Lori

(While I was leaving DC, my friend Lori was still on the way to jail. Several weeks later, I asked her to describe her experience.)

It was pouring down rain, people were dancing and singing in the streets…but there were a large number of people who, deciding that they would cross the police line, had sat down, linked arm in arm. And I looked down and I suddenly felt totally inspired to join them.

And so the people in the front were going first, and over time, line by line we all went forward, crossed the line and were peacefully arrested, and were handcuffed and taken to the buses. A few people were dragged, they went limp…for the most part we went along peacefully. As we went onto the bus they took our photograph, and many of us distorted our faces when we were having our picture taken so that they would have a difficult time recognizing us.

Once we got on to the bus, I remembered that I had a piece of paper from the jail solidarity course in my bag, and I was trying to remember the various demands that we were supposed to make, and the tactics for achieving them. And so like a bad movie I reached over and with my teeth unlatched my bag and started taking things out of my bag to find this piece of paper. And of course everything in my bag was soaking wet, as was everything that I was wearing, so this piece of paper was folded in four and just sort of sandwiched together. So I grabbed it with my teeth and shook my head to get it to open, and placed it by my side and started memorizing the demands and the tactics.

We were taken to the gymnasium of a police academy, where we were processed. We were lined up into 3 long rows. We were sat down with our hands still cuffed behind our backs. And we were trying to conduct some kind of consensus meeting, we were trying to determine first if we should fight to see our lawyers right then and there or wait until we got to jail. But they were using a technique that I found very fascinating…at the actual demonstration, where in order to communicate to huge numbers of people, they would scream out “Repeat after me!” and then large groups of people would repeat whatever information that person was trying to convey, and that would ripple down toward the back of the demo. So they were doing that in the gymnasium.

As this was going on, there was suddenly a commotion from the back of the gymnasium, and someone started screaming, “they’re taking her away! They’re taking someone away! Don’t let them take her!” - so that being one of the most important demands, that no one be separated from the group, we began screaming “Bring her back! Bring her back!” And a few of us actually got up and started jumping up and down as we were screaming. So one of the guards came up behind me and grabbed me by the arms and kicked my feet out from beneath me and slammed me down to the ground, started to walk away, and I jumped up again and started jumping up and down, he came back again, knocked me down onto the ground, and a third time I jumped up, and this time three people came up and grabbed me and picked me right up off the ground and whisked me away into a separate adjoining room, whereupon they threw me down and left me there alone. I felt like I was in detention in school or something, they had a guard outside the door…It turned out afterward that that woman was only being brought to the bathroom and someone really overreacted. So that was really unnecessary, but it was kind of funny.

I was in there for a long time, I didn’t know how long, must have been at least an hour, an hour and a half…they then brought me out and into the room where they were taking our belongings, taking down our information and fingerprinting us…in the jail solidarity course they had taught us one technique for blotting out your fingerprints, and one of those techniques was to actually put vaseline in your belly button or on the side of your neck, so if at one point you are able to coat your fingers in vaseline, then it will blot the fingerprints without them noticing it. So when we were in the gymnasium, I asked to be brought to the bathroom, they had port-a-potties outside, I went out there, and I had placed vaseline in my belly button, but it was raining so hard when we were outside that there was none left. As we were being brought into the room for processing, I reached into my pockets and found some crackers, and so I started eating crackers and then picking the crackers out of my teeth, and as I was doing that trying to put a lot of saliva on my fingers! But then when he took my hand to take my fingerprints he was going, “Girl, what’s all over your fingers!” Oops - busted! He wiped my fingers clean and got some good fingerprints.

One of the women behind me, I noticed she was pretty upset, she was crying, and I asked her what was wrong. One of the cops had made some comment…about the ‘niggers’ he had to work with, which was just pretty mind-boggling, and really upset her.

So we were processed and brought into the gymnasium again, and our wrists were cuffed to our ankles. One wrist, one ankle, and set on these mats. But when we got back into the gymnasium, I looked around, and our numbers were much less than they were before. And that really freaked me out because in the jail solidarity course we had taken, the jail solidarity was based on the assumption that we were all in the same room. And suddenly I realized that we were gonna have to adapt this to a situation where we may be separated from each other in different cells. And I started to really get scared, I was a bit freaked out by that. Cause I really didn’t know how we would be able to do jail solidarity if we weren’t able to talk to each other. We were allowed however to make one phone call… I called the woman I was staying with in Washington to get her to call my parents and let them know that I was okay.

