Crossing Lines

‘The bullpen was meant to be a small holding cell area, but
because the jail was so overcrowded, the six bunk beds, exposed
toilet, metal table and spray-mist shower with a ripped curtain
became housing for women prisoners awaiting transport.’ So writes
activist Kathy Kelly, about her 1988 incarceration for an
anti-military protest. Facing another jail term this month for a
similar act, Kelly realizes that you don’t need to travel to Iraq,
Afghanistan or Guantanemo to see the ill effects of the United
States government’s global war effort — they’re obvious in the
heart of the country’s prison system. In her sobering, reflective
piece ‘Crossing Lines,’ she writes: ‘Entering [American] prisons
offers an opportunity to better understand how the once lauded war
on poverty has become a war against the poor.’

Kelly is more than willing to do time, even though her offenses
are symbolic gestures defying the American war machine. She’s
crossed the line into the war zone in Baghdad, ‘invaded’ the Army
school at Fort Benning, GA, formerly known as the School of the
Americas, and protested the Project ELF weapon facility in northern
Wisconsin, which sent Tomahawk cruise missiles down on Iraqi
cities. But her most eye-opening experience happened in 1988 when
she crossed the line into the Cass County jail in Harrison,
Missouri, to occupy a holding cell with 12 other women who were on
the inside for crimes like using or selling drugs — which, for
many, are survival tactics in a society that offers them few other
decent options.

Kelly’s story is rife with irony. Her cellmates called her
‘Missiles’ and one wonders what they must have thought of an
educated, financially stable white woman intentionally committing
crimes that land her in the slammer. But Kelly understands that she
is doing time not only as the consequence of her protests, but as
an effort at self-education ‘I do feel troubled because I’ve been
so distanced, in recent years, from some of the poorest people in
our country,’ she writes. ‘I need to better understand what’s
happening to them.’
— Jacob Wheeler

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Crossing
Lines

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