The Forgotten Climate Prisoners

So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of ‘failures’, the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it. - Michael Foucault, 1975.

Just got back from a protest outside the Danish embassy, in solidarity with the climate prisoners. This week, the first two of those charged with crimes during the COP15 protests go on trial. During the Copenhagen climate summit, over 2000 protesters were detained without reason, under a package of laws passed specifically for the summit. 7 of them will be going on trial in total.

The two activists going to court this week, Natasha Verco and Noah Weiss, were put through 3 weeks of police detention, unjustified isolation, and are now facing longer sentences, higher penalties and deportation from Denmark. Both were snatched off the streets by plain clothes police during the protests. Both are being accused on the basis of organizing demonstrations. Specifically, shouting “push.”

Last December, I spent 10 hours in a cage without water, toilet break, and without food for the first 7 hours. I was pepper sprayed through the bars while I stood on the other side, my hands tied behind my back. More importantly, I was held without cause, in a pre-emptive arrest, made entirely to terrorise civil society and deter demonstration. While we – hundreds of us – were locked up, NGO delegates and indigenous rights activists were surrounded by police on the bridge to the conference centre, and beaten.

When we were arrested, we were initially sat in so-called ‘herring bone’ lines (how Scandanavian can you get?), legs splayed out like a grotesque teddy bear, hands behind back, and then each person slotted into the next. This morning we replicated the line outside the Danish embassy. On a sunny morning in the middle of Poshville (aka Chelsea), all those red brick buildings around us, I felt the pain in my ham strings just the same as back in Copenhagen, on a pavement next to a car park, 100 police around us. Without cause.

Throwing a bottle at a fully armoured policeman deserves jail as well, it would seem, and certainly if you’re the wrong colour. Last week, I watched as a group of about ten British asian teenagers (and as young as 10) were harassed and search by police outside the British Library. A stabbing having been committed the night before, Terrorism Act legislation had been used to give the police powers for 24hrs to stop and search anyone – without cause. Naturally, the Met’s reaction was to find a group of asian kids, bring the dogs, and scare the shit out of them. At one point, one of them got down from the wall he was sitting on, and the uniformed thug with the dog shouted “Did I ask you to get down? You get down when I tell you to get down, or I’ll fucking lock you up.”

What I experienced in Copenhagen was nothing, I know, compared to what goes on everyday. But it was an insight into another life, that of those forgotten in jails, of walls both real and systemic.

And strangely, it might be these walls which build the growing movement for climate justice into something more than a single summit mobilisation. Climate activists have been hounded and locked up before. But when it was on British soil, we were rarely forgotten. I wonder whether our continued obsession with prisons as some kind of good isn’t because they allow revenge or judgement, but because they allow us to forget that a crime – or protest against a crime – even happened in the first place.