So then we were being taken out of the gym and taken onto buses, so we were in there with a lot of the same guys that we had been on the bus with earlier. By this point it was dark, and the guards were being kind of intimidating, at one point I remember one of the guards saying, “okay girls, there’s no video cameras now to videotape us beating the crap out of you.” That’s a bit scary.

So they took us to one jail, apparently it was full…the impression I got was that it was full of protesters. So they took us to another location, and the guards again were being very intimidating, they were warning us about the place we were being brought to: “Okay, you’re going to the DC lockup now, good luck, that’s no picnic,” you know that sort of thing. We were a bit scared, and we just started singing, in the bus we were singing some songs they taught us in the jail solidarity course, and some others like Solidarity Forever…and “If Mahatma Gandhi can go to jail I can go to jail too,” you know, and then each time we would repeat the song, everyone would pipe in someone else’s name, MLK, and Emma Goldman. That was pretty fun, it felt like being in a Girl Guide camp for activists, on the bus, being taken away to God knows where…

They didn’t even bring us in through the main doors, they brought us in through the parking garage, so the first thing we saw was this big open pit leading down into the jail. And you could just sense among the group, this sort of sinking feeling as we were being brought down single-file into the pits of hell. And but then someone in the lineup started singing again, and we started singing softly hoping that the guards wouldn’t tell us to shut up. But the whole way we were just singing these songs, and it was a really good tactic that we used throughout the time that we were in jail, to lighten the mood, to make us feel together as a group…and the acoustics in the basement were really fantastic, we sounded really great.

So then they started bringing us in small groups of 3 to process us, and you know they frisked us again up against the wall, they took down our information, and they then took us into the cell area, and before they did that there was sort of a fridge at the end of the hall, and they offered us a baloney sandwich and some orange flavored drink which contained 0% real juice…And so they brought us in in dribs and drabs and brought us in two at a time, two people per cell.

The cells had two bunk beds, metal bunk beds with no mattress, no blankets, no pillows. There was also of course the toilet, the open toilet there in the cell, and it was really really dingy, it looked like it had been built in the thirties and hadn’t been painted since. There were splatters of dark something against the ceiling, and you know it really makes your imagination go wild about what that could be.

And we were still soaking wet from the protests. And some of us were able to get these white paper kind of coveralls to put on, but even when we were able to put these on it was kind of cold. But they didn’t have enough of these to go around, so some of us had to spend the night in our wet clothes.

More and more women were being brought in, there were two women who were there before us who had been brought in earlier in the day, and one of them told us of a horrible experience that she had had where these male guards were saying things like, “Oh you don’t look like a real woman, are you a real woman? We’ll show you what a real woman is like, we’re gonna strip search you in front of 20 male police officers.” And things like that. So I think that really scared her, and that didn’t make us feel too secure either.

Once the cell area was full of women, we decided to conduct a consensus meeting. While we were in jail we were all using code names, aliases - many of us hadn’t even seen each other’s faces, all we could do was hear their voices - so we called our names out into the hallway …

“My name is Mad Dog.”
“I’m Red Emma.”
“I’m Layla.”
“I’m Hashi.” Hashi means chopstick, she was my cell mate.
“I’m Peanuts.”

So we found a facilitator and we conducted a consensus meeting until six in the morning, and that was one thing that i was really amazed to see while I was down there, was how people would use the consensus decision making model for every stage of the process, from spokes council meetings to determining strategy for the demonstrations, to actually in the demonstrations at the various clusters at the intersections there were consensus meetings going on, to when we were in jail.

