JAILS
An Introduction
As of 2020, over the course of sixty-three years of nonviolent agitation for a world of peace and social justice, I have been arrested over sixty times, brought to trial thirty-eight times, convicted twenty-seven times, and served about twenty-six months, in thirty-two different local jails and federal prisons.
Most of these arrests were for alleged "trespassing" at public property, or "disorderly conduct", for failing to comply with police demands to cease constitutionally protected free speech and peaceable assembly at properties supposedly owned by The People of the United States.
Usually it was the police who were violating what I believe to be legally protected rights. How can public employees, our employees, arrest us at properties of which we are said to be among many owners, for assembling peaceably to petition for redress of crimes being coordinated or facilitated from those properties?
In 2001, I was sentenced to six months in federal custody for trespassing at the Fort Benning, Georgia, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (renamed School of the Americas), where the U.S. Army trains chosen officers and soldiers of Latin American armies in all the skills of military repression.
I was held successively in four different jails in Georgia, and one in Oklahoma, before completing my sentence at the Forrest City, Arkansas, Federal Correctional Institution. What follows are letters I sent to my four year old granddaughter Abby describing a month spent in a transfer cell at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, and to my seven year old grandson Felix describing my time at Forrest City F.C.I.
Most of these arrests were for alleged "trespassing" at public property, or "disorderly conduct", for failing to comply with police demands to cease constitutionally protected free speech and peaceable assembly at properties supposedly owned by The People of the United States.
Usually it was the police who were violating what I believe to be legally protected rights. How can public employees, our employees, arrest us at properties of which we are said to be among many owners, for assembling peaceably to petition for redress of crimes being coordinated or facilitated from those properties?
In 2001, I was sentenced to six months in federal custody for trespassing at the Fort Benning, Georgia, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (renamed School of the Americas), where the U.S. Army trains chosen officers and soldiers of Latin American armies in all the skills of military repression.
I was held successively in four different jails in Georgia, and one in Oklahoma, before completing my sentence at the Forrest City, Arkansas, Federal Correctional Institution. What follows are letters I sent to my four year old granddaughter Abby describing a month spent in a transfer cell at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, and to my seven year old grandson Felix describing my time at Forrest City F.C.I.
August 27, 2001
A Letter to my Granddaughter,
from United States Penitentiary
Atlanta, Georgia
Dearest Abby,
It is your birthday soon. I hope you will have a lovely day, and that you and Sadie will have lots of fun. I wish I could be there.
Grandpa Meyer is in jail. I have a nice room here. It is 8’ by 12’ with cinderblock walls that are a dirty ivory color. I get to sleep on the top bunk every night. I have to climb up first on our one chair and then on the table to get up here. The beds are bolted to the wall so we will never have to worry about moving them.
My roommate is a very nice cocaine dealer from Macon, Georgia. He is almost as old as I.
I have been here for 27 days. Before that I was in three other fine jails for over two months. The helpful people here are waiting to figure out how to get me onto their airplane to take me to Oklahoma City, and then to Memphis, and then on a bus to another nice prison camp in Forrest City, Arkansas. This is very complicated, and they are not too smart, so you can see why it takes them such a long time.
We have our own sink and toilet right in the bedroom with us, not like your house where you have to walk 20 feet to get to them. Here they are right near our beds, and always handy. The toilet has been leaking around the base since before I got here, but we can put a towel and sheet around it, and we have lots of time to keep it mopped up.
We each have a steel cabinet with shelves to keep our toys, and snacks, and books. I have been reading a story book by Sherwood Anderson called Winesburg, Ohio. It is a very good book about how lonely people can get when they don’t know how to ask for love. I have also just read Chang and Eng by Darrin Strauss. It is a story about the first “Siamese Twins” who were born in 1811, linked together so that they could not be separated. We are like this for a while when we are in jail.
I am also writing a book about my life. I have reached the time in 1964 when your Daddy was born. I am writing about taking care of him when he was about as big as Sadie. He was a cute little sucker, and he had lots of friends in our house. I am sorry to say it took him a long time to learn to use the potty, but I am not writing about that in the book.
