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From Kings Bay Plowshares

MARCH, 2019 LETTER FROM MARK COLVILLE FROM THE GLYNN CO. JAIL

Dear Friends,

Greetings and hugs all around! With a grateful heart I commend all who continue to make the sacrifices necessary to keep our doors at the Amistad Catholic Worker open, the kitchen warm, and the table set, especially during these harsh months and under the added strain of my extended absence. For some time now, I’ve hesitated to check in from here in Georgia before being able to offer a bit of clarity with regard to the legal situation of the Kings Bay Plowshares in Brunswick Federal Court. But with delays encroaching now into Spring, and still no action being taken by the magistrate judge on our pretrial motions, a brief update has become increasingly overdue.

Actually, what has been most on my heart these past three months is a deep sense of responsibility to speak about this jail where I’ve been warehoused now for the better part of a year. It is labeled a detention center,” so-called because the people being kept here have been arrested but have not yet had their cases adjudicated. Considered a temporary holding facility, its conditions and amenities are suited to accommodate the accused for a few weeks or a month at most, irrespective of the reality that – for reasons I’ll explain in a moment – half a year or more is closer to the average length of stay. This means that all the detained, most of who are suspected of low-level or nonviolent offenses, are held in maximum security conditions for months, and in some cases, years on end. We are locked down on crowded cellblocks, essentially for 24 hours a day. The diet is heavy on starch, sugar, and sodium, which rapidly foster obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease when combined with a sedentary lifestyle. (I’ve witnessed three people having strokes, and one man I knew died of heart failure in his cell late last summer). There is no access to the outdoors nor to physical recreation of any kind; no exercise permitted outside of one’s cell; no visits with loved ones except by video monitor; no use of a library, computer or internet. It also seems to be common knowledge that we are sitting on top of a toxic waste dump, but I have neither the means nor the fortitude to investigate that particular report.

As for the 400 to 500 detainees here, most are in the same predicament as Liz, Steve and I, being held indefinitely with their cases pending. Several systemic factors conspire to make this so. Bail is generally set extremely high, unaffordably so for many, although this can sometimes be remedied at a bail reduction hearing after at least six weeks have passed. The bigger issue, though, is what’s referred to as the “probation hold.” In Glynn County, persons arrested for any reason while on probation can be jailed for renewable terms of up to 60 days, and simply forced to wait until a probation violation hearing is scheduled. As anyone who’s had the experience knows, virtually any encounter with a police officer on probation can result in an arrest, regardless of probable cause or the likelihood of an infraction being provable in court. Merely being on probation is reason enough.

Practically speaking, lengthy probation terms usually have little to do with supervision, rehabilitation or public safety. They have plenty to do with funneling people back through the criminal justice industrial complex, which seems to be a significant source of revenue and employment in municipalities like this one. Convictions in the Brunswick court, 90 percent of which are obtained by plea bargain, commonly bring sentences which include probation terms of between 3 and 20 years! The prisoners here call it being “on paper.” Once they are on a probation hold, an investigation of the newly-alleged crime can proceed, or not, at the leisure of the D.A.’s office, Of course, whether or not they find evidence, the living conditions at the detention center will usually provide ample coercive power to secure another conviction. Obviously, after 60 or 120 or 180 days of 24-hour lockdown, almost anyone is well-disposed to accept whatever plea will result in an immediate release, even if it means being on paper for another decade. This, there is ensured an endless supply of indefinite detainees at the Glynn County Detention Center, and their demographic won’t surprise anyone; at present, I am one of three white people in a cell block of thirty-four.

From the inside, I find the real horror of all this in its utter normalcy. Sometimes it takes a rigorous act of the will to maintain a personal relationship with reality. I’m living in a place where hundreds of people accused of low-level and/or nonviolent crimes are being held indefinitely, under maximum security conditions, having neither been granted due process nor convicted nor sentenced. The presumption of innocence is, quite literally, a punchline. The totalitarian culture of coercion that dictates every aspect of life in a maximum security jail has essentially chewed up and swallowed the “justice system” here, such that it is not honestly possible to even use that term without the disclaimer of quotation marks. Broken families bear a terrible burden, some driven from poverty into destitution. The racial bias could hardly be more obvious. Yet it all seems to function well beyond significant public notice, much less any questions of morality, necessity or service to the public good.