So we were trying to determine whether we should kick up a fuss to get the lawyers while we were still there in the lockup. We were still pretty scared that we hadn’t seen a lawyer, that was one thing that really put us on edge. So we began to chant all together, very loudly, and we picked up our footwear, we were banging them on the footwear yelling “We need our lawyers now! We need our lawyers now!” And we kept that up for an hour and a half at least, screaming at the top of our lungs and banging on the walls, and we got really funky: 

We need our lawyers now - OH YEAH!
We need our lawyers now - UH HUH!
We need our lawyers now - BRING EM TO ME!
We need our lawyers now - SOCK IT TO ME!

And at one point we stopped, but the men were in the cell block downstairs, and we could hear them banging on the walls, in the same rhythm.

It didn’t do any good, unfortunately, they didn’t bring us our lawyer. But around 5:30 in the morning, one of the women who had been brought to the lockup before us, her lawyer came in to see her separately, because she had different charges from the rest of us. And so she informed us that we were going to be brought to the courthouse for arraignment at 6 in the morning, and that was about all she was able to tell us. So after she left we decided, okay, well most of us likely were going to see our lawyer in ½ hour anyway, so we’ll stick it out and try to see them then.

It’s just amazing what they feed people in jail! For breakfast they gave us these really old and sugar-coated donuts and then more of this orange flavored drink which contains 0% juice…And then they started to take us away to the courthouse. But in doing so they were leaving 3 women behind, and many of us were very concerned about that. So some of us, 3 or 4 of us went limp in the hallway, and I was the first one to be dragged out. Someone was mopping the floor in the hallway, and so my clothes had just gotten dry, and this women dragged me right through the middle of this huge puddle of water and just threw me down into the middle of it. She then picked up the mop and went after the other women, splashing them with the mop and saying, ‘get up off the floor! Get up off the floor!’ and then they started dragging them down the hallway. When we got to the stairs, I managed to turn myself around so that I kind of slid down the stairs on my butt, but the other two women were still clung, wrapped around each other as they were being dragged down the stairs, I was sticking my hands under their backs so they wouldn’t hurt each other. We got to the bottom on the floor, one woman was really upset, she was crying, and she was really concerned about her friends. But at that point we were just outside of the hallway where the men were being detained, and they told us that they would make sure that the women were being brought out before them or with them. So we felt a little better about that - and also the women upstairs, if something really bad was happening, they could scream out and the men would hear them.

The paddy wagon was pretty scary, it wasn’t like I expected, with a big sheet of polished metal down the middle, so that we were sat on benches on either side but staring straight into this sheet metal, we couldn’t even see the women on the other side of the wagon. And of course there were bars on either side, and it was really dark in there.

And we were brought into the courthouse - again, through the basement - and we were brought in through the elevator. It was just a series of cages, there was a cage in the elevator, when we got out of it there was another big cage, a man was trying to suss out whether there were any minors among us, he was really convinced that half of us were minors, but there were no minors among us.

Then we were brought into another room in smaller groups. And this woman appeared wearing plastic gloves - she came into the room, very gruffly started frisking us again, and then ordered us to line up against the wall, pull down our pants, squat and cough, and we looked at each other in terror - of course, thinking we were about to be cavity searched. And she again screamed out her orders, so we just complied, and pulled down our pants, squat and coughed. Nothing happened, so we just pulled up our pants and stood up and that was it, and we just started laughing, it was so ridiculous.

We were then taken to another detention area, and this time we were all put into the same cell, so we were able to conduct a consensus meeting a little more easily. But there were other cells around us where we could see other protesters as well, so we were trying to include them into the meeting…so again the main issue of the meeting was how to proceed without having seen our lawyers. We had a long meeting, we were being held down there for a long time, and tension was starting to rise, but we kept defusing that by stopping the meeting at various points and singing a song or omming briefly before we went on with the meeting.

At one point the women who were left behind were brought in and put into the cell opposite us, and then glove woman appeared out of nowhere again and ordered them to pull down their pants, squat and cough, and we could see the terror on their faces the poor things. and so I screamed out, “we’ll do it with you in solidarity! it’s not what you think!” So we all pull our pants down, squat and cough and pull them up again. And so they felt a little more at ease. That was funny.