When we use the potty here, we don’t have to close the door, because it is almost always closed and locked anyway, at least 23 hours out of every day. The door is solid steel, so we don’t have to worry about breaking it. It doesn’t drag on the floor like your front door that I tried to fix when I was there in January.
The door has a narrow window in the top so that the people who help us here can look in anytime to see that we are all right. They are very worried about losing any of us. They come by and count us seven times a day to make sure that we are still here. The light switch is outside our room in the hallway, so they can turn it on several times a night when they count us. That way they can be extra sure that we are still here and have not run away.
The door has a slot in it, 5” by 15”, with a cute little door to it. Our helpers can open the little door anytime they want to talk to us without having to open the big door. That way, if we get angry and start to scream or cry about anything they tell us to do, or not to do, they don’t have to worry about us hitting them or throwing anything at them. Isn’t that a spiffy arrangement?
We get to go downstairs three times a day to get trays of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We bring them back to our rooms to eat. It’s like TV dinner every meal, but fortunately for me, there are no TVs in the rooms here. If there were, they would be on all day, as they were at the other jails, and I would get to watch action cartoons, The Price is Right, Jerry Springer, and other programs just as wonderful, all day long.
The trays have lots of food on them. It is all overcooked by hardworking amateur cooks, with ingredients that don’t cost too much. Everybody gets to have equal servings of everything on the trays, except that vegetarians like me can ask for no meat. The food is so good that the average person here only throws away about half of each meal. That works out fine because after each meal the most trusted guests here come around with a great big galvanized garbage can on a cart. We put our trays out through the slot in the door, and they can fill up the whole garbage can from just one floor.
We have to go downstairs and take a shower three times a week, and then we get clean clothes. All of the clothes are a nice bright safety orange color, which is very cheerful. That way, if we would get mad and try to run away, it would be easier to find us. The T-shirts, towels, and sheets all get orange too, because it is easy to wash all of the laundry together, so the orange dye gets on everything.
Several times a week, we get to leave our rooms for an hour in a big room that is called “outdoor recreation.” Only, it is not outside. The floor is interesting dirty gray concrete, with a concrete ceiling about 20 feet above. Two of the walls are made of heavy steel screens that outside air can blow through if there is a breeze. However, the walls are covered with translucent plexiglass for 10 feet up so that we don’t have to see anything outside except for smokestacks, floodlights, and a slice of sky.
Oh, I forgot…when the helpers here want us to do anything or go anywhere, they shout very loudly, and that is thoughtful, because some of us could be quite hard of hearing.
I get to stay in several nice jails like this for six months because I walked across a white line I wasn’t supposed to on a highway leading into a U.S. Government Reservation at Fort Benning, Georgia. There were 3400 of us in a memorial procession to ask people there to stop training soldiers who go back and kill families down in Latin America.
I’m told that if the nice people here can ever figure out the plane and bus schedules to get me there, they will take me to a vacation camp on another U.S. Government Reservation in Arkansas. There will be another line on the roadway there, and this time if I walk over the line to leave the reservation, they will catch me and can make me stay for another five years.
So you can see it is very confusing for me, because I can’t tell whether they want me to stay off of Government Reservations, or stay on them. You can see how very logical it all is, and yet so hard to understand.
Meanwhile, my toenails and fingernails are growing very long just sitting here, so I asked the nurse for toenail clippers. That was two weeks ago, and my nails are still growing, because the nurse has only six clippers for six hundred people, and they have to be sterilized after each use to protect us all from diseases.
They can’t let us have clippers, because they are afraid we might get to fighting and stab each other with the nail clippers. So you can see how concerned they are to take care of us, in the best of all possible homes.
I would call you on the telephone to wish you a happy birthday, but I have to share six phones with all the other people, and we have only been getting out to do that on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the day when you are at nursery school and your Mommy and Daddy are at work. They don’t make us pay for the calls here. Your Mommy and Daddy get to pay for them collect, and it would only cost them 40 cents a minute.
