What then is to be done?

Sometimes, as by a flash of light, you realize that the obvious is not the obvious.
Even if you know this at an intellectual level you have to cope with the obvious that is not obvious at all because - it looks obvious.

Today I was shaken by this story - nothing particularly very new about it. I will come back to it after this:

The other day I read an inside story from the public transport company (a telling word) in the town I live in, my personal commitment to this "company" is expressed by my avatar.
The story is funny and sad at the same time because the teller of the story, who worked for one-and-a-half year with this "company", makes it clear she is completely indoctrinated with the story that the company is not about transporting people from one place to another.
The municipal transport company is about making profit. Therefore it is no longer called municipal transport company but MTC, without article, please!

If transporting people is not the goal of a public transport service anymore, why bother to keep it at all?
If making a profit is the goal of
caring for the elderly who cannot take care of themselves anymore,
of healing people who are ill,
of preventing diseases,
of locking up people who somehow are deemed worthy of being locked up,
of policing the streets,
of educating the young and the adult and the old -

why at all bother to keep up these former "services"?

Because they were never meant to be profitable.
Because "profit" as well as "competition" are social constructs, figments of an imagination that has totally derailed from humanity, humaneness - however you want to name it.
Maybe co-operation and mutual aid are too. I do not think so, but you may call it a matter of opinion. That is what the ideologues of profit and competition will say in return if you say this. They will insist that profit and competiton are "facts of life" and they are proven right every day and all the time because they impose their order.

As Choccy, the blogger whose piece I mention above, writes, school will not be handed over to the profitmakers directly. There will be unctuous stories about charity and bringing out the best in the pupils etcetera.
Look at this one, calling itself "christian" as if they still needed to bother.
The Golden Award Winners are lined up. ONLY ONE CAN WIN. Just like on the telly.


Whereas education - especially since that is etymologically the meaning of the word: leading someone out [of ignorance] - should be about learning what "profit" actually is, who gets it, who loses from it (you, the pupil, your parents, Society) and that there are alternatives.

These are not new insights, I know.
This is just to write down my tolstoyan moment of urgency: What then is to be done?

Sex-offenders and State-sponsored Abuse

Throughout lent a small group of us from our Church is meeting, in a local members club, to discuss a couple of stories from the papers and try and make sense of them in the light of faith.

I was shocked (which is a rare thing) when I heard in the group of trials in a Nottingham prison for chemically castrating sex-offenders.

The theory is that by destroying the libido of a registered sex-offender the state can reduce the individuals desire to re-offend; to abuse. The prisoners involved have all volunteered to undergo the treatment and it has the backing of both the Health department and the Justice Department.

My first thought, although it took a while to articulate, was: "but this is abuse!". Perhaps they get away with it because our culture has so dehumanised sex-offenders - "They're just animals!" - that we can do terrible things to them without conscience or protest from the tax paying, therefore complicit, public.

The Anarchist Black Cross: Setting Captives Free

In the limited training I've had on managing a community that includes sex-offenders (i.e. the Church) I've only ever heard people say that it is an issue not of sex but of 'power over'. This was something our small group this evening was agreed on.

Furthermore, most sex-offenders are people who themselves have been in some way abused and are acting out of the brokenness that comes with that.

So what we are seeing is a cycle of abuse: someone is abused so they abuse someone else; that person is then caught and submits to sexual abuse from the state in the form of chemical castration.

This makes sense to the "volunteer" who understands the world thus: the powerful predate the powerless and this is morally acceptable therefore the state predates me just as I did to my victims. 

The most powerful moment, for me, in the Eucharist - the act of worship where we break bread together is in this call and response:

"We break this bread to share in the body of Christ:
Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread".

For those who take up the invitation to God's feast in these words there is a new reality to our ethic. Whatever we do to others we do to ourselves and we do to God.

This at least gives us pause for thought, although the state has no such qualms, no such reality. For the state 'might is right' and the logic of the sex-offender only mirrors the logic of the state.

To have power over another makes violence a moral option and dehumanisation a natural result of human relations. The state is the offender is the state.

Facing prison without regret

From King 5:

by TONYA MOSLEY / KING 5 News

NWCN.comhttp://www.nwcn.com/news/washington/Bangor-protestors-face-prison-with-no-regrets-113825804.html

Posted on January 15, 2011 at 5:51 PM

Updated yesterday at 6:05 PM 

POULSBO, Wash. - At the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action on Saturday there was a celebration of what Martin Luther King Junior stood for, and a celebration of the Bangor 5.