After a long time we were brought into another holding area, another hallway with small rooms with barred doors, and we could see some of the men in the other rooms, we could see them raising their fists and shouting “solidarity sisters!” so that felt really good to see them and to see that they were okay. But when they were putting us into our room, the men in the cell next to us were screaming out, “They’re going to try to scare us! They’re going to really really freak you out! Don’t listen to them! Don’t listen to them!” And you could hear the panic in their voices, and that of course really scared us. We were terrified!

We were kept there for a while. Some people were citing themselves out, this was a guilt free solidarity we were doing, so anyone that needed to leave for any reason were encouraged to do that without any feelings of guilt or remorse. The woman, for example, who had been intimidated by the guards earlier went, and we surely understood that, and other people for other reasons had to leave. But we were also informed that other people were being no-papered, for some reason the paperwork for their bus had been damaged or lost or something and so they were being released. So those of us that were left were starting to get concerned about the numbers of us that were still in solidarity, we had no idea how many people were still in solidarity.

At this point we were dealing with the US marshals, and they were real pricks, they were warning us that we were being brought into the DC central jail, “which is nothing like the DC lockup, people don’t call you honey and sweetie like they do with the DC lockup, it’s dirty and it’s old, and you’re going to be mixed in with the general population.” They also said that because we had decided not to give our names, they had no idea when we would be released, that we would be held in jail until our court date, which could be months away.

Someone then appeared from the lawyers’ guild, who we were told were in partnership with the Midnight Special Law Collective. Well, we could never be 100% sure if the people who were coming in were actually lawyers…sometimes they misrepresent themselves and give you advice, but they’re really undercover cops. But she came in and made an announcement through the hallway, saying that we were being brought to the DC central jail, and that we were being mixed in with the general population, and that it could be dangerous.

We didn’t know what to believe, and I for one was really starting to become terrified, and was in my mind starting to tell myself, my god, this is not some game, what the hell are you doing, this is crazy. But there was a woman with me who had done this several times before, and she really calmed me down, she told me that we were being brought to a jail, which was not like a prison, that the offenders there would not be as hardcore as they would be in a prison, and that we would most likely be all together in a large cell. And she told me not to worry, and it really really helped me get through the next couple of hours, and to go ahead with it.

We were informed that we were being given a court-appointed lawyer, which also freaked me out a bit…we were also told that someone who had gone in before us had screamed out into the courtroom, “is there someone here from the Midnight Special Law Collective?” and that no one responded. So again, we felt really alone at that point and really scared, and not sure how to proceed.

We were brought out in smaller groups of 4 or 5 to meet our court-appointed lawyer in the hallway outside of the courtroom. We informed him that we were going to remain silent, that we weren’t going to give our names. So we were brought into the courtroom, and we could see a few people in the audience giving us the fist up in the air, or the thumbs up or winking at us or that sort of thing, and that really made us feel good and secure that there were people outside who were there for us.

So that was that, we were then brought to the jail, and there was one woman left behind with two other women who were going to cite out, so we were worried about her at that time. But she informed us that she was okay, that she felt secure, so off we went. And in retrospect I really, really wish that we had stuck with her, because later on when she came, she was really upset because she had been put on a bus with a bunch of male inmates who really harassed her the whole way, making really lewd sexual remarks to her, and that really shook her up. That was really unfortunate, I wish we had stuck with her.

So anyway we were brought to the jail in a minivan, and we went to the main wicket, and I was still feeling pretty scared, it just looked like this really old, dingy building. But then we went inside, and there was a little hallway with rooms there with bars on the doors, but the doors were actually open, and we were able to mingle with the other rooms. And they had beds and cots and we were actually able to lie down and sleep if we wanted rest, but we were able to talk to each other and that was good, to not be separated.

There were other people there, who were being processed in or out of the jail who weren’t a part of our group, but they were really cool, there was one woman there who was saying, girls it’s really cool what you’re doing, I was a real radical back in college, she was an environmentalist, and she was really encouraging, it was nice to talk to her. And inside one of the cells, someone had gone through there before us and written on the wall, “Yay sisters! We’re all in here together, over 600 in solidarity! Be strong!”

