Threat: Juveniles and Jail Solidarity
by Kristin Bricker
On the morning of April 17, 2000, I was arrested at the protests against the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, DC. Police loaded me into a van with approximately a dozen other women and took us to a garage in what I believe was the D.C. Courthouse. Upon arrival, a U.S. Marshal boarded the van, punched the first woman he saw in the face, and announced that there would be no smiling and no laughing on his watch. One by one, the U.S. Marshals took us off the bus in shackles and asked us, “How old are you?” Many women chose not to give their ages or other personal information. This was not a problem for the Marshals, because most of the women in the van looked like adults. Except for me.
One of the Marshals asked me, “How old are you?”
I repeated the phrase the Midnight Special Legal Collective had us practice over and over again in trainings: “I wish to remain silent until I speak to my lawyer.” “Good,” he replied, smiling. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
He threw me against the concrete wall of the garage and began suffocating me by crushing my chest between the wall and the full weight of his large body. He held me in that position while 3-4 other Marshals took turns smashing my face into the wall and beating me in the kidney area. Approximately five other Marshals surrounded us and cheered for their colleagues: “Yeah! Give her what she deserves. That’s what you get.”
After the beating, I was separated from my affinity group (all of whom were adults) and thrown into a solitary confinement area with other ambiguously-aged women and girls. I stayed there for hours, my hands and feet shackled to chains around my waist. We could hear screams from prisoners being beaten in other parts of the building. The screams terrified us because we were alone, separated from each other and the hundreds of other protesters who were arrested over the weekend. Eventually the women I was with decided that they wanted to give their ages and be returned to general population where there was safety in numbers. I told the Marshals I was seventeen.
I was taken to a different part of the building and put into a cell with another juvenile girl. We were all alone. Over the next day and a half, the U.S. Marshals threatened to beat us and let other inmates rip out our ear piercings and rape us. My cellmate was never allowed to wash the pepper spray off of her leg. It soaked into her jeans and caused first degree burns on her thigh. The toilet in our cell was broken and overflowing. Since two of us were crammed into a one-person holding cell, we had to take turns sleeping on the feces- and urine-covered floor. The sink did not work, and we were never given water or food. At my arraignment the following day, I passed out due to dehydration. When I came to, I found myself being charged with contempt of court. In the middle of the night, the police shuttled my cellmate and me to a juvenile detention center in Laurel, Maryland, about 20 miles outside the city, because, according to them, there are no juvenile detention centers in Washington, DC. The facilities were very clean and comfortable and the staff and inmates were very kind.
The following day, our public defenders told us that all the juveniles had been released, the adults were in negotiations with the city and our gesture of solidarity had no affect on them, so we should give our names and go home. We agreed and were “no-papered,” which is the official term the judicial system uses when it wishes to pretend nothing ever happened. When we left the courthouse, we discovered that hundreds of people were still inside, including a handful of juveniles. We had been misled, presumably because our lawyers thought it was in our best interest to be released.
I came out of this ordeal with two important lessons. The first is that if cops enjoy beating a 93-pound girl whose only crime is asking to speak with a lawyer, perhaps police brutality is not something victims bring on themselves. The second lesson is that no one – police nor protestors – is prepared to deal with juveniles in mass arrest situations. In a time when John Timoney’s “Miami Plan” is the law and authorities are increasingly prepared to effectively counter traditional jail solidarity tactics, juveniles present a double-edged sword that, if used correctly, can be one of jail solidarity’s strongest weapons.
In legal, direct action, and nonviolence trainings, we are always told to use our solidarity to protect our marginalized comrades: queers, differently-abled folks, people of color, and people with injuries. Juveniles should be included in this list of people who should be given special consideration when arrested, especially because, unlike other marginalized groups, law often explicitly requires them to be isolated from adult prisoners. I became involved in organizing for the 2000 Republican National Convention to ensure that juveniles’ interests were adequately represented in the planning stages of the protests. The R2K Legal Collective went to great lengths to ensure that juveniles were not abandoned in the legal system. On the contrary, thanks to our juvenile-specific legal training and strategizing session, juveniles on average faired better than adults in Philadelphia’s criminal in-justice system.
We scheduled one combination legal training/strategizing session for juveniles. The session was restricted to juvenile participants only. I was able to provide the group, many of whom had not been arrested before, with insights from my experiences in the D.C. jail system. An adult member of the R2K Legal Collective was there to help synthesize juvenile jail solidarity with adult jail solidarity. She brought the decisions of the juvenile strategizing session to the legal collective, and adult participants in the subsequent legal trainings were informed of the decisions we made so they could plan accordingly.
