|
Comment on this article |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Miscellaneous |
|
Support Freedom of Assembly, the PA 3 |
Current rating: 0 |
by 4
(No verified email address) |
29 Jul 2002
|
|
Freedom of Assembly was made illegal in 1996, very few people know that 75 or more people can't legally assemble on public land without permits (a deniable process) The PA 3 are but the first to go to Federal Prison for this crime. |
In 1996, despite massive public outcry Freedom of Assembly was made illegal. For 75 of more people to legally gather on public land a permit is required, making freedom of assembly a deniable process. The PA 3 are the first citizens to go to federal prison for this new found anti-Bill of Rights crime.
Contact Info in Prison for the PA 3 During the 1999 Rainbow Gathering in Pennsylvania, 3 individuals were chosen by the Forest Service's Incident Command Team as "secret leaders", and cited for not applying for a group use permit. As Rainbow is a leaderless, self-created temporary community, these charges were totally bogus. Unfortunately, due some legal maneuverings by the USFS, they not only lost their case (they weren't allowed any witnesses, among other things), and the judge threw the book at them. Go here for more details on their case. Nothing from the outside is allowed to be sent directly to anyone; the only way to send anything is via money orders made out to the person with their ID number, ie... Joan Kalb #20008-068. Keep in mind all mail is opened and read. You can send paperback books (no hardcovers), magazines and newspapers only if they come directly from the publisher.
Contact Info
Garrick Beck
#20009-068
FPC Florence PO Box 5000
Florence, CO 81226
If you want to send money contributions to Garrick, he has asked folks to instead send a contribution to:
FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums)
1612 K Street, NW Suite 700
Washington, DC 20006
http://www.famm.org
Stephen Sedlacko
#20010-068
SHERIDAN FCI PO Box 6000
Sheridan, OR 97378
Joan Kalb
#20008-068
FPC Danbury 33 1/2 Pembroke Station
Danbury, CT. 06811-3099
Please send your Green Energy to help Joanee pay her personal expenses while on jail (Rent, parking, petcare, etc.) Being single and self-employed, Joanne has no way to pay her bills while locked up.
MAKE ALL CHECKS PAYABLE TO:JOAN KALB NOT JOANEE FREEDOM!
NY Rainbow
P.O. Box 1554
New York, NY 10009
ATTN: Joan Kalb
Correspondence July, 15, 2002: Letter from Garrick Letter From Garrick July 15, 2002 Beloved sisters and brothers, family and friends
Greetings from inside the compound of the Federal Prison Camp in Florence, Colorado. I have been here six days now, getting processed into the federal prison system and finding myself more at home, more welcomed, more guided and supported by the other inmates here than I ever expected.
The food is good with plenty of alternatives for my vegetarian taste. The recreation is plentiful, with soft ball, walking track, library, music room, etc. And there is much freedom of movement in and around the facility. I have already been graciously brought into the traditional sweat lodge ceremony here, thanks to the amazing advance notice set in motion by our deeply beloved brother Jimmer. I am going to be assigned to the landscaping crew for daily work. But most of all I want you to be assured that the living here is clean and safe, to know that despite the situation, I am in my usual good spirits.
But all of these daily activities are only surface issues here. As most of you know, I am doing three months for having refused to participate in what I believed to be an illegitimate permitting scheme put onto the two and a half decades of Rainbow Gatherings as a matter of making us illegal and thereby accomplishing the Federal Government's original stated aim: to limit our numbers (see Granby Project Report, 1972, by Unified Federal Agencies).
Above all, I am so grateful to, so proud of, so in love with all the beautiful Rainbow Sisters and Brothers, Children and Oldsters who came together in Peace and Grace to make this 2002 Annual Gathering of The Rainbow such a strong spiritual, peaceful, healthy and delightful coming together.
Travelling directly to this prison camp from the circle of our family with its love, its beauty, its cooperation, its sharing and caring has given me more than enough strength to deal with this period of jail time.
We are the first people ever jailed in this republic for this new crime. And this is nothing to be proud of, not because we lost the case, not because jailtime is a pain in the ass in even the most supportive of situations, but because it reflects so badly on the dream of America. The dream of the reality of the basic freedoms of the press, religion, and of assembly and expression suffers. Liberty Herself holds her torch a little lower and feels the rats gnawing at her pedestal.