And also the woman who was processing us was very nice to us. At one point I looked down the hallway - there was a television , and there was a news item about a protest at a Coca-Cola plant against racism. And three of us, myself and my friend, and the woman who was processing us, a black woman, all three of us were saying right on, that’s great. Which then led to a wonderful conversation, the woman was telling us about this program she had seen a couple of nights earlier about sweatshops and how horrified she was that this type of thing was allowed to go on, and we were able to talk a little bit about sweatshops, and that that was a large reason why a lot of us were there at that protest.

So they gave us some clean clothes, the traditional prison garb, and the mechanics’ coveralls in fashionable blue and orange, and they gave us some food. And one of the women who was there to give us our clothes and stuff, she was really nice as well. She was telling us that the meat that they were giving us was actually not really meat but soy, so I gobbled it up whether it was or not. Mashed potatoes, and these meat patties and creamed corn or whatever, but you know we hadn’t eaten in a long time so it tasted really good to me. A lot of people wouldn’t eat it though.

So we were brought through another area, we had our photos taken. We were given an interview with the psychiatrist, who asked us if we had any thoughts of depression or suicide, I guess they don’t want people hanging themselves while they’re in their jail. But while we were in the medical area, we were sitting in the hallway, and some of the workers there were informing us that there was a huge crowd of people outside the jail who were protesting, who were in solidarity with us. So again that felt really wonderful to know that there were people outside for us…

We were brought into the cell block, and we were put into jail cells with other women, and we were given a pillow and a blanket and a sheet, and we actually had mattresses and clean clothes, we were fed, and I felt like I was in the Hilton, because I think I had maybe 2 hours sleep in the previous couple of days…it felt wonderful to be able to crash finally.

So we ended up spending five days in jail. There were about 80-100 of us in the cell block I guess, and a lot of our time was actually spent in the cells, but when we were allowed out of the cells we were allowed to have meetings together in this sort of central meeting area where they had picnic tables. Basically we conducted meetings to determine the priority of our demands and the tactics for meeting those demands.

One of the most important demands was that everyone receive the same treatment and that everyone receive the very same charge. There are three levels of charges, there’s infractions, there’s misdemeanors and then there’s felonies. Most of us had been charged with either incommoding, which is parading without a permit, or crossing a police line, and both of those are misdemeanors, they’re not terribly serious charges. But for  internationals, misdemeanors can be very serious: two misdemeanors can equal a felony and then you would not be allowed back into the United States. So we needed to make sure that everyone was treated the same, that internationals not be singled out, another of our demands was that we maintain anonymity, and that we never had to come back for another court date, that there were no fines, no restitution, and no probation.

We were dealing with two levels of authority, some of us were arrested on state property while others of us were arrested on federal property. So there were a handful of us who had to deal with the federal authorities, and they were being stickier about our demands, they didn’t want to concede on the anonymity issue, and they didn’t want to reduce the charges to infractions either. However, our lawyers assured us that they felt that their charges could be easily defendable in court because most of them were bogus charges. In Washington going limp or resisting arrest can be construed as assaulting a police officer, but there were a lot of videotapes of what had been going on, so they thought they could defend those people.

While we were in jail, we were usually woken up at 4am with a woman screaming, “Chow time, ladies! Chow time!” so we’d go down and get our trays and breakfast, some sloppy oatmeal or cream of wheat and a piece of fruit, and more of this 0% real juice. A lot of the women weren’t eating at all while we were in there. I did, I’m a vegetarian but I ate meat the whole time I was there.

I guess it was our 2nd or 3rd day while we were in there, some of us were called down to meet our lawyers, which confused us, because we had been meeting our lawyers while we were in jail. So we were informed that it was our court-appointed lawyers that we would be seeing - which again confused us because we hadn’t seen them since the arraignment process. We couldn’t understand why we had to do anything with the court-appointed lawyers, since we were working with the Midnight Special Law Collective. So we went along, down past this room like you see on TV with the people talking to their mothers on the telephone on the other side of this thick glass. And then we were brought into this other office area where we met our court-appointed lawyer. He told us that the judge had ordered him to proceed with a bond review on the next day. So he needed to get our information that night…A bond review is a process where they reconsider the bond, an amount that a person is supposed to pay to assure that you come back later for another court date.