A local juvenile criminal defense lawyer also participated in the training and strategizing session. He was intimately familiar with both local laws as they applied to juveniles and conditions in the local juvenile detention center. He provided us with information that was crucial to our decision-making process. Because the juvenile criminal defense lawyer regularly visited minors in detention facilities, he was able to give us information about the conditions in the juvenile detention center we would be sent to. As laws pertaining to minors in the criminal in-justice system vary from locale to locale, it is very important to consult a local lawyer well-versed in juvenile law. Laws that can vary and should be clarified before undertaking a risky action include:
Legal guardians should be aware that in many places they can give the police permission to release their children to lawyers or adult members of the legal collective, rather than personally picking them up from jail.
Legal trainings should also discuss a person we juveniles often see in jail: the social worker. I am still unclear on who jail social workers are, what my rights are in relation to them (do we have social worker-client confidentiality?), and if they are my advocate or the police’s. In my experience, social workers have never advocated for my needs (such as food, water, or a lawyer), but they have always played “good cop” – they tell me it is in my best interest to give the police my name, that the police are my friends, and that if I do exactly as the police say and tell them everything they want to know, I’ll get out very quickly. They also rarely wear identification, so it is likely that at least some of the “social workers” I’ve met are actually cops.
Because juveniles often comprise a very small proportion of total arrestees in direct action protests, it is vitally important to consider that law generally requires that they be held separately from adults. Furthermore, because there are so few of them, it is possible that multiple juveniles of the same sex could be arrested at different times or locations and never run into each other in the system. Juveniles often come to protests as part of adult affinity groups. Affinity groups with juveniles in them should always have a mutually agreed-upon plan of action in the event the police ask for ages. Some questions affinity groups should ask themselves are:
Affinity groups may find that after asking themselves these questions, they are unable to form a satisfactory juvenile jail solidarity plan. This is where the legal collective-facilitated strategizing session can fill in the holes. Juveniles who are the only underage members of their affinity groups can meet each other in the session and find safety in numbers. Affinity groups with lone juvenile members of the same sex can unite as sister affinity groups and carry out their actions in the same area, so that if the groups are arrested, the juveniles can stick together through the criminal in-justice system. Alternatively, juveniles may decide to form a juveniles-only affinity group to ensure that if they are arrested, they will be arrested together.
If juveniles do not choose to team up during the action, they might use the strategizing session to agree on an answer to the popular question, “How old are you?” They may decide to try their luck at withholding their ages, or they could agree to give their ages. Agreeing to either option will increase the chances of staying together in the system, though the latter is, in my experience, a safer bet. Juveniles should also use this session to come to an agreement on questions affinity groups often ask themselves before an action, because they know that communicating in jail is difficult:
In our strategizing session before the August 1 direct actions against the Prison Industrial Complex, most of us opted to give the police our ages so we would be put in the juvenile detention center. We made this choice for several reasons, some of which were Philadelphia-specific:
The decision to give our ages was not a binding decision, and it was made very clear that no one should feel pressured to give their age against their will. The purpose of determining whether or not to give our ages prior to the action was simply a way for us to know where a majority of our fellow juveniles would most likely be held, so that we would not be isolated in the system because of our ages.
There were some juveniles in the strategizing session who either came to the action on their own or came with an all-adult affinity group. These juveniles decided to form a “kid-only” affinity group so that they would be arrested together. I was arrested with this affinity group. Because we were arrested at the same time and place, we were all transported to the precinct that was designated as a juvenile holding facility. We met other juveniles who were arrested throughout the city in the precinct. However, some juveniles who were arrested later in the day reported that the police had likely become privy to our plan, because when they arrived at the infamous Round House and gave the police their ages, they were not transferred to the juvenile precinct. Despite their insistence that they were underage and that they wished to be held with juveniles instead of adults, they were booked as adults and were forced to go through the adult criminal in-justice system and all of its horrors.
In some regards, juveniles can have more rights than adults in the criminal in-justice system. For example, we learned that it is much more difficult for juveniles to give up their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent than it is for adults. Philadelphia code states that juveniles cannot be questioned by police until their lawyer and/or parents are contacted. It is crucial that juveniles are aware of all of their rights, both generally and juvenile-specific, in the legal training. Juveniles know that the system treats them differently from adults, and therefore may not assume that they have all of the same rights as adults (and more). For example, police told us that juveniles do not have the right to remain silent, and that the right to a lawyer is reserved for adults. While most protesters, juvenile or adult, are probably aware that police often lie, statements such as those place seeds of doubts in an uncertain juvenile’s mind and may prevent them from demanding their full rights under the law.