Eighty-four-year old Anne Montgomery is the oldest of the "Disarm Now Plowshares," convicted in December of breaking into the Kitsap Bangor Naval Base outside of Bremerton.

Now in their golden years, they face 10 years in federal prison with no regrets.
"We take responsibility, we don't walk away, and prison comes out of that," said Montgomery.

For decades they stood outside of the base - protesting the storage of nuclear weapons. But two years ago, they cut through barbed wire and onto the base.
The five were charged with trespassing and destroying property.
"We have a responsibility and we're grateful we had that opportunity to speak out the atrocities that exist on the other side of the fence here," said Lynne Greenwald.

Footprint of freedom

A few years ago I got in touch with a representative of the UK Chagos campaign. It earned me the qualification of being the Dutch Solidarity Campaign, which only made me feel embarrassed and inadequate - this is very much an uphill struggle, a sisyphean labour.

Then I was invited by International Prison Watch to participate and focus on Chagos, this being the unknown Guantánamo of the USA on - officially - British soil. And so there it is: campaigning means blogging, these days, does not it?

The main introduction, Chagos in a nutshell

The Chagos Islands - an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, halfway Africa and Indonesia. Colonised by French plantation operators, populated by slaves taken from other French island colonies in the Indian Ocean. In 1804 conquered by the British who abolished slavery. Plantations and workers however stayed.

And then the government of the United States of America decided that the archipelago was of high strategic value and wanted to have the natural harbour of the main island, Diego Garcia, as a navy base - condition was that there should be no human beings snooping around.

The islands were detached from the original main island colony, Mauritius, were not given independence and the British government decreed that the population of slave descendants was really an itinerant worker community.Plantations were nationalised and immediately closed down. The islanders were deported, the US navy and air force moved in (1973).

In the so-called war on terror the islands are used as a prison and torture camp under the incredible code name of Footprint of Freedom.

Although the indigenous people won their court cases against their deportation they are still being denied the right of return. Nowadays, the risk of climate change is the main story why the islands should not be populated.
A continuing sad story.

You are invited to gather news and send it to the site.

London Catholic Worker jailed

Zelda Jeffers appeared at Bedford Magistrates Court on Monday November 2nd. She was sentenced to 16 days in prison for refusing to pay a fine of £450 for a 'No Borders' protest at Yarlswood Immigration Detention Centre.

She has been sent to HMP Peterborough. Asuming Zelda gets half off for 'good behaviour', she should be released on Monday 9th November, probably in the morning.

If you want to write to her or send her a card of support, you can

- post a letter (although the postal strike obviously makes it seem unlikely to get through before Monday )

- either to the prison at:
Zelda Jeffers BD3976,
HMP Peterborough,
Saville Road,
Westwood,
Peterborough PE3 7PD

- or to us at :
London Catholic Worker,
16 De Beauvoir Road,
London N1 5SU

Marcia Powell

Marcia J. Powell, a mentally ill prostitute and drug addict, died like a dog last week, roasting in a cage in the fearsome sun at the state prison at Perryville.

She was 48 years old.

Her final tortured hours in an outdoor enclosure last Tuesday mimicked those of a five-year-old law-enforcement canine named Rik that died at Perryville in 2007 after having been left by handlers in an exercise run for three hours. Temperatures that day reached 105.

The temperature in Powell's cage last week exceeded 107. She was locked up for an hour longer than the dog before she collapsed.

There are many questions to be answered by the Department of Corrections about Powell's final hours. But her death is only the gruesome exclamation point on a long list of institutional failures that got her there.

DOC officials say that Powell had a rap sheet going back decades and included at least 10 sex and six drug convictions. She'd been in and out of Arizona prisons since 1994.

Records indicate that she left home in California at 15 with a ninth-grade education, no marketable skills and a serious mental illness. A presentencing report describes her as bipolar.

Last summer, she was sent to prison for more than two years on a prostitution charge.

"It's awful the way this woman died," said Donna Leone Hamm, executive director of Middle Ground Prison Reform Inc., which for years has advocated for Arizona inmates and their families. "No one cared much about her when she lived. I hope at least that we care about the way she died."

