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Notes from a County Jail in Georgia

by Karl Meyer
Crisp County Detention Center
Cordele, GA
July 30, 2001

he outdoor exercise yard at Crisp County Jail is a concrete area 60' x 120', completely enclosed by a 10'-high cement block wall, but we can see the azure sky and the tops of a few trees. Rough-winged swallows glide overhead and perch on wires of a radio antenna. A young house finch is tough enough to perch with one foot on a razor’s edge of the coiled razor wire that tops the whole perimeter of the cement block wall to prevent us from escaping.

I have been 10 weeks in county jails of south Georgia as an SOA Watch prisoner convicted with 25 others on May 23 for re-entry at Fort Benning in the annual protest at the School of the Americas. I was sentenced to six months in federal prison. Disregarding the warnings of SOA Watch staff about the rigors of county jails, I chose to go into immediate custody from the courtroom, rather than accept the option of self-surrender later at one of the designated federal prison camps, as most of the 26 did. I acted on an incarnational instinct retained from my Catholic past: Until we experience the hardships of others in our own bodies, we will not fully appreciate them and be moved to seek radical change in the structures of oppression. To state this in the words of Jesus, “I was in jail, and you visited me.”

I am still in county jails five weeks after my brothers in custody, Jack Gilroy and Josh Raisler Cohn, were taken to the federal system because it occurred to me three weeks into the process to write the Bureau of Prisons advising them to send me to a prison with exterior fences or walls, rather than an open federal prison camp, because I would not construct a virtual prison wall in my own mind to contain myself at their behest. This was like 88-year-old Sr. Dorothy Hennessey, who refused an offer of house arrest. Reluctance to be my own jailer goes back to my deep respect for the Peacemaker tradition of Wally and Juanita Nelson, Ernest and Marion Bromley, Maurice McCrackin and Chuck Matthei; they acted on a more radical refusal to cooperate in any way with their own imprisonment, to the extend of refusing to eat or to walk to cells while held in jail.

Our first weeks were spent at Muscogee County Jail in Columbus, GA, where we were tried. Apparently because of past experiences with SOA Watch prisoners, the jailers at Muscogee decided to hold us in 24-hour-a-day lockdown, in almost total isolation from other prisoners. We believed this was to protect other prisoners from contamination with our spirit of organized nonviolent assertion and possible resistance.

Brick Walls, Tight Security
The whole jail was very tightly controlled. The cell for the three of us was 9' x 12' x 10' high, with foot-thick brick walls and a solid steel door. Through one tiny window at the top of the cell we could see only a little murky daylight and an occasional pigeon on the outer sill. The jail provided us with a 21-page Inmate Manual of rules and privileges that did not restrict our outside correspondence and promised a minimum of two hours of outdoor exercise per week. Our faithful SOA Watch visitors, Jeff Moebus and Alice Budge, could bring us each a book a week, so we were reading Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom and Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (both superb books). After 18 days we had received only a half-hour of outdoor exercise, and we were experiencing recurrent screw-ups on our weekly commissary orders for stamped envelopes. We filed written grievances, following the prescribed procedures. We pointed out that both Nelson Mandela and Primo Levi got at least an hour of outdoor exercise daily while jailed in apartheid South Africa and in fascist Italy, respectively. We got some informal resolution of the envelope order problems, and began to get an average of one hour of outdoor exercise per week, isolated and heavily guarded by up to eight armed guards in an enclosed yard.

After five weeks, Jack and Josh were shipped out to the federal holding center in Atlanta. Not receiving any answer to our grievance appeal after 20 days (the Inmate Manual mandated a reply by the administrator within 10), I undertook a fast from all food starting on my birthday, June 30. I did not publicize the fast or seek outside help. My fast soon gained sympathetic hearings from the jail doctor and psychologist, who both promised to carry my concerns to the jail administrator.

I ended the fast after seven days for the protection of my own health. Three days later, U.S. marshals transferred me to Harris County jail, 30 miles south in Hamilton, GA. Harris proved to be the best run and most benign jail I have ever been in 44 years of nonviolent activism; I hoped the Bureau of Prisons might just leave me there for the four remaining months of my term.

It is a small jail, with only 46 prisoners when I was there, mostly from the local area, with a handful of federal prisoners awaiting transfer. It was built in recent years, with a capacity for twice as many prisoners. I was in one of 12 individual cells opening onto a large day room with tables and a dominant TV, always on, and usually tuned to law-enforcement dramatic series, The Price is Right, or The Jerry Springer Show. Each cell had its own stainless-steel sink and toilet unit and a built-in stool and writing desk looking out through a five-inch-wide window that showed a nice slice of wooded Georgia countryside.