Of late, I’ve grown convinced that it couldn’t be more fitting for the Kings Bay Plowshares to have been swept up and tossed into a human dumpster such as this. The racket they run here gives real substance, on the neighborhood level, to what U.S. nuclear policy – our national religion – has been preaching to every child born on the planet for the last seventy-five years: No Lives Matter. However long it might draw out, I hope that my incarceration here will in some way speak this truth. The idols we named at Kings Bay are not sleeping. They demand sacrifice. The god of the national security state feasts on the blood of the poor.

“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide.” – Martin Luther King, Jr., March 1968

Yes, indeed.

– Mark Colville

[As of this writing, the Kings Bay Plowshares have been waiting many months for a ruling from Magistrate Judge Benjamin Cheesbro on a pre-trial argument they have placed before the court. The essence of their position is that a jury should be allowed to hear and consider the principles of faith and conscience that informed their action at Kings Bay, and that the government has acted improperly by filing criminal charges against them. For a transcript of Mark’s testimony at the pre-trial hearing https://static1.squarespace.com/…/9.26.18+Colville+RFRA+Dec… The seven were arrested on April 5, 2018.]

#blacklivesmatter

#swordsintoplowshares

#kingsbayplowshares

#abolishprisons

#abolishnuclearweapons

https://www.kingsbayplowshares7.org/

No To NATO events in DC in April

This came from Facebook, from the World Beyond War group. Protest will be on April 4, 2019.

War on Iraq Reflection

And all the suffering and dying done by US troops was to make sure that evil people like Cheney made a shitload of money. And, of course, the price paid by US troops was nearly non-exisitant compared to the price paid by the Iraqi people.

This war was a massive, massive evil done by massively evil people and promoted by our massive evil corporate media. May they all rot in Hell. This came form a Facebook post.

Our Biggest Polluter, Part 2

Not only does the US military burn more oil than any other single entity, the are also the world's biggest polluters. They are an environmental disaster.

Our Biggest Polluter On The Planet

This came from Facebook. The US military is the single biggest burner of fossil fuels on our planet. They burn more fuel than about 160  countries! And they are totally exempt from an carbon agreements (as are the military in other countries). And not only does the US government plan on drilling for oil in the Arctic after the ice melts, they also have plans for our military to conduct more wars for oil in the Arctic. I think we might be mostly gone before that drilling in the Arctic or wars in the Arctic actually happens. At least, I hope so.

Another quote from Scott Peck

“How could a whole people have gone to war not knowing why? The answer is simple. As a people we were too lazy to learn and too arrogant to think we needed to learn. We felt that whatever way we happened to perceive things was the right way without any further study. And that whatever we did was the right thing to do without reflection. We were so wrong because we never seriously considered that we might not be right. With our laziness and narcissism feeding each other, we marched off to impose our will on the Vietnamese people by bloodshed with practically no idea ow what was involved. Only when we - the mightiest nation on earth - consistently suffered defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese did we in significant numbers begin to take the trouble to learn what we have done.” - M. Scott Peck, from the book "The People of the Lie"

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I would argue that (for the most part) we never did take the trouble to learn what we have done in Vietnam. We never faced up to it, and therefore we (meaning the American people) see no reason to make reparations or feel much regret for what happened to the people who lived and currently live in Vietnam. And that is true for many aspects of our history both recent and past.

Quote from Scott Peck

“As an example of group evil MyLai was not an inexplicable ‘accident’ or unpredictable aberration. It occurred in the context of a war, which is itself an evil context. The atrocities were committed by the side that was the aggressor and that, in its aggression, had already fallen into evil. The evil of the small group - Task Force Barker - was clearly a reflection of the evil of the whole American military presence in Vietnam. And our military presence in Vietnam was directed by a deceitful, narcissistic government that had lost its bearings and that was mandated by a nation that had fallen into torpor and arrogance. The entire atmosphere was rotten. The massacre at MyLai was an event waiting to happen” - M. Scott Peck, from the book "The People of the Lie"

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All wars start with lies, and usually anyone joining in a war is lying also. And lies lead to evil. Unfortunately in the USA, the majority of the population is full of lies that came from our lying corporate media. And unfortunately, the majority of the population is too narcissistic and lazy to figure out what the truth of our nation's actions were in the past or the present. And this is why we have killed about 20 million people since the end of World War II and why hardly anyone knows about it and and hardly anyone cares.