DOC is investigating the incident. Several employees already are on administrative leave.

After Powell collapsed, she was taken to the hospital and placed on life support. A DOC spokesman told me that the department was unable to locate any family members.

So when the time came to decide whether to pull the plug on the machines keeping her alive, it fell to prisons Director Charles Ryan. Powell was taken off life support at 11:15 p.m. Tuesday; she died at 12:42 a.m. Wednesday.

"The death of Marcia Powell is a tragedy and a failure," Ryan said later. "The investigation will determine whether there was negligence and tell us how to remedy our failures."

I'm not so sure.

For one thing, DOC should not be conducting the investigation. It should fall to an outside agency. The governor should demand it.

According to Hamm, she contacted then-prisons Director Dora Schriro in late 2007 about the practice of placing prisoners in outdoor cages.

"Because no one had died or had been permanently injured, I couldn't get anyone - including the press - interested," Hamm said.

Questions like that are only a beginning.

Powell's horrific death and her woeful life should finally get us to ask why Arizona's failed mental-health system transforms county jails and prisons into mental-health institutions.

It should get us to ask why we criminalize people like this but don't adequately treat them, since it's clear that taxpayers end up footing the bill for their care one way or another.

Powell told state officials that she had two children who were given up to foster care, but DOC says the state has no record of that. Police also checked the address of a name she'd listed as a friend on prison records but found no one living in the abandoned house.

In spite of spending years in the system, Powell's life remains a mystery. Her death is a tragedy, although perhaps not on the level of Rik the law-enforcement dog.

There was a public outpouring for him.

From the Arizona Republic, 24th May 2009.

Remaining question: who needs compassionate care most - the woman who was put in a cage in the scourging heat or those who thought it a good idea of making such a cage and putting a living being inside of it.
You need not decide, just think about it.

Free Marcia Powell!

Naked as the day you were born

Just when I thought prison abolitionism had died out with one of the very last important jurists dedicated to the Cause in NL, then my attention is drawn to this from Prison Abolitionist in Arizona:

Here he comes again, his hands covered in heavy black mittens, his head stuffed into a net that makes him look like a beekeeper, his legs and wrists closed in shackles.

Clark County Detention Center officers dress him this way because he has been known to spit, throw punches and kick.

The inmate shuffles through a sliding door, a large officer follows and, nearby, other members of the jail staff step back, as if sensing danger. The inmate, seemingly unaware, tells the officer, “I don’t want a plane crashing into me, you know.” The detention officer nods and nudges him toward an isolation cell, where the inmate will have to remove his clothes. He will be left with what’s known as a suicide blanket, which can’t be torn apart and used as a noose.

He is not yet 20, but he has been in jail three times, for 71 days, since coming of age last year...

Further reading.

The Cause of abolition of criminal law and prisons was given life by Christian anarchists who started experiencing life behind bars, especially during the First World War. Actually, it is amazing the Cause seems to have damped down for no rational reason...
It is fighting against the odds of politicians and the hoi polloi who want to look Tough On Crime, but fighting against odds is what it is all about, is not it?

Imprisoned radical intellectual seeks help for his case

A report from the US Gulag:

Coyote Sheff is a self-styled anarchist. This according to him means that “what I do as an anarchist defines what anarchism means to me.” He became aware of anarchism while in prison. Coyote is an intellectual and a writer. Coyote has published three Zines up to now with the help of South Chicago ABC (Anarchist Black Cross), and he has started his own prison chapter of ABC, educating other prisoners around him.

Coyote shares stories of abuses and injustices inside Ely State Prison with the world, through his Zines and articles published on the net and in the SF Bay View, and this has caught the attention of the administration of this prison, notorious for not giving medical care to inmates held there, and being a prison on permanent lockdown.

Since writing an article about a fellow inmate in Ely State Prison, who is suffering from potential kidney failure without the prison authorities doing anything, the state of Coyote´s confinement has been hightened to “High Risk Potential” (HRP), which means he is shackled in hands to his belly, and his feet, everywhere he goes during the one hour a day break; his cell was raided every day during three weeks, and they are now trying to bring new criminal charges on him for alleged weapons in his cell, a charge thought up to try and get his prison sentence prolonged, even though Coyote is nearly at the end of his prison sentence. In Coyote´s own words: “I´m kind of close to being released, but these people here are trying to make it so I never get out! Because that is what happens when you are a radical, in here they either kill you with medical neglect if you have a lot of time to do in prison, and if you do not have a lot of time to do in here, then they will try to set you upon new charges, giving you more time.”

The prison administration is cracking down on all of Coyote´s mail, not allowing any literature to be sent in to him from his friends who support him in his struggle to express himself (denying him his constitutional rights). He is being denied a due process hearing about the HRP status too.

“All of this is due to my political activism within these walls; because of my efforts in politicizing prisoners in Nevada as well as prisoners in other states. And especially because of my connections to political and radical activists on the outs. They are trying to crush me with the pressure of their boot on my neck.”

For his case in fighting the false charges brought against him, Coyote seeks funding for his attorney. He himself has already been successful in gathering donations while in his cell, but he still needs a little more to make the total sum of 2500 US dollars complete. That is why we ask you to please consider donating an amount however small towards helping this unselfish, lively brother who is doing so much for us in the form of writing and motivating others.

If you want to read more by Coyote, please visit this website where his writings are being gathered:
Nevadaprisonwatch (see the sidebar with “Coyote Calling”)

Please also visit Coyote´s Myspace page: myspace.com/abcnevada

We have a chip over there through which you can donate by clicking on it. The money will be sent to Coyote´s family to pay for his attorney.

Coyote´s address for support:

Coyote Sheff, #55671
P.O. Box 1989,
Ely, NV 89301 – 1989
USA

CPT activists given four months

Ekklesia reports that the Swedish state has given to activists four months for although it dismissed SAABs claim for huge damages.

How many of us are ready to lose this much freedom to turn swords into ploughs? The courtroom gave the pair an opportunity to give their views on the importance of their actions.

We have at least two New Testament models for response to the courtroom.

1. Don't plan ahead, the spirit will lead you (Luke 12:11)
2. Keep silent and let the holy spirit defend you that way (Matt: 26:63)
   

Whatever we do in the courtroom, or upon arrest, we are generating stories - like the prophets - that go beyond the actions we perform and take on a life of their own.

Let's keep Martin Smedjeback and Anna Andersson in our thoughts / prayers.

Talking about the Gulag

A complete - and of course damning - analysis of Capital(ism) Today can be given to accompany this piece. No need even to look at world hunger, warmongering, financial crises, surplus exploitation, unemployment and all the other wrongs you can mention.

One in 31 adult US citizens is behind bars.
Is there really a way to fathom such a situation?

On death penalty, torture and meeting Jesus

Doug Tjapkes speaks at Cities for Life rally in Toronto, On.

(Nov. 2008)

It must be something in the air...
After I wrote this there is Evangelicals for Social Action bringing out a magazine proclaiming I was in prison and you visited Me (it is on the pdf of the complete issue, which unfortunately I cannot place here). And then today there is my friend Doug Tjapkes from Muskegon, MI, under the same title. A good opportunity to ask some attention for his site:

I had driven about 400 miles in one day…200 to the prison, 200 back home.

I was still sorting through my emotions when I said to Marcia: “I’m not sure how to say this, but I think that I’m the privileged one to visit a prisoner.”

She quickly responded. “When I worked for hospice, and sat with the family of a loved one at the actual time of death, I felt that I was standing on holy ground! There’s no doubt in my mind that that’s where you were.”

I thought of the lyrics of that old gospel song: We are standing on holy ground, for I know that there are angels all around…

Kevin is 16 years old, and has already served a year in a prison system where he doesn’t belong. He’s been diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. For a mentally challenged juvenile in an adult world, it has been anything but easy, as proven by the ugly scars on his arm. Failure to get proper medication, long hours in isolation, scorn and ridicule. His excellent condition and demeanor today are testament to his loving mother’s 24/7 vigil, an around-the-clock fight for the rights of her son!

When he entered the room my first thought was: ‘This could be one of my grandkids!” Then came the uneasy second thought: “Can two people with an age difference of over 50 years connect?”

“Are you hungry?” One of my first questions. I had brought my limit of quarters for the vending machines. “I’m always hungry!” A killer smile! Why was his answer no surprise?

We started out with a breakfast sandwich and a Pepsi. We switched to sweets: M&Ms and a Snickers bar. The desserts for his meal were an apple fritter AND a piece of apple pie! He was right: a voracious appetite! I grinned as he wolfed down the food. He was so polite. “Please.” “Thank you!”

We talked of prison facilities (the juvenile facility has been closed); we talked of guard abuse of mentally ill prisoners (one prisoner’s eye was swollen shut and bones were broken because guards beat him while he was strapped down); we talked of prisoner guard behavior (some of them seem to enjoy making fun of mentally ill prisoners, imitating them or laughing at them); we talked about Kevin (I want to make a difference; I was placed here for a reason; I want to write a book; I want to speak at public meetings; I want to work in YOUR business when I get out!). His slightly herky-jerky speech pattern was the only indication that this young man has any problem. We had a delightful conversation!

I had to leave. There was a long drive ahead.

We shook hands. I allowed that I needed a hug, also. “My mom gives me a hug when she leaves!”

I did well...not until I reached the car did the tears flow.

Did I do the right things, God? Did I say the right words?

We are standing on holy ground for I know that there are angels all around.


Doug Tjapkes
HUMANITY FOR PRISONERS

Animal rights activism as anti social behaviour

The picture represents twenty year old Gerrah Selby, sentenced to four years imprisonment for animal rights activism. She can neither be visited nor written as she wants to keep the place where she has been locked up undisclosed. This is a story about animal rights activists who are treated as terrorists ("extremists") and antisocial elements at the same time - a text borrowed from Infoshop.org:

On Wednesday 21st January 2009 the police's National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit issued a press release celebrating the jailing of seven animal rights campaigners for "over fifty years". In their press release NETCU are at pains to point out that the sentences have "nothing to do with freedom of expression" and that those jailed are "extremists".

NETCU, a shady, unaccountable branch of the UK's expanding political police, have thrown the weight of their press department behind a campaign to present the seven defendants, all active in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign, as extremists. The mainstream media has swallowed NETCU's spin unquestioningly without seeing the affair for what it is -- a political trial with serious ramifications for the right of individuals to voice their dissent against corporate power.

On December 23rd, 4 out of 5 activists on trial at Winchester Crown Court were found guilty of 'Conspiracy to Blackmail' at Winchester Crown Court after a 3 and a half month long trial. Natasha and Greg Avery and Dan Amos had plead guilty during Summer 2008. During the trial much had been made about how each defendant fitted in to what the prosecution described as the "hierarchy" of the SHAC campaign. At the three day long sentencing in January, Judge Butterfield sentenced the defendants according to how he saw them in this "hierarchy", not according to the evidence against them. Accordingly Greg and Natasha Avery were given the heaviest sentences possible, but were given credit for their guilty pleas and were sentenced to serve nine years each. Heather Nicholson, who plead not-guilty, received the longest actual sentence, eleven years. Gavin Medd Hall was sentenced to eight years, Daniel Wadham got five years, and Daniel Amos and Gerrah Selby were each sentenced to four years.

One thing that was not reported at all by the mainstream media was the imposition of indefinite anti social behaviour orders (ASBOs) on four of the defendants preventing them from protesting against animal experimentation. These ASBOs make otherwise lawful protest activity into a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison. The use of indefinite ASBOs against protesters is, as far as Corporate Watch knows, a completely new development. The terms of the orders could prevent these four people, all dedicated campaigners against vivisection, from ever voicing their political views again. The orders could even be interpreted as preventing the defendants from speaking or writing against vivisection.

By giving the maximum possible sentences, the Judge was effectively saying that this case represented the most serious form of blackmail. However, the allegations against those convicted would not fit in at all with a layperson's definition of blackmail.

As Corporate Watch wrote last month, the charges related to over four years of concerted campaigning against Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). The essence of the blackmail charge is that SHAC called for companies to cease trading with HLS and wrote polite letters to that effect. SHAC also encouraged their supporters to write to and protest against companies working with HLS. In some cases, direct action occurred, but this was never called for by SHAC. Letters were sent to company employees falsely accusing them of paedophilia, threats were received in the post and cars were paint-strippered. Evidence was presented that suggested that some of the defendants may have had knowledge of, or been involved in, some of these activities. However, many defendants were convicted because of what they said on demonstrations against HLS and their suppliers or because of the length of their involvement with SHAC.

