Prison

Father Bill ‘Bix’ Bichsel, 83, recidivist peace activist, was imprisoned (for three months) for trespassing at the Y12 nuclear weapons complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Bix left prison on 9 February (having completed 19 days of fasting against ‘nuclear weapons, inhumane treatment at prisons and the separation of policy from conscience’). This picture by cartoonist and inventor RR Anderson (from Bix’s home town, Tacoma) is of a Tacoma Action Figure: ‘REAL ULTIMATE American Hero Bix…

Egyptian pacifist Maikel Nabil Sanad has finally been released by the military authorities. Maikel was arrested on 29 March last year for criticising the military for its role during and after the Egyptian uprising. He was convicted by successive military courts of ‘insulting’ the army and ‘spreading false information’.

Peace News has been following Maikel’s case since the beginning (see PN 2533 for the background).

Maikel was finally released on the anniversary of the uprising…

On 19 January, Christian activist Chris Cole was sentenced to 30 days in prison by Westminster magistrates for non-payment of £1,545 in fines and £350 in court costs. The fine was imposed after Chris was found guilty of criminal damage: spraying ‘Build Peace Not War Machines’ and ‘Stop This Bloody Business’ on the Queen Elizabeth II centre in September 2009. At the time, the QEII was hosting a reception for arms dealers during the DSEi arms fair.

On 25 January, Barbara Dowling, 66,…

At 9.15am, I was the first one to arrive at the Court.

Maya had told us that she'd been asked to get there for 9.30am. At 9.35am there was still no sign of her, though veteran peace activist John Lynes showed up with some home-made "rollable" banners, which we proceeded to display outside the court, much to the bemusement of the local citizenry.

"Thank you Maya for speaking out bravely for victims of war in…

As PN went to press, Egyptian pacifist Maikel Nabil Sanad was continuing his hunger strike in protest against his imprisonment for criticising the new military regime. 20 January marked his 150th day without food: his kidneys were beginning to fail.

Maikel’s sentence has been reduced from four to two years. He is now on a water-only fast.

Anti-prison protests were held around the world during the New Year period. In the UK, there were noise demonstrations outside Holloway women’s prison and a young offenders unit in London, a flash mob outside Gatwick detention centres, demos outside Brixton prison and Bristol’s Horfield prison, and a banner drop outside Cardiff prison. No arrests.

On 1 December, Peace Prisoners' Day, please put aside an hour to write four cards to people whoíve been imprisoned for their commitment to peace.

Please do: send your card in an envelope; include a return name and address on the envelope; be chatty and creative: send photos from your life, drawings; tell prisoners about your own anti-war work.

Don'ts. Please donít write anything that might get the prisoner into trouble; donít write: "You are so brave, I could never do what you…

On 30 October, Anat Kamm, 24, was sentenced at Tel Aviv District Court to four-and-a-half years in prison for leaking over 2,000 military documents to Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.

She had copied the documents, 700 of which were classified, while serving as a junior clerk between 2005 and 2007 in the office of the Israeli commander in charge of operations in the West Bank.

Using the leaked documents, Haaretz demonstrated that senior Israeli officers had authorised the…

Pacifist blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad has been on hunger strike in an Egyptian prison since 23 August. Arrested on 28 March on charges of “insulting the military” for publishing an article exposing the role of the military during and after the revolution, he was sentenced to three years in prison on 10 April.

With his hunger strike, Maikel Nabil Sanad demands his release from prison. An appeal hearing has now been brought forward to 4 October, but his friends and supporters fear that he…

On 23 August, Maikel Nabil Sanad, the pacifist blogger sentenced to three years’ imprisonment by the new Egyptian government for “insulting the military” (see PN 2533), began a hunger strike in protest against his sentence. As we went to press, the hunger strike was continuing. On 18 August, similar charges were dropped against Asmaa Mahfouz and Louie Nagati.

The Huntington Lane camp in Shropshire has been evicted after more than 18 amazing months of disrupting UK Coal’s construction of an open-cast coal mine on the site. $1.8m action In the US, activist Tim DeChristopher was jailed for two years in late July following his fake $1.8m bids for oil and gas drilling licences in the final days of the Bush administration. The judge stated that DeChristopher’s sentence had been increased because he had spent the trial process encouraging mass civil…

After experiencing my first couple of week-long prison sentences in the 1980`s - when all I did was keep my head down - I started to learn how to continue my actions and resistance from “inside”. I decided that I must be myself and really live, wherever I was, and that I did not stop being a conscious, political person just because the state had incarcerated me.

I now consider nonviolent resistance whilst in prison to be part of our struggle for a better world—a way of confronting…

Not many people would today defend the use of torture. And yet, every day, people are tortured in almost every country of the world. Human beings, of different cultures, ages, or sexes, are raped, beaten or electrocuted by their fellow human beings.

By launching its third Campaign Against Torture, Amnesty International aimed to place the issue of torture in the spotlight, and to give a message of hope that torture is a disease that can be defeated. A key part of that will be the…

The British government's Home Office " Research, Development and Statistics Directorate" produce a publication called Research Findings. It covers many topics pertinent to policy-related research and has periodically provided information on the world prison population.

The man responsible for producing these particular briefings - Roy Walmsley - has since gone on to work with the international centre for prison studies, at King's College in London (see details of…

The Prison Activist Resource Centre is an online prisoner support site. While predominantly US- oriented the site is available in English and Spanish, and does offer information about internationally- relevant resources.

These are divided into categories such as “prisoner support”, “activist groups” and “prison law” (US). One of the great things about this site is that it has a rather fantastic and massive bibliography, divided into sections such as “women”, “history”, “black activism”, “…