That is good because the other jails I called from charged $1.40 a minute.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to write to you today, because I was having a lot of trouble getting envelopes, but today downstairs at the showers they were giving out envelopes and I was able to get a few.
So Abby, Sweetheart, have a good birthday. Kiss your sister Sadie, and Mommy and Daddy for me, and write me a little letter about your life.
With Love,
Grandpa Karl.
A Letter to my Granddaughter,
from United States Penitentiary
Atlanta, Georgia
Dearest Abby,
It is your birthday soon. I hope you will have a lovely day, and that you and Sadie will have lots of fun. I wish I could be there.
Grandpa Meyer is in jail. I have a nice room here. It is 8’ by 12’ with cinderblock walls that are a dirty ivory color. I get to sleep on the top bunk every night. I have to climb up first on our one chair and then on the table to get up here. The beds are bolted to the wall so we will never have to worry about moving them.
My roommate is a very nice cocaine dealer from Macon, Georgia. He is almost as old as I.
I have been here for 27 days. Before that I was in three other fine jails for over two months. The helpful people here are waiting to figure out how to get me onto their airplane to take me to Oklahoma City, and then to Memphis, and then on a bus to another nice prison camp in Forrest City, Arkansas. This is very complicated, and they are not too smart, so you can see why it takes them such a long time.
We have our own sink and toilet right in the bedroom with us, not like your house where you have to walk 20 feet to get to them. Here they are right near our beds, and always handy. The toilet has been leaking around the base since before I got here, but we can put a towel and sheet around it, and we have lots of time to keep it mopped up.
We each have a steel cabinet with shelves to keep our toys, and snacks, and books. I have been reading a story book by Sherwood Anderson called Winesburg, Ohio. It is a very good book about how lonely people can get when they don’t know how to ask for love. I have also just read Chang and Eng by Darrin Strauss. It is a story about the first “Siamese Twins” who were born in 1811, linked together so that they could not be separated. We are like this for a while when we are in jail.
I am also writing a book about my life. I have reached the time in 1964 when your Daddy was born. I am writing about taking care of him when he was about as big as Sadie. He was a cute little sucker, and he had lots of friends in our house. I am sorry to say it took him a long time to learn to use the potty, but I am not writing about that in the book.
When we use the potty here, we don’t have to close the door, because it is almost always closed and locked anyway, at least 23 hours out of every day. The door is solid steel, so we don’t have to worry about breaking it. It doesn’t drag on the floor like your front door that I tried to fix when I was there in January.
The door has a narrow window in the top so that the people who help us here can look in anytime to see that we are all right. They are very worried about losing any of us. They come by and count us seven times a day to make sure that we are still here. The light switch is outside our room in the hallway, so they can turn it on several times a night when they count us. That way they can be extra sure that we are still here and have not run away.
The door has a slot in it, 5” by 15”, with a cute little door to it. Our helpers can open the little door anytime they want to talk to us without having to open the big door. That way, if we get angry and start to scream or cry about anything they tell us to do, or not to do, they don’t have to worry about us hitting them or throwing anything at them. Isn’t that a spiffy arrangement?
We get to go downstairs three times a day to get trays of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We bring them back to our rooms to eat. It’s like TV dinner every meal, but fortunately for me, there are no TVs in the rooms here. If there were, they would be on all day, as they were at the other jails, and I would get to watch action cartoons, The Price is Right, Jerry Springer, and other programs just as wonderful, all day long.
The trays have lots of food on them. It is all overcooked by hardworking amateur cooks, with ingredients that don’t cost too much. Everybody gets to have equal servings of everything on the trays, except that vegetarians like me can ask for no meat. The food is so good that the average person here only throws away about half of each meal. That works out fine because after each meal the most trusted guests here come around with a great big galvanized garbage can on a cart. We put our trays out through the slot in the door, and they can fill up the whole garbage can from just one floor.
We have to go downstairs and take a shower three times a week, and then we get clean clothes. All of the clothes are a nice bright safety orange color, which is very cheerful. That way, if we would get mad and try to run away, it would be easier to find us. The T-shirts, towels, and sheets all get orange too, because it is easy to wash all of the laundry together, so the orange dye gets on everything.
