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by Jennifer Randolph '00 I spent twelve and a half hours in a holding pen at Hennepin County Jail on Monday, November 1. It was horrible, and I would do it again. I chose to be arrested for trespassing at Alliant Techsystems headquarters to protest their production of weapons. Before the protest, I had spent months discussing and debating the action; I had focused on the decision to be arrested and the moment I would be handcuffed. Twelve hours in jail, however, taught me about a whole new set of injustices. Jail does not correct; it disempowers further. It is not just; it is stuffed with the marginalized and the desperate. Many things in jail dehumanize and demoralize. Your clothes and possessions are taken; you have absolutely no control over your actions or your future. The few you do, like where you sit or when you use the toilet on the side of the room, become very important. Several times people on our cell block would beat on the locked door until a guard Came and threatened her with solitary, an animalistic way of asserting some control. One of the worst for me was the total lack of time in the holding pen: not only did we not know when we would get out, but we rarely knew how long we'd been in. It was the first question asked when women returned from making their phone call. Our watches had been taken away, presumably because we could hide drugs in them or use them to kill ourselves or escape. As we sat under florescent lights in that concrete cell, it seemed I had been there for days. How long since I had eaten? How long since I had slept? How long since I got back from the fingerprinting? The monotony was broken only by the addition of new women shoved into the cell, strung-out and frantic, sometimes angry, sometimes in the green scrubs that showed they had been in jail for over a day. After a time (how long?) they became old-timers in the social circle of our cell. I learned more from those women than most of my professors. They were hard women, used to the prison system, in for "another felony." Some of them knew the cops' names and personalities. More importantly, they were also from a very marginalized section of our society; I had never known women like this. Prison is a study in race and class in America. As Mumia Abdul-Jamal says from death row, prison is the privilege of the poor. Half were African-American and some of the rest were Hispanic; almost all were single mothers depending on long hours at low-paying jobs. A few were in business school at night. Most had been in jail before, and they gave each other advice on charges and consequences. They talked casually about smoking and selling crack, street violence around them, welfare, getting lawyers when you make a little money so you can't get a public defender but don't have near enough to hire "a real lawyer". The system does an unbelievable job of keeping these women in the cycle of addiction, poverty, and arrest. The room we were in after processing had a telephone, and the calls they made broke my heart. They were frantically looking for people to pick their babies up from day care, take their children to school; one African-American woman instructed her three children in great detail on what to wear to school the next day. There were countless protestations of love, countless "I'm gonna miss you, baby," because some of these women would be "going upstairs" to the jailhouse for the days until their court date, and probably going right to jail after that. They made a different set of frantic calls to their workplaces. One woman who was a couple hours behind us in the processing asked one of us to call her workplace as she waited more and more hours and realized that she was not going to make it there by 5:00. One of the women in our group memorized the number, repeating it so she would remember it for hours until she could make a phone call, since we had no pens or paper. The woman knew there was no point in appealing to the cops that she had to go to work. It would always be "when the processing gets done," and then we would be called suddenly, given papers and property, and released into the cold night. I knew these women worked tenuously, that many of them lost their jobs each time they were picked up. I could picture their children, stranded at day care with no explanation or alone at home not knowing when their mother would get out of jail. It would be a cycle of arrest and marginalization by the system being a normal part of your life. I had grown up believing in the system, as part of the small section of people with power. I didn't know anyone who had ever been to jail, for any reason, until college. It was implicit that people in jail belong there and it "fixes" them, that they "deserve" it, and that they are "dangerous." These lies continue because of the distance in our society between the social situation I grew up in and they did. Crack addicts, prostitutes, and felons are invisible people and dehumanized labels when seen from so far above. The "justice" system perpetuates their inability to escape life situations of poverty and low levels of opportunity. Like the Hennepin County Jail, perhaps it is intentional oppression by the powers that be, or perhaps it is really only bureaucratic indifference to suffering and injustice. Regardless, the system succeeds in keeping down the lowest sectors of American society away from opportunity, and out of sight from the suburbs and offices of the world. I went to jail because of one kind of injustice, but I came out deeply concerned about another. What I learned in jail was something I had heard before, but it was quite different to see and feel it. Our jails and prisons are stuffed with people picked up for drug charges or who have committed crimes because of drug addiction. They are populated by the poor, the desperate, and the hopeless as the "white-collar" criminals and respectable businessmen go on their way and while some of them profit from injustice as they produce landmines or use those poor and desperate as cheap labor.
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