Patrick O'Neill: Solitary Confinement

The following column by Ted Vaden originally appeared in lastgaffe.com, an online blog for people in their retirement years.

I wrote to you recently about Patrick O’Neill, the Garner, NC, Catholic pacifist who is serving 14 months in federal prison for following his conscience. That is, he broke into a Naval base in Georgia and defaced a monument to nuclear warfare. The official sentence was conspiracy, trespassing and damage to government property.

Patrick since has written to me – a pencil-scrawled letter on yellow legal paper – to express gratitude for the people who have sent him letters of support after reading of his ordeal on this blog.  He recounted a harrowing tale of his recent hospitalization after experiencing a heart flutter in his cellblock. I’ll let Patrick tell the story from here:

“I have been in solitary confinement for two weeks, following a 4-day stay in the hospital about 45 minutes away. While in the hospital, I was under armed guard (2 corrections officers at all times) who kept me in leg irons and chained to the bed 24-7. I was only out of the bed (always in leg irons) for brief tests. I was expected to use a handheld urinal instead of the toilet….

“The guards worked 8-12 hour shifts over the four days. (They basically ignored me, but one of them I became friends with.) I listened to their conversations and realized some of them were working overtime at close to $50 an hour, so the cost of guarding me for those 4 days was likely in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. Your tax dollars at work.

“I spent my birthday (March 27) in the so-called ‘Special Housing Unit,’ AKA ‘The Hole,’ and I may be in here for Easter as well. So this Lenten season is unlike any other I’ve ever experienced (harder than the year I did a juice-fast all 40 days for Peace in Iraq and lost 30 pounds.) I really do thank God daily for my suffering, but I do have my moments when I try not to think about the fact that I’ve now been in a 9x5-foot room for 13 days and counting without the door opening once. I did feel a little stir-crazy one night and paced and recited the Rosary and felt better. I’m not as tough as I used to be, that’s for sure.”

Patrick’s wife Mary told me that she finally had received a phone call from him on April 7 and that he had been released from solitary confinement. He had been placed there because of COVID. He still has not been vaccinated but was returned to his cellblock of more than 100 inmates. The disease reportedly has infected hundreds of inmates and staff at the Ohio federal prison complex where he is incarcerated.

In a recent letter to supporters, Patrick wrote, “Some of the men in this room have been here for more than 10 years, many have 10 years to go! And almost all for charges that warranted placement in a ‘low security’ prison that has cubicles instