I spent Sunday outside Santa Rita County Jail, waiting with other Occupy Oakland people for the 400 people who were arrested the previous day to be released, to greet them with food, rides, hugs, and cheers. As of last night, the round the clock support team was still there; people were still, slowly, being released. It was a very strange day, but quite pleasant for those of us lucky enough to be free, bathing in the information vacuum, the company, and the California sun. Thousands of birds had occupied the nearby trees – set in the midst of vast grassy lawns whose grass was, according to signs posted, not to be walked upon – and the weird aharmonic chorus of their chirping was both almost as inhumanly robotic as the jail itself, and also quite peculiarly soothing.
For those we were waiting to greet, the situation was somewhat different. When my friend Michelle got out, her first words were a very understated "That place is really not a good place." As another friend, "Repoliticize," described her experience on twitter:
For those of you who haven't had the, ahem, pleasure of paying a visit to the inner corridors of santa rita jail, a few words… this is a cold, concrete space, which will eventually defeat you into lying on surfaces you wouldn't let children touch. If you stay there long enough to be served more than one "meal," you realize there is only one meal that they serve in the holding cells, a sealed plastic bag with two thick, stomach-turning slices of bologna, two stale slices of white bread, two soggy cookies, an orange, and a packet of "bernard" orange powder for flavoring the oddly filmy water that comes out of the cell's one faucet.
The toilet is next to the window, so that you're forced to pee not only in front of your cellmates, but also passing guards and inmates you're made to beg for more toilet paper, and there hasn't been any soap in the cells on either of my visits to santa rita. There are no trash cans, so you sit and lie in your own filth: orange peels, plastic packaging, spilled "bernard" off-brand tang.previous inhabitants of the cells have written on the walls with mustard and the benches are thick and sticky with food and bodily discharge. There's not thing to do but sleep (if you're lucky) and ponder whether it's worth it to eat the "food" or drink the "water"
I don't want to be overly dramatic with this account — although everything is as disgusting or as bad as I say because this was a TERRIBLE experience — but let's be real: I was detained for 24 hours. This is one of the LEAST bad experiences one could have in jail.
Now, why were they there? Why did 400 people from Occupy Oakland spend days in a county jail? Why was it necessary? What did this accomplish? And why are some still there?
The easy answer – the one you'd get from newspapers, who are careful to give you a (gradually rising) number of arrestees — is something like "Violence Erupted in Oakland." And the police exist, as you and I know, to calm the violence, restore stability, preserve order, pacify the situation, etc. Sitting outside the jail, it was hard not to think about the ways those distinctions were being established spatially: inside, those who were arrested (CRIMINALS) were lying in filth; outside, we (CITIZENS) were bathing in the pacific beauty of pristine lawns, sky, sun.
I start by talking about this because I want to expand on the post I wrote on Sunday morning — and I apologize for the excessive length of this — but I've been unable to stop thinking about what was has been so viscerally physical for those 400 people who were arrested versus the way we, who are distant from their experience, are able to make sense of why they have gone through it (with perhaps a bit of uneasiness about having been spared it). And I can't help but talk about where I was and what I saw, not because I'm a narcissistic blogger — that's just bonus — but because where you are, and when, is what makes the story you are able to tell what it is.
As I wrote on Sunday morning, what was so striking the day after was how all the mainstream news stories seemed to have been composed the same way, starting with OPD's press release (issued in the mid afternoon) as a rough outline, sprinkling in some quotes from non-OPD sources (often social media, no doubt collected from the comfort of their office chairs), and then (maybe) added on the additional information that between one and four hundred people were arrested in the evening, depending on how late in the day they filed their copy.