Police often exploit prisoners’ uncertainty about their rights, and juveniles are no exception. Some of the RNC juvenile prisoners were separated from the main group and unlawfully questioned without a lawyer present. It was a frightening experience for them, and many gave their names and ages soon after being escorted back to their cells. They were cited out for a $50-$75 fine.
I, as a member of the legal collective, was well aware of my rights and insisted that they be respected. My cellmates and I were rather rowdy in our demands. When the police attempted to misinform us about our rights, we called them liars and demanded that they leave us alone until we could speak to our lawyers, who were outside the building demanding to be let in. The police never attempted to question us, most likely because we knew our rights better than the cops did. Instead, my cellmates were literally kicked out of jail. Despite their insistence that they remain with us, they were taken from the cell in the middle of the night, left alone on a street corner and told by police to wait there to be transferred to the juvenile detention center. After waiting for a few minutes, they used a pay phone to call the R2K Legal Collective for a ride to safety.
Eventually, all of the other juveniles were either kicked out of jail without giving any information, or had given their names and cited out. I was the last one inside. Scared to be alone with Philadelphia police, who only a week before brutally beat Thomas Jones unconscious on live national television, and unable to speak to lawyers, I was unsure of what to do. Being one of the protest organizers, I was afraid to give my name until I was sure I would be released without charge. The whole police station was cleared out and would remain that way until I was released. At one point, police tried to bring juvenile who was not a protester to the station, but they were told to send him elsewhere because the station was reserved for juvenile protesters and they still had one left. I was very pleased that my solitary act of jail solidarity was an obvious burden on the system.
I was never actually permitted to see a lawyer face-to-face in Philadelphia. The authorities attempted to arraign me three times. Before they came to get me, I could hear them argue over which one had to do it because I smelled so badly (the natural result of imprisoning me in a temporary holding cell instead of a real detention facility with showers and running water). Each time I was brought before the judge, I told him that I did not know how to plead because I was not permitted to speak to my lawyer. Each time, the judge sent me back to my cell and instructed the police to allow me to speak to R2K Legal. Rather than let me speak to a lawyer, they would beg me to give my name so they could go home. After the second time in front of the judge, the police actually did let me speak to an R2K Legal lawyer. They called him, spoke to him for a few minutes, and then handed me the phone. He uttered the sweetest words I’d heard in two days, “You’ve won, Ophelia.” He told me that they agreed to drop the charges if I gave my name to the judge.
When I went before the judge, she asked me what plea I wished to enter. My lawyer hadn’t told me how to plead; he simply told me I’d won. I asked the police sergeant, the one who had spoken to my lawyer, how I should plead. He told the judge, “I would like to enter a plea for the defendant.” The judge was visibly perplexed, but allowed him to continue. “I wish to enter a plea of ‘Not Guilty’ for the defendant.” The prosecutor angrily objected that police cannot enter pleas for defendants, but the judge announced that my charges were dropped due to lack of evidence and walked out of the room.
***
The legal strategy for juveniles at the 2000 RNC was more organized and effective than at the protests against the 2000 Spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank, where the only juvenile legal training was cancelled due to a police raid of the convergence space. Over the past couple of years, I’ve run into cellmates from the RNC. All of them expressed their gratitude to R2K Legal for the work we did to ensure that juveniles had an adequate jail solidarity strategy. No one could have foreseen the horrors protestors experienced in Philadelphia jails, and for years afterwards in the court system. But in preparing juveniles to fend for themselves and fight the system, we inadvertently helped many of them avoid a much worse fate in the adult criminal in-justice system. R2K Legal armed juveniles with the knowledge of their legal rights, facilitated juvenile jail solidarity strategizing, and monitored arrested juveniles as a marginalized group that needed special attention.
So what is the next step? It is a bigger question than simply integrating juveniles into adult jail solidarity strategy. The RNC taught us that the authorities are becoming increasingly prepared for traditional jail solidarity. It is time to reexamine our tactics, and part of this process should include asking ourselves how juveniles can contribute to jail solidarity. Legally defined as children, society is often more sympathetic towards them regarding jail conditions, police brutality, and the legality of their arrests. Furthermore, a small handful of juveniles who refuse to leave jail can be much more of a burden on the system than hundreds of adults. It remains to be seen what will come of jail solidarity in future protests, but the secret juvenile weapon should not be overlooked.
you're a really good writer kristen, this is great. - dan PS nice title.
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