Several times a week, we get to leave our rooms for an hour in a big room that is called “outdoor recreation.” Only, it is not outside. The floor is interesting dirty gray concrete, with a concrete ceiling about 20 feet above. Two of the walls are made of heavy steel screens that outside air can blow through if there is a breeze. However, the walls are covered with translucent plexiglass for 10 feet up so that we don’t have to see anything outside except for smokestacks, floodlights, and a slice of sky.
Oh, I forgot…when the helpers here want us to do anything or go anywhere, they shout very loudly, and that is thoughtful, because some of us could be quite hard of hearing.
I get to stay in several nice jails like this for six months because I walked across a white line I wasn’t supposed to on a highway leading into a U.S. Government Reservation at Fort Benning, Georgia. There were 3400 of us in a memorial procession to ask people there to stop training soldiers who go back and kill families down in Latin America.
I’m told that if the nice people here can ever figure out the plane and bus schedules to get me there, they will take me to a vacation camp on another U.S. Government Reservation in Arkansas. There will be another line on the roadway there, and this time if I walk over the line to leave the reservation, they will catch me and can make me stay for another five years.
So you can see it is very confusing for me, because I can’t tell whether they want me to stay off of Government Reservations, or stay on them. You can see how very logical it all is, and yet so hard to understand.
Meanwhile, my toenails and fingernails are growing very long just sitting here, so I asked the nurse for toenail clippers. That was two weeks ago, and my nails are still growing, because the nurse has only six clippers for six hundred people, and they have to be sterilized after each use to protect us all from diseases.
They can’t let us have clippers, because they are afraid we might get to fighting and stab each other with the nail clippers. So you can see how concerned they are to take care of us, in the best of all possible homes.
I would call you on the telephone to wish you a happy birthday, but I have to share six phones with all the other people, and we have only been getting out to do that on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the day when you are at nursery school and your Mommy and Daddy are at work. They don’t make us pay for the calls here. Your Mommy and Daddy get to pay for them collect, and it would only cost them 40 cents a minute.
That is good because the other jails I called from charged $1.40 a minute.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to write to you today, because I was having a lot of trouble getting envelopes, but today downstairs at the showers they were giving out envelopes and I was able to get a few.
So Abby, Sweetheart, have a good birthday. Kiss your sister Sadie, and Mommy and Daddy for me, and write me a little letter about your life.
With Love,
Grandpa Karl.
November 2, 2001
National Catholic Reporter
A Letter to my Grandson, Felix
Dear Felix,
I am writing to wish you a happy birthday, and the same to Tyler and Mommy and Daddy, too.
I am being corrected here because the government says that I have been a bad boy. I have to stay in timeout, but it isn’t just for 10 minutes. It is for six months, from last May until Nov. 22, because a judge felt that I was a very bad boy for walking down a street that I wasn’t supposed to be walking on at Fort Benning, Ga.
I was trying to go with 3,400 other people to the School of the Americas to talk to the teachers and students about nonviolence. It was sort of like when I went to Tyler’s school with my Peace House six years ago, when he was in kindergarten, and talked with his classmates about peacemaking and compassion for animals.
I have a nice little cubicle room here in a dormitory with 120 other men. My cellmate is a Mexican man who is in timeout for five years because he crossed the Rio Grande River, after he had already been told not to do that ever again.
The people who run this place are very serious about not doing what you have been told not to do.
I sleep on the top bunk. I have to climb down and then up again whenever I have to go to the bathroom at night. We have to go to bed at 10 o’clock. The lights go out then. The lights go on at 6 a.m., and we go to the main dining room for breakfast.
Everything is very regular here. If we fool around and don’t do things when we are supposed to, we will miss our meals altogether. If we don’t go where we are supposed to go, like work, or school, or appointments, we could be sent to a special time-out room, where we would be locked in all day and night for 30 days.
