So far we’ve had it easy in this independence drive when you consider Catalans are still being hunted down all over Europe for doing basically the same thing. Our misguided Fed brothers and sisters deserve a hat tip for their quiet reaction, but this is just starting. Here’s what each of us can do from inside jail if we get put there. These are * options * , a menu to pick from, which is likely to make your treatment harsher… but your cause stronger. The fullness of your compliance does you shame; the brutality of your enemies does you honor. Can you do roughly half of these things, as I plan to do and have already done?
) First, avoid active physical resistance that would make someone fear for their safety or anything that could reasonably be interpreted as such. They benefit from that; don’t help them.
) Having said that, consider going for your camera/phone/recorder and filming your arrest, even if they tell you to put your hands up. Facing away from them may help them feel less threatened. Try to have it with you in each part of the house that you visit, all day every day. Live steaming ability is best if possible but i’ve never found a good service for this. Meanwhile, trying and failing to record is much better than not even trying.
) Consider making the arrest about independence (assuming you are an advocate for your state’s independence from the Union). No matter what the charges are, assume that you may have wound up there because of your involvement in the independence drive, or your activism in general. Your arrest is the arrest of an independence activist, and no matter where they got you in the U.S., you were arrested and then held by Fed-funded institutions.
) Consider not walking toward them or toward the sound of breaking glass in your home as Ian Freeman did, consider refusing to reveal your location or presence within the house.
) Consider complying with their orders at minimum speed or make them drag you places like Pete Eyre and Lauren Canario. The latter works better for women.
) Make sure that any confiscated video or audio becomes an issue…. What are they hiding? Make sure video and audio not confiscated gets publicized.
) Go peaceably but not quietly. Maybe you should be screaming for help from neighbors and for more videographers during the arrest? The media videographer who filmed the 1994 Waco shootout and saved an ATF agent…got assaulted by Feds as he was evacuating the scene. But he had trained himself to yell for help, which males don’t do naturally. It may have saved his life. The French Republic didn’t stop its terror in the 1795 era…until people stopped trying to be dignified at the guillotine and instead lost their decorum. Consider doing that.
) Write down everything of interest that happens to you, have your calls from jail recorded and broadcast…read your written record out loud to the public.
) Consider refusing to provide your personal information to the jail, or delay it as long as possible, or limit it. Do not consent to TB tests or other medical tests, or delay them etc. They will retaliate but it will be expensive for them probably. You also can then publicize what they did to you.
) Consider starting a prison labor strike. Announce it to the public and the rest of the jail; try to spread it to other jails. Refuse to work in the kitchen, etc. Certainly do not produce anything that would help the government. Ask other detainees to do the same…American governments are able to jail so many people because they use their labor for profit. Make your stay cost them financially:
2016 U.S. prison strike - Wikipedia
) Consider refusing bond/bail or delay accepting it, certainly don’t accept just any bail conditions, consider refusing to pay the bail bondsman who is parasiting off of the system. I don’t think they are allowed to make you pay them in New Hampshire, i.e. you’re allowed to refuse to pay them bc of a new law.
) Request your lawyer as frequently as you can afford maybe? Max out your public defender if you have one of those instead perhaps? Uncharted territory for me.
) Consider starting an unauthorized jail paper. Dictate it to other detainees if they take your pen. Have them and your outside supporters make copies and spread the copies in and outside jail. Publicize your faith in your fellow inmates to the extent you can and politicize their cases; give them a higher calling. The Sarajevo daily Oslobodenje didn’t achieve greatness because of its circulation, production values or writing style…They achieved it because they published a message of ethnic tolerance every day during a four-year siege, from the basement of a destroyed office building 100 yards behind the front line of an ethnic war.
) Learn Spanish to improve relations across the language barrier, presumably it’s the #2 language in New Hampshire jails. Or have supporters send you a spanish language book in jail.
) Maybe attempt to file written complaints against key perpetrators with which you have had contact. This should be done as officially as possible, but for the moment I don’t know much about that and at first it may just be pen and paper handed to a guard. If possible, organize other detainees to mass produce such complaints the way Vlad Bukovsky did in Soviet jails: How To Bring Down the System - LewRockwell LewRockwell.com
We started to do this when I was at Cheshire County jail for refusing to turn my camera off in the Keene District Court lobby. Do you have advice how to proceed along these lines?
) Attempt to unionize the detainees? This may involve having someone outside file paperwork? Or it could all be unofficial. Uncharted territory for me too, do you know more?
) File lawsuits from jail? Don’t know much about this.
) Request specific actions the rest of us can take from the outside… for example a “calling in sick” regimen or conventional strike directed against Federally-connected businesses. Erica Chenowith says general strikes are the most effective method of resistance against bad governments:
Why nonviolent resistance beats violent force in effecting social, political change – Harvard Gazette
) Come up with some piece of peaceable resistance that everyone on the outside can do which is very small…aiming for 3 percent of the population doing it. For example 5,000 New Hampshirites chalking NHexit.US once a week outside their nearest Fed facility. Tall order but Chenoweth says once this percentage is achieved, victory becomes unavoidable… Your status as a detainee will give you the cred to make this request go further than others could. So far very few of our detainees have taken advantage of the sudden power they have just by being in jail.
) Inform the public, preferably in advance, what else you want us to do as a result of you being in jail.
) Tell us everything of interest that * you * are doing in the jail and everything bad that happens to you there so we can publicize it or spread the word to other jails/prisons.
) If you get out, consider openly filming and broadcasting interactions with probation personnel, if any. No one in our movement has ever even tried to do this. If they object, do it anyway but tell them up front you’re doing it, place a sign or wear a lapel pen that says “I’m audio taping” in case you forget to inform them verbally. That will keep you on the sunny side of New Hampshire’s wiretapping law. Decline bail conditions which forbid recording.
Again, I’m only planning to do half of these, but they are all options.
) If the retaliation or length of sentence becomes more than you can bear, thirst or hunger strikes are available a last resort. Once initiated they must be continued to a successful conclusion…or to the death.
