime, but it’s very often the determining factor for whether or
not offenders will be able to avert jail time. Money means bail. Money means
fancy lawyers. Money means a way out. So, overwhelmingly, poor people go to
prison.
In many ways, the US 2.3 Million are an invisible 1
percent of the 99 percent: they go to jail poor, they work for slave wages,
they’re deprived of basic rights and dignity, they can’t vote (thus forfeiting
even the most modest semblance of democratic participation) - and then they’re
released, even poorer, with little support, sporting a blotch on their record
that will no doubt discourage prospective employers.
Despite the fact that the US sees a drug-related
arrest every 19 seconds - and 81.9 percent of those arrests are for simple possession) - prison-based drug rehabilitation
programs are overwhelmingly underfunded. Reentry programs, intended to prepare
prisoners for life outside, are often perfunctory. For the US 2.3 Million, all
signs point to a devastating conclusion: they’re not only punished, violated,
dehumanized and ignored - they are also abandoned. Tracing the roots of this
abandonment, Kathy Kelly asks, “What happens when compassion dies?”
With the images of highly publicized activist arrests
still bright in our memories and on our screens, I want to ask: what happens
when compassion is ignited? What would a grassroots prison reform movement to
cultivate new ways of thinking about justice look like? Where does it start?
When I speak with people in prison, the most common
refrain is the all-consuming pain of isolation: broken connections with family,
long-lost friendships, severed ties to their communities and to society at
large. The one semi-dependable channel for communication available to them is
the mail service and letter writing can get demoralizing when mail call comes
up empty a few weeks in a row. Phone calls are preciously limited, and in many
state prison systems, recipients of prisoners’ calls must pay in advance before
they can accept. (In Illinois, it’s ten bucks a pop for each short, in-state
call.)
In-person visits to jails and prisons are sometimes
so restrictive that they only remind prisoners of their loneliness and
isolation. (For example, visiting an inmate in Chicago’s Cook County Jail means
being shepherded into a small, cramped, musty room with more than a dozen other
family members of inmates. The inmates appear on the other side of a hard,
plastic wall. For the next 15 minutes, inmates and family members are permitted
to shout back and forth through holes in the wall, straining to hear and be
heard over the shouts of the other family members and inmates.)
Civic participation, of course, is universally
denied. They can’t vote. They can’t attend town hall meetings. They can’t call
Congress and would be hard pressed to boycott the corrupt corporations that
provide their food and services. They certainly can’t march in the streets.
Given these barriers, any movement for prisoner
solidarity must begin with communication: connecting with the real human beings
that compose the US 2.3 Million and hearing their stories.
One simple way to get started: check out Write a Prisoner, Prisoner
Solidarity or the Prisoner Correspondence Project and acquire a prison pen
pal of your own. As activism goes, it’s not too glamorous - in all likelihood,
it won’t make a public splash - but it’ll almost definitely make a private
splash in someone’s life. (In the words of PrisonerSolidarity.org, “On the
whole, a letter is the brightest point of the day for most prisoners.”)
Reaching out to a prisoner, one on one, opens the
door to interaction with the larger society by which they’ve been abandoned. By
virtue of simply addressing them by name (instead of by number or by offense),
asking them questions and sharing your own stories, you’ll be recognizing their
humanity. What’s more, these relationships will allow you to - if you so choose
- build bridges that pave the way for a broader movement.
Picking up a pen or pulling up a Word doc and writing
a one-page note to a random prisoner is one of the purest forms of direct
action you can take. You’ll be trespassing across the razor wire fence,
breaking down the barriers of disenfranchisement and digital disconnect and
economic discrimination and $10 phone calls to perform a radical act of communication.
An added bonus: chances are, you will not get arrested.
This article may not be republished without
permission from Truthout.
Maya Schenwar is Truthout’s editor-in-chief and the
author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We
Can Do Better. Follow her on Twitter @mayaschenwar.
Previously, she was a senior editor and reporter at
Truthout, writing on US defense policy, the criminal justice system, campaign
politics, and immigration reform. Prior to her work at Truthout, Maya was
contributing editor at Punk Planet magazine. She has also written for the Guardian,
In These Times, Ms. Magazine, AlterNet, Z Magazine, Bitch
Magazine, Common Dreams, the New Jersey Star-Ledger and others. She also
served as a publicity coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Maya is
on the Board of Advisors at Waging Nonviolence.
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