If I do not get papers to prove that I have been to college and graduated, I will have to go to high school classes and pass tests to show I know enough to get a high school diploma. I don’t have one because I was too smart and went to college after two years of high school without getting a diploma, but the teachers here don’t believe anything you say, unless you prove it with official papers.
All the walls are painted white here; all the furniture is tan or beige. I have a tan steel locker to keep all my letters, books, and clothes in. Everything has to be put away, except when you are actually using it. All of the clothes are either white or tan, too. We have white underwear, socks and towels. Each one of us has four tan khaki shirts, four pairs of pants, one tan windbreaker jacket, and a pair of black boots.
All the toads are tan, too. There are hundreds, or maybe even thousands of them, that hop around in the grass of the recreation yard, where we can go every evening, or in the daytime when we are not working. The clay dirt is tan, too. There is a half-mile walking track of packed dirt around the softball and football fields; I walk around it for three miles every night and watch the toads hopping around the shallow ditches that drain the recreation fields, and the killdeers and mockingbirds in the fields beyond the fences.
There are 1,800 men in timeout here, and probably more toads, but the toads can hop through the fence.
There are lots of recreational opportunities: In addition to football and softball fields, there are four outdoor basketball courts, four handball courts, two volleyball nets, two horseshoe beds, and two bocce ball courts. Inside there are music rooms, pool tables, and body building equipment. We are never at a loss for games to play.
The men are all very nice and friendly; we get along very peacefully together. It is hard to believe they have all done such bad things like me. A lot of us are here for what is called “illegal reentry,” which means coming or going places that we were told not to go.
Now, of course, we are not supposed to leave this timeout area until we are allowed to. They have two 10-foot chainlink fences around the whole place, with lots of coils of razor wire on top of them and between them, to make sure that we wouldn’t leave without cutting ourselves to shreds.
If we would try to leave timeout before we are allowed to, we might be made to come back and stay for another five years, so now almost all of us are pretty good about staying where we are told. After they let me out on Nov. 22, if I try to come back in without permission, or send anything in to my friends here without permission, I might have to come in again for another five years.
I know all this is confusing and doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t need to make sense,, because it teaches us all to do what we are told to do, even if it doesn’t make any sense to us at all, and, as you know, that is very important to learn.
One day I counted. There are 27 fully salaried medically benefited, pension-vested, federal employees standing in the dining room watching us eat lunch, to make sure that we are eating it right.
That is fine for them, and easy work, but I kept wondering: Isn’t there a classroom somewhere in an impoverished neighborhood where a poorly paid young teacher is struggling to teach 27 children to read and write, without any help at all. Isn’t there a nursing home somewhere where one nursing aid is being paid minimum wage to care for 27 feeble old people and keep them clean and fed, without any help at all?
I read a book here about a man named Nelson Mandela. He had to stay in timeout for 28 years, which is almost as long as your Uncle Eric has been alive, because he didn’t stay where he was told. After all that time they let him out and let him become the president of his country, because they found out that he had been right about things all along.
Maybe sometime the people who run this place will believe your Grandpa, too, when he says that nobody should kill anybody, anytime, anywhere, ever and that people who have a whole lot of belongings should share them with other people who have little or nothing.
In the meantime, I have no complaints. Everything is very clean and neat and well-run here; I have lots of friends to talk with, as I am sure you do, too.
With love,
Grandpa Karl
National Catholic Reporter
A Letter to my Grandson, Felix
Dear Felix,
I am writing to wish you a happy birthday, and the same to Tyler and Mommy and Daddy, too.
I am being corrected here because the government says that I have been a bad boy. I have to stay in timeout, but it isn’t just for 10 minutes. It is for six months, from last May until Nov. 22, because a judge felt that I was a very bad boy for walking down a street that I wasn’t supposed to be walking on at Fort Benning, Ga.
I was trying to go with 3,400 other people to the School of the Americas to talk to the teachers and students about nonviolence. It was sort of like when I went to Tyler’s school with my Peace House six years ago, when he was in kindergarten, and talked with his classmates about peacemaking and compassion for animals.
