One disadvantage of civil disobedience is that activists can be tied up in the legal system for months or even years after an action. Occasionally a trial can make the news, and occasionally a judge will allow some evidence to be presented at the trial about the injustices that caused a person to break a law. For the most part, though, a courtroom is not an ideal spot to do political education. Penalties can be unexpectedly harsh -- like the eight-year prison sentence handed out to a group of Plowshares protesters who destroyed some MX missiles in their silos -- and legal proceedings can get expensive. On the whole, after the dramatic action of an arrest, the court system can be a confusing, inconvenient let-down, and it is hard to make the experience serve a clear political end.

Demonstrators in Seattle and D.C. took a practical approach to the legal system. Rather than hoping to put global capitalism on trial in the courtroom, they hoped to clog the system up so badly that they would all be released quickly and cheaply, with no return court dates. In this, they largely succeeded. I am describing the tactics in some detail because they were new to me, in spite of my years of experience with civil disobedience.

"Jail solidarity" is the overall name for a number of techniques they used. Because prisoners are supposed to be arraigned within twenty-four hours of their arrest (except over a weekend or legal holiday), one idea was to delay the booking procedure as long as possible. That in turn would delay the arraignment and increase the chances that the police would have to let the demonstrators go without prosecution. Another part of jail solidarity was refusing to post bail, of course. No one would carry identification, so that everyone’s names could be secret. Basically, demonstrators intended to stay in jail once they'd gotten there, in large enough numbers to make the system stop working.

The success of jail solidarity depended to a great degree on the number of people arrested, so in Seattle when the police used tear gas and concussion grenades to disperse crowds instead of arresting people, protesters became uneasy about the fate of the relatively few who were detained. Overall, Seattle police made about four hundred sixty arrests, as opposed to the nine hundred to twelve hundred expected by organizers. In Washington, the police arrested about thirteen hundred people, including the six hundred they scooped up the day before the actions were to start.

In Seattle, demonstrators taken into custody were packed onto city buses and driven to a temporary booking facility at a former naval station. They refused to get off the buses. Some stayed there, without food or water, for as long as fourteen hours. They danced, sang, discussed issues, made decisions by consensus, and gave interviews to fascinated TV reporters through the bus windows. When finally dragged off the buses, demonstrators gave obviously false names, like "Jane WTO". That delayed booking even longer. They insisted on their right to speak to an attorney before they would enter a plea.

The preventative arrests in D.C. undercut some of the most effective things about jail solidarity. To begin with, even demonstrators who intended to risk arrest did not intend to risk arrest on that day, in that location. Secondly, many people who did not intend to risk arrest were arrested anyway. Thirdly, they all had a motivation for being released -- they wanted to be on the streets the next day. Fourthly, they had not been arrested in affinity groups, and they didn’t necessarily have support people on the outside. Under those circumstances, jail solidarity did not work particularly well. On the other hand, for people arrested as anticipated on Sunday and Monday, jail solidarity did have some effect. The authorities released them on Friday with $5 fines for jaywalking. The protesters did, however, spend those days in sometimes-appalling conditions.

Another aspect of jail solidarity was training to protect one another from abuse inside the jail or holding facilities. Before the actions, affinity groups practiced "puppy piling": piling themselves on top of someone who was being singled out for abuse by the jailers. They also devised ways of calling attention to brutality when puppy piling wouldn't be possible. In both Seattle and D.C., demonstrators reported widespread intimidation and mistreatment by the police inside the jails. (Stories from Washington were actually worse than those from Seattle, and those from Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention were worse still.) Under the circumstances, jail solidarity also took the form of protesters helping to keep one another's spirits up, listening to one another's feelings, and insisting on fair treatment. One group of male prisoners in DC composed a statement, similar to Dr. King’s letter from a Birmingham jail, affirming their solidarity with prisoners arrested for routine offenses and detailing the abuses of the system.

Outside, solidarity was practiced as well. In Seattle, demonstrators who had not been arrested marched to the jail on Thursday afternoon and blocked the doors, demanding that the prisoners be allowed to see their lawyers. As of Thursday at 3:00, many people had been in detention for more than twenty-four hours with no arraignment and no legal advice. By nightfall, a team of eight lawyers got in to see the prisoners. Demonstrators singing and chanting on the street below were rewarded and encouraged by seeing shadows of raised fists through the windows of the jail. The detainees could hear them outside and knew why they were there!

Support demonstrations took place in D.C. as well. A team of incredibly-dedicated legal volunteers visited regularly and worked the system on behalf of the prisoners. Demonstrators who went home made hundreds of telephone calls and send hundreds of e-mails to city council members in Washington demanding that their comrades be released. The same happened in Philadelphia, where some detainees faced outrageous bails and felony charges for trivial "offenses".

The escalating stories of police brutality inside jails, the efforts of police forces around the country to avoid arresting large numbers of demonstrators, and the frightening bails imposed on identified protest leaders all suggest to me that jail solidarity is a very effective technique. Police forces appear to be working hard to figure out how to neutralize it. I am quite curious about how we will evolve the tactic to increase its power, while evaluating whether activists should put themselves into situations out of the public eye (jails) where they get beaten, threatened, and intimidated.

Training for jail solidarity is a relatively new thing, obviously. In the couple of workshops I have witnessed and attended, trainers relied on extended role-plays, and took the roles of police, prosecutors, and other "bad guys" themselves. There is much concrete information to relay, although trainers attempted to build skills through debriefing the role-plays and repeating them if necessary to practice the skills. The main weakness of this training, which was particularly noticeable because of the experience in D.C., was the lack of attention to emotional support. Many people emerged from jail in Washington feeling angry, depressed, dispirited, and generally miserable. To prepare for the brutalizing experience of jail, some practice in empathic listening and some grounding in receiving support might be as important as information.