Reflection on Hospitality of DC Jail
Susan Crane June 2008
On May 30, 2008, 35 of us joined the 7.2 million people in the United States who are in jail or prison, or on probation or parole. And twelve of us joined the more than 2 million who are incarcerated.
We were found guilty of assembling at the Supreme Court, wearing jumpsuits or orange shirts that brought to public scrutiny the issues of indefinite detention, torture, violations of Geneva conventions, denial of habeas corpus and insults to Islam.
We brought our grief to the Supreme Court on January 11 and we each of us assumed the identity of a Guantanamo prisoner. Each of us gave the prisoner's name at arrest; each of us took that man's life, grief, suffering to heart and literally walked with him. I carried is Sami al-Hajj. Sami is a Sudanese man who was on assignment from Al Jazeera. He was arrested on the Pakistani border.
In the DC Superior Court, my codefendants spoke eloquently about why they had come to the Supreme Court, while 13 of us sat silently in orange jumpsuits, in a gesture of solidarity with the Guantanamo prisoners who don't get to see the evidence against them or defend themselves in a courtroom. It is always hard to go to trial (that's why it's called a trial). What makes it so hard is that rhetoric aside, we are judged guilty because we were arrested, regardless of what we did or didn't do. There is no openness to the truth we witness in our action and then seek to bring to court; it is irrelevant. We are silenced just as the men of Guantanamo are silenced and regarded as guilty regardless of what they did or didn't do. It was especially hard to sit in silence those four days; it was, for me, a radical identification with Sami al-Hajj.
I was given a 15 day sentence which is less than an eye blink for federal prisoners. The men were held at the DC jail, I and two other women were held at the adjoining Corrections Corporation of American private facility. Many of the women I met were on their way to another federal facility, perhaps in Danbury or Philadelphia .
I know that in the jail with us were women who had been arrested in Columbia and had been extradited to the US under Plan Columbia . They, like the Guantanamo prisoners, were taken from their home, from possible visits and advocacy from friends and family. Their future is uncertain, as they face trial in US courts for whatever they did or didn't do in Columbia .
We already have 25% of the world's prisoners here in the US . One would think that that would be enough but here is the U.S. government importing prisoners! As a country we excel in exporting weapons and importing prisoners.
The first three days we were held in lock down, were we ate in a cell and didn't get out at all. Then we were moved to a unit—Chris Gaunt, a hog farmer from Iowa, was moved with me, and we were assigned to the same cell. The women were curious about why we were in the jail, and shared coffee, not out of their abundance, but out of their scarcity. For me the time was an immersion into the culture—Fox news, constant noise, Jerry Springer and Maury Povich.. It seems to me that this raw, unreflective emotion provides entertainment and reinforces the values of greed and revenge. From the news that I was able to see, one would never know that the US is waging an illegal war against Iraq and Afghanistan , or even that there was a war happening. Occasional human interest shorts were aired about a deer in the back yard or a soldier who was getting the purple heart. The 1.3 million Iraqi people who have been killed, the use of depleted uranium that poisons the Iraqi people as well as our own soldiers, the stop loss policy that keeps soldiers from being able to go home, the suicide rates of soldiers, the difficulties that the veterans face here in the states …..somehow these news stories didn't get into the prison TV room. Perhaps this is a comment on fox news, perhaps a comment on the interests of the women turning the channels.
A note about the women's jail : Sr. Carol Gilbert, who lives with us at Jonah House, got Shigella dysentery the last time she was in the DC lock-up from the dirty food trays. It seems that now that a new staph infection, MRSA, and hepatitis are more likely to be a danger in the jail. We were not able to make phone calls, get visitors, or go to religious services because it takes a month or so to set these things up in the jail bureaucracy. Visitors have to be on an approved list, which can only be changed every 6 months. There were some books in a very small area of the law library that were available for reading. I took the test to be a tutor to help women getting their GED, but since the teacher I was going to work with was out sick, I didn't get to help in the classroom. I was able to do some informal Math tutoring in the unit, which I really enjoyed. There were about 50 women in our unit, in double or single cells during lock down and out in the TV room for a good part of the day and evening. We were able to go to indoor recreation. on weekdays, and outdoor recreation a couple of times.
Hope : I found hope in the action at the Supreme Court, hope in the trial where 35 people were able to listen to each other and defend themselves together. I found hope in the friendliness of the women in the jail. As I was released, one of the women I was released with and her boy friend gave me three-fifty so I could get a train back to Baltimore . I found hope in the welcome the Jonah community made for me when I came back: interest in what had happened, and good company and good food. Kindness continues, and in this kindness hope abounds.