So first of all we informed him that we weren’t coming back, ever, for any court date, and then that we weren’t going to give him any information, that we weren’t going to give him our names or addresses or any of that information. Which confused him and baffled him, he didn’t know how to proceed then, he was sort of “Oh, okay, hmm.” But then I raised the issue that he was continuing to represent us on any level. I asked him, have you communicated with our other lawyers, and why are there still these two legal processes going on independent of each other?

The next morning one of our spokespeople had been talking to the lawyer, and they informed us that yes, they were trying to put us through a bond review hearing, and that we should resist going to the hearing and just to practice noncompliance techniques in the court hearing itself, ie remaining silent, and also telling the court-appointed lawyer that he did not represent us, and that if he continued to represent us then we would sue him for misrepresentation.

Later on in the day some of the guards came to get us again, and told us that they were being brought to the medic, because some of us were lactose-intolerant. That was what they told us. So I ran down the hall and two of the women had already been taken outside of the cell block, they were behind the door, outside. There was this glass window that I was able to knock on and ask them what was happening, and they called up that they were being brought to court. So I screamed down the hallway, “They’re being taken to court!” Some of the women hadn’t been taken yet…and this one woman in particular whose code name is Defender, she was standing there in the hallway, and they were preparing to take her. So she just stood there, thought about it for a minute, and then said, “Okay - STRIP!” - they can’t take you out of the jail when you’re naked! So she stripped off her coveralls, lay down on the ground and grabbed onto the leg of the table. And this freaked out the guards entirely, they didn’t know how to deal with this at all. They managed to get her out and forcibly dress her. Two other women down the hallway had also taken off their clothes…but once they got to court they did what the lawyers had said, they fired their court-appointed lawyer, they brought them back to the jail later on and we were still in solidarity.

We were kept in there longer than we expected. On the Friday night it was good Friday, some of the women in there with us were Jewish and they wanted to have a seder ceremony. And we had this wonderful seder ceremony in jail with someone from the Jewish community and the text of the ceremony had been really adapted to include themes of social justice and activism and it was so wonderful and so inspiring, I'll never forget that, it was really nice.

So the negotiations were going really really well but they weren’t conceding on the anonymity thing. On the Thursday we weren't allowed to see our lawyers because of the previous day’s strip-down, and that combined with the fact that there were protests outside the jail freaked the guards out, and apparently the whole jail were being denied privileges, they locked down the whole jail. What they did then was to sort of intimidate us they brought two of the inmates from another cell up to serve us our breakfast one day. And they were really angry at us for having caused them to lose their privileges. And I guess this was a tactic to calm us down, you know. But we were able to talk to those women and engage in a discussion with them.

Thursday was my birthday, I spent my 33rd birthday in jail. But of course we were all anonymous, so some of the women who I'd been arrested with knew it was my birthday, so they made this announcement when we were out in the meeting area that it was Jane Doe’s birthday. The whole group sang Happy Birthday to Jane Doe.

On Friday we met with our lawyers again, they came in and finally told us that we were going to be released that night. They weren't conceding on the anonymity thing, but they didn't require us to give our identification when we were being released, so many of us gave fake names. But most of our other demands had been adhered to. We had all been charged with an infraction, which is of the same severity as a parking ticket, it was a jaywalking charge with a $5 fine, but the lawyers had agreed to pay that charge for us.

So it was great, we got our clothes, got our belongings back, although four of us didn’t get our money back that they had taken away from us…we were waiting a long long time in the hallway downstairs while we were being released, and they weren’t adhering to the order of release, so that scared us because many of the vulnerable people weren’t being released until the very end. But in the end we did all get out, except for one person - my cellmate when we were in the lockup. Apparently they had lost her paperwork somehow. So one of us had to stay back for that night, but the lawyers managed to meet with us and informed us that she was feeling safe and that it wasn't a severe thing, so she was released the next day.

When we came out of jail, there was a huge encampment outside the jail, and people were there with guitars and video cameras, and they had welcome signs chalked out on the ground and things like that. And they had hot food, really good food, and blankets, and they had forms for us to fill out, in case of any police brutality. It was just a really warm feeling to come out and meet up with those people. So we spent most of the night there, we were there until well after dawn, and then many of us then met up with our friends and went on home.