I have a nice little cubicle room here in a dormitory with 120 other men. My cellmate is a Mexican man who is in timeout for five years because he crossed the Rio Grande River, after he had already been told not to do that ever again.
The people who run this place are very serious about not doing what you have been told not to do.
I sleep on the top bunk. I have to climb down and then up again whenever I have to go to the bathroom at night. We have to go to bed at 10 o’clock. The lights go out then. The lights go on at 6 a.m., and we go to the main dining room for breakfast.
Everything is very regular here. If we fool around and don’t do things when we are supposed to, we will miss our meals altogether. If we don’t go where we are supposed to go, like work, or school, or appointments, we could be sent to a special time-out room, where we would be locked in all day and night for 30 days.
If I do not get papers to prove that I have been to college and graduated, I will have to go to high school classes and pass tests to show I know enough to get a high school diploma. I don’t have one because I was too smart and went to college after two years of high school without getting a diploma, but the teachers here don’t believe anything you say, unless you prove it with official papers.
All the walls are painted white here; all the furniture is tan or beige. I have a tan steel locker to keep all my letters, books, and clothes in. Everything has to be put away, except when you are actually using it. All of the clothes are either white or tan, too. We have white underwear, socks and towels. Each one of us has four tan khaki shirts, four pairs of pants, one tan windbreaker jacket, and a pair of black boots.
All the toads are tan, too. There are hundreds, or maybe even thousands of them, that hop around in the grass of the recreation yard, where we can go every evening, or in the daytime when we are not working. The clay dirt is tan, too. There is a half-mile walking track of packed dirt around the softball and football fields; I walk around it for three miles every night and watch the toads hopping around the shallow ditches that drain the recreation fields, and the killdeers and mockingbirds in the fields beyond the fences.
There are 1,800 men in timeout here, and probably more toads, but the toads can hop through the fence.
There are lots of recreational opportunities: In addition to football and softball fields, there are four outdoor basketball courts, four handball courts, two volleyball nets, two horseshoe beds, and two bocce ball courts. Inside there are music rooms, pool tables, and body building equipment. We are never at a loss for games to play.
The men are all very nice and friendly; we get along very peacefully together. It is hard to believe they have all done such bad things like me. A lot of us are here for what is called “illegal reentry,” which means coming or going places that we were told not to go.
Now, of course, we are not supposed to leave this timeout area until we are allowed to. They have two 10-foot chainlink fences around the whole place, with lots of coils of razor wire on top of them and between them, to make sure that we wouldn’t leave without cutting ourselves to shreds.
If we would try to leave timeout before we are allowed to, we might be made to come back and stay for another five years, so now almost all of us are pretty good about staying where we are told. After they let me out on Nov. 22, if I try to come back in without permission, or send anything in to my friends here without permission, I might have to come in again for another five years.
I know all this is confusing and doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t need to make sense,, because it teaches us all to do what we are told to do, even if it doesn’t make any sense to us at all, and, as you know, that is very important to learn.
One day I counted. There are 27 fully salaried medically benefited, pension-vested, federal employees standing in the dining room watching us eat lunch, to make sure that we are eating it right.
That is fine for them, and easy work, but I kept wondering: Isn’t there a classroom somewhere in an impoverished neighborhood where a poorly paid young teacher is struggling to teach 27 children to read and write, without any help at all. Isn’t there a nursing home somewhere where one nursing aid is being paid minimum wage to care for 27 feeble old people and keep them clean and fed, without any help at all?
I read a book here about a man named Nelson Mandela. He had to stay in timeout for 28 years, which is almost as long as your Uncle Eric has been alive, because he didn’t stay where he was told. After all that time they let him out and let him become the president of his country, because they found out that he had been right about things all along.
Maybe sometime the people who run this place will believe your Grandpa, too, when he says that nobody should kill anybody, anytime, anywhere, ever and that people who have a whole lot of belongings should share them with other people who have little or nothing.
In the meantime, I have no complaints. Everything is very clean and neat and well-run here; I have lots of friends to talk with, as I am sure you do, too.
With love,
Grandpa Karl
