CHARGES DISMISSED!

Letter About a San Francisco Jail

My name is Jonah Zern. I am a substitute teacher in Oakland and the co-coordinator of the Peace and International Relations Committee of the Oakland Education Association and was one of two protestors falsely arrested on Saturday, January 18, 2003 at the anti-war rally of 200,000 people in San Francisco. I want to thank all those who came to my aid and state how important people’s calling the District Attorney, jail and Mayor’s office and the rally organized outside the jail was in both our release and in today’s dismissal of our charges.

I want to make sure that my arrest helps to shine a spotlight on the bigger issues of the prison industry and how it is destroying our communities. I saw how much me being in prison hurt those close to me. I can't even imagine how much it destroys communities of color, about 2/3 of the people in prison were black, very, very few were white, no-one I met were even middle class - when I ask students who I teach in Oakland, "how many of you know someone in prison?" without fail 3/4 of the class raises their hands.

There are many more political prisoners than just Jeremy and I. Most people who I met were in fact there because of non-violent crimes of poverty, such as using drugs or taking money for a place to sleep, or because they had been profiled as a black male. My cell-mate was going to be in jail for a year for taking money from a Wal-Mart, a company that has sweatshops all over the world and viciously fights unions within its own doors. People I met were brilliant, caring, and being deeply hurt; a large portion of people I met talked matter-of-factly about the last few times they had been in prison. One was 18 and talked about how much more difficult the conditions were in jail than his multiple times in Juvie. There are much deeper doors that we need to open, to know that just because two community leaders supported by a massively popular movement are freed of our charges that we cannot rest or put this behind us.

There are so many people suffering in our own community from intolerable government oppression; oppression that continues a cycle of poverty, sadness, and hopelessness. We cannot shed tears for the millions of Iraqis suffering from our government's sanctions and war-mongering without also taking to heart the call to stop incarcerating Black and Latino children. We cannot fight for justice abroad and ignore what amounts to the genocide of a people within our own nation. The total number of inmates in local, state and federal prisons has quadrupled in the past 20 years to more than two million. Two-thirds of all nonwhite adult males are arrested and jailed between the ages of 18 and 30 nationally. On any average day in America, one of every four African Americans between the ages of 20 and 29 is in jail, prison, or on probation or parole.

If my community was so hurt by my two days in jail, where I received much media support, phone calls from political and community leaders, how much does it hurt whole communities of poor people of color who are only told that their brothers, husbands, boy-friends, girl-friends, sisters, mothers, uncles, aunts, friends are in jail because they are “no good”. How can a community lift itself up, when the institution of power is pushing it down with all its might.

It is time that we say “NO WAR ON THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ! NO WAR ON THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES! BOOKS NOT BOMBS, SCHOOLS NOT JAILS!” It is essential that our anti-war movement also become a civil rights movement.

* (prison is data from Platt, in Social Justice Journal, Vol. 28, No.1, 2001)