When I arrived, the young guard at the receiving desk said she wanted “a room with view” for me; this was typical of the warm and friendly attitude of all the guards, who responded promptly to all reasonable requests by prisoners that were allowed by clearly defined rules. The attitude of the guards was so casual and cooperative that I did not see one incident of hostile tension between prisoners and guards, even when two guards went into a tier to conduct two prisoners to the “hole” after they were discovered smoking smuggled marijuana. All of the younger prisoners were friendly and respectful to me. In these jails almost all of the prisoners are familiar with SOA Watch protests from television news reports. We were allowed an hour a day of outdoor exercise in a chain-link cage that looked out on the Georgia woods. The only aversive aspect of Harris County jail was the pervasive TV noise, which distracted from my reading and writing during the day when we were locked out of our cells from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Unfortunately, after 10 days I was transported again to Crisp County Detention Center in Cordele, south of Macon.

This is a local jail, as well as being a holding center for state and federal prisoners awaiting transport to prisons or trial in Macon. A count of one shift in the recreation yard this morning showed 10 white, four Latino, and 35 African-American prisoners, most of whom are from this region. Of the visible guards on duty, five were African-American and one was white. The system provides both survival jobs and criminal punishment for minority communities in disproportionate numbers, locking both prisoners and guards into a totally non-productive stalemate. Centuries of jail time are being served by a million U.S. prisoners, and a million guards work in shifts to keep them contained and paralyzed.

In the cell block, each tier consists of a 12' x 27' sleeping room, with four double-decker steel bunk beds and locker chests, and an adjoining day room of the same size with two tables and a TV shelf. Fortunately for my tastes, the TV in this tier was broken and has not been replaced, though other prisoners complain bitterly about this. The population shifts from day to day as prisoners come and go. Presently in this cell there are three whites, two Mexicans and four African-Americans. The latter have segregated themselves in the day room by putting down their mattresses between tables and along walls, partly to avoid climbing up and down to the top bunks and partly to stay together. (The lower bunks are occupied now by whites and Latinos, through accident of seniority in the cell.)

The balance between friendly communication and racial tension shifts constantly as people move in and out. One young white drug dealer and I maintain the integration of the tier by persisting in eating at the tables, playing cards and talking with the Black prisoners. The young African-Americans call me “Dad”; as I gain seniority in the cell community and refuse to show prejudice or partiality, I gradually gain respect, and I am able to mediate tensions with a few words here and there; all this dynamic has evolved in the 10 days I have been here.

I find in the county jail system today standards for conditions, rules and privileges that did not exist in county jails 40 years ago, when I first experienced them, but did exist in federal prisons. I infer from the generality of these standards that they resulted from federal imposition of standards as a condition for being allowed to house federal prisoners temporarily as the federal prisoner population expanded rapidly.

Who’s in Prison and Why?
As always when I’ve lived among other convicted criminals, I conclude that we are fairly decent people like you outside. Most of my fellow recidivist criminals have been caught hustling to make a buck in an acquisitive culture that fosters more aspirations to prosper than opportunities to do it legally. The experience reinforces my belief in the abolition of the criminal “justice” system and prisons as we know them; they could be replaced, if necessary, by a benign system of reasonable restraint for people who may persist in actual serious harm to others.

It’s hard for me to believe this practice of holding federal prisoners for weeks at a time has evolved for actual efficiency in moving the prisoners to their assigned destinations. It seems more probable that it is a budget dodge, because it may cost less per diem to hold people in county jails than in federal prisons, due to wage and benefit differentials and more costly standards in the federal prisons. This would be a worthy subject for investigative reporting or research by a doctoral student in criminology or sociology.

I have now been held for ten weeks in county jails. Having been given lemons, I am making lemonade here, writing an autobiography of my years in nonviolent action. I am a third of the way through a first draft, having completed pages on my first jailing at the “Tombs” in New York City in 1957, with Catholic Worker founders Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy and the Living Theatre’s Judith Malina and Julian Beck, among others. Yesterday I finished the account of my first federal sentence, in1959, at the age of 22, for an action at an intercontinental ballistic missile base in Nebraska. Forty-two years later we face the new threat of National Missile Defense and a second “Cold War” over domination in space.

Meanwhile, I await probable shipment tomorrow by “FedEx” and “Con-Air” to a federal prison, destination and time of delivery unknown.

Longtime Catholic Worker activist Karl Meyer is a member of WRL’s Nashville local. To write to Karl Meyer or any of the other SOA 26, call SOA Watch at (202)234-3440 or see www.soaw.org.