Let us look at the case of Heather Nicholson, the defendant who received the most severe sentence, eleven years. Heather is a committed, long-term campaigner for animal rights and had been involved with SHAC since the beginning. She had lived and worked at the SHAC office and been involved with communicating, politely, with companies doing business with HLS. Only the most tenuous of circumstantial evidence linked Heather to any of the activities parroted in the press as attributed to her. Heather was convicted because of her long involvement with SHAC and given the most severe sentence because of Judge Butterfield's perception of her importance to the campaign.

In the case of the defendants who were newer to SHAC, their convictions stemmed largely from words spoken on demonstrations. These convictions are extremely worrying as threatening words should normally be dealt with, at most, by charges under the Public Order Act. Again, the catch-all charge of "conspiracy to blackmail" meant that the defendants could be dealt with more severely because of their association with others.

Judge Butterfield was not content with the harsh sentence doled out to the SHAC 7. In his sentencing he invited the Department of Public Prosecutions to consider indefinite detention in blackmail cases. Surely Judge Butterfield had seen the potential for the state to use this charge in the future as a bludgeon to silence political dissent.

Despite the repression of the SHAC 7, resistance against HLS, Europe's biggest animal testing laboratory, continues. Protests against financiers of HLS, and in solidarity with the SHAC 7, have taken place across the UK, Europe and the US while a protest against the Bank of England, who have provided HLS with banking facilities since their regular bankers dropped them, is planned for 27th February. (see www.shac.net)

For more on the state repression of anti-corporate dissent see:

Animal Rights Activists Convicted of conspiracy to Blackmail

Whose Agenda do Reports of Eco-Terrorism Serve?

To write to the SHAC 7:

Natasha Avery NR8987 and Heather Nicholson VM4859 at HMP Bronzefield, Woodthorpe Road, Ashford, Middx, TW15 3JZ. England. Dan Amos VN7818, Gregg Avery TA7450, Gavin Medd-Hall WV9475 and Dan Wadham WV9474 at HMP Winchester, Romsey Road, Winchester, SO22 5DF. England.

Animal rights have been a Christian anarchist action issue for over 125 years, especially the struggle against vivisection. Prison sentences of up to twelve years for animal rights activism amounts to a declaration of war to any kind of activism, regardless whether it can pass the non-violence test or not. Sentences which are telling as to where the priorities of this society lie.

...and you visited me

A few years ago I read the book The hot house - life inside Leavenworth prison by Pete Earley. One of the main characters in the book was an inmate who became a murderer inside the prison - he was in it for a robbery, and once in, killed a fellow prisoner (which he denies having done) and a guard (which cannot be denied). Especially for the latter case he is depicted as the most dangerous prisoner inside Leavenworth, if not in the entire US Gulag (but there are many who are given this qualification). He has been in total isolation for twenty-five years.

Locking someone up in complete isolation amounts to torture - and this type of torture has become rather commonplace in the locking-up industry which has plagued the so-called developed world for the past decades. Reading about this man reminded me of my own activism against especially the isolation cell. In the US Orwellian phrases like administrative segregation (ad.seg) or control unit or solitary confinement (still the clearest one) are in use. And what struck me most - somehow, at that moment a few years ago - was that this man never even has seen a leaf of grass for a quarter of a century.

Finding out his address proved rather easy, and so I sent him a picture postcard of probably the main attraction of Holland's coastal strip: the Keukenhof, the famous bulb garden. And he replied, seemed to be still reasonably compos mentis, probably the only way to survive his situation. He asked me some questions about that funny country I live in which I started answering when suddenly a passage from the gospel went through my mind. Matth. 25:36, to be precise - please look it up yourself.

It was hard for me to finish the letter, and I had to confess what had gone through my mind - "you may not know it, but you are Jesus. I am writing to Jesus at the moment."
I cannot call it a mystical experience, but it was a moment of fear and trembling. And the inmate - although he certainly resembled a starets in his complete isolation, which has been softened a tiny bit since then - cannot have understood what I meant. Especially since he has a conspicuously Jewish family name. And perhaps the censors at the prison took care of my note, because we never got any reply to it (my lady-friend took over the correspondence).

A real visit is out of the question because of regulations concerning prisoners in isolation, so this is as far as I have got in meeting Jesus, the most famous inmate at death row of all times...