Still, I have great faith in the Rainbow Light helping us to kindle some of the republic's diminished spirit. Thank you, thank you for coming to this year's Gathering.
You can write me at:
Garrick Beck
Reg. No. 20009-068
Federal Prison Camp PO Box 5000
Florence CO 81226-5000
Please send only cards, letters, photographs and single sheet news clips. NO property or other stuff of any kind, as it will not get to me except for paperback books which must be sent in envelopes only. NO boxes and are limited to three per envelope.
If you want to send money contributions to my account, please don't. Instead, send a contribution to:
FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums)
1612 K Street, NW Suite 700
Washington, DC 20006
(http://www.famm.org)
Here's why:
It's not the physical scene here that's oppressive, nor the food, nor the activities, nor the company. No, it's the loss of freedom here for so many kindly people who have committed victimless crimes and who by cause of the bitter length of their punishments are losing homes, wives, families and the most sacred of times: that of being with one's children while they grow up.
Don't weep for me. In a few short months I will be out "on the street" (as they say here), living freely with my family and friends. Weep for the husbands here, and for the tens of thousands in this republic, who are locked up for having hurt no one but the colossal ego of the Law, for having done nothing but honest business between consenting adults.
And worse , and this is little known and needs to be more widely told, many of these souls-in-bodies are here through the innuendo of "conspiracy" charges, caught with no dope, no cash, no ill-gotten gains, no theft, no violence, but caught in a dark web of accusations, and cross charges that are based on things people are accused of doing 5 or 8 or 10 years before, and often by voices unseen, who weave a web of "co-conspirator hear say" to catch others in order to free themselves.
In the guise of the admittedly very gentle, very easy-going prison, I can see the shadow of the Gulag. I can see the iron claws of the same ill spirit that brought us the Inquisition, the POW camps of the Axis powers in WW II, the Stalag. The wrenching stomach-twisting horror of any mass of people separated from their families and forfeited of their property under the cloak of laws in an attack not on crime but on a culture, nothing more than "Cultural Cleansing." And a cultural attack is what the "war" on Cannabis really is.
And the second claw of this beast (the first being the legalization in federal courts of Co-conspirator Hearsay) are the Mandatory Minimums. These addendums to law, over and over , in the Federal Courts, under the eyes of judges who know and understand better, force the Iron Gates to clang shut for far, far longer that good jurisprudence would allow. First time offenders, peripheral participants who refuse to turn in everybody they know, people who did no more than introduce two people they know to each other are doing double decades' time under the federal Mandatory Minimum Sentencing laws. "Beware, beware," sayeth the oracles of old, "when the bird of two iron claws flies over your head, your lovers and your children are in danger of capture and being dropped into its iron nest."
Lester, the legendary dockworker turned pot dealer, who serviced half the Beatniks of Greenwich Village in the glory days of the 1950s, said "youze radicals, you free thinkers, youze gotta get organized!" ; Nuff said.
So we gotta figure some way to turn these laws around, some real, coordinated way to make changes in the powers that surround us, some way to help free these tens of thousands of kind and gentle people, prisoners of this cultural war, whose lives, at great taxpayer expense , sit here, waiting.
We have a choice of futures. And many of you have heard me say this before. It's a choice between a New World Order and a New World Culture. Of course I believe a New World Culture is what's best for every creature, from the tiniest plankton to the greatest eagle, and that this culture we are heralding is one of the ways out of the clutches of the heartless iron bird who rules the roost I'm imprisoned in now.
But don't let me frighten anyone with these ominous warnings. Remember: As Long As the Sun Shines and the Rain Falls, There Will Be Rainbows Upon the Earth.
Love and hugs, and Gather On!
Garrick
Joanne says she is in good spirits and in a ward with ten other inmates in Minimum Security. She reported that the personnel at Danbury were dismayed by her incarceration in a Federal Facility for such a trivial crime.
Stephen isn't being left out, I just haven't received any word from him yet.
|
See also:
http://www.welcomehome.org
|
|
