Prison

Described by Cornel West as a ‘secular bible for a new social movement’, Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow argued that the US prison system – the destination for one-in-three Black US males during their lifetime, compared with one-in-17 of their white contemporaries – had become ‘a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control’, functioning in a manner ‘strikingly similar to Jim Crow’ – the system of government-sanctioned racial…

Lightning flashed across Kentucky skies a few nights ago. 'I love storms,' said my roommate, Gypsi, her eyes bright with excitement. Thunder boomed over the Kentucky hills and Atwood Hall, here in Lexington, Kentucky's federal prison. I fell asleep thinking of the gentle, haunting song our gospel choir sings: 'It's over now, It's over now. I think that I can make it. The storm is over now.'

I awoke the next morning feeling confused and bewildered. Why had the guards counted us so many…

On 18 March, Yorkshire peace activist Sylvia Boyes, 72, was sentenced to 14 days in New Hall prison for not paying a fine arising from an anti-arms trade protest.

Sylvia had been fined £100 and ordered to pay £340 court costs after being found guilty of obstructing the highway at the defence and security equipment international (DSEI) arms fair in East London in September 2013.

‘That is also us, the possibility of us, if the wonderful accident of our birth had taken place elsewhere: you could be the refugee, I could be the torturer. To face that truth is also our burden. After all, each of us has been the bystander, the reasonable person who just happens not to hear, not to speak, not to see those people, the invisible ones, those who live on the other side of the border.’
Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage

It was a little…

US peace activists Frances Crowe (left) and Kathy Kelly, Northampton, Massachusetts, 19 June 2014. photo: Milan Rai

22 January: The US bureau of prisons contacted me today, assigning me a prison number and a new address: for the next 90 days, beginning tomorrow, I’ll live at FMC Lexington, in the satellite prison camp for women, adjacent to Lexington’s federal medical center for men. Very early tomorrow morning, Buddy Bell, Cassandra Dixon, and Paco and Silver, two house guests whom…

On 23 January, US peace activist Kathy Kelly handed herself in to authorities in Kentucky to start a three-month prison sentence (see p8), one part of the US movement against drone warfare.

On 26 November, on the west coast of the US, Chris Nelson and Shirley Osgood deliberately ‘crossed the line’ outside Beale air force base in California. They handed in a letter asking the base commander to end his role in ‘the kill chain which uses the Global Hawk drone to identify human…

On 24 November, a new human rights group, ‘We Stand With Shaker’, launched itself opposite parliament in London, calling for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and his return to his family in the UK. Despite being approved for release twice by the US authorities – under president George W Bush in 2007 and under president Barack Obama in 2009, Shaker is still in Guantánamo. The launch was attended by Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve; John McDonnell…

Please send a card for 1 December Peace Prisoners Day. More names and addresses can be found on the War Resisters’ International website:
www.wri-irg.org/node/4718. Please send your card in an envelope and include a return name and address on the envelope. If a prisoner’s number is given, include this with the address. Please avoid writing anything that might get the prisoner into trouble.

China: Liu Yuandong (detained 23…

Sentenced last year to 35 years imprisonment for leaking thousands of classified files to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning’s real crime was embarrassing the US government and exposing some of the brutal realities of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Clark Stoeckley’s crudely-illustrated non-fiction graphic novel provides an accessible precis of Manning’s trial, taking us from her first pre-trial hearing in December 2011 through to her sentencing in August 2013. Along the way, we learn…

On Wednesday, January 15th, 79-year old Margaretta D’Arcy, writer, member of Aosdana which honours outstanding contributors to the arts in Ireland,  and widow of the late playwright John Arden, answered a knock on the door of her small Galway City terraced house. It was the Irish police. She was arrested and ferried by squad car to Limerick Prison to serve a three month sentence. Her crime: failure to sign a bond pledging to no longer trespass onto unauthorised areas of Shannon Airport.…

Chelsea Manning was already a hero of mine after releasing hundreds of thousands of classified documents revealing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her whistleblowing was digital direct action akin to the 1960s Spies for Peace revelations of UK preparations for nuclear war and exposure of the US COINTELPRO programme in the 1970s.

And then, as the world watched a military judge give her a 35-year sentence, she opened herself up with a beautiful and articulate statement: ‘I want…

On 7 October, US whistleblower Chelsea Manning stated publicly that she does not consider herself a pacifist, anti-war ‘or (especially) a “conscientious objector”.’

Manning, who is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking US military and diplomatic files, wrote: ‘it’s not terribly clear to me that my actions were explicitly done for “peace”.’

Manning was responding to the award to her of the International Peace Bureau’s 2013 Sean MacBride Peace Award.

The Transform Now Plowshares support group is calling for letters to help lower prison sentences for Megan Rice (83), Michael Walli (64) and Greg Boertje-Obed (57).

The peace activists are facing 30-year sentences for breaking into a US nuclear bomb-making factory in Oak Ridge, California in July 2012, and ‘transforming’ it with blood, spraypaint and hammers.

The support group asks for letters touching on three points: 

The hunger strike among California’s prisoners against protracted solitary confinement, a strike which initially involved over 30,000 prisoners (see PN 2561), was called off after 60 days on 5 September, in order to avert deaths.

The decision was ‘especially difficult considering that most of our demands have not been met’, said the prisoners. More info:
www.tinyurl.com/peacenews498

On 21 August, a military judge sentenced the 25-year-old US army private formerly known as Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison, with time served (almost three years) in pre-trial custody counted towards this.

The next day, Bradley Manning publicly asked to be referred to as Chelsea Manning from that point on, and asked people to use the feminine pronoun to refer to her (except in official post to the prison), saying: ‘I am a female’.

The judge in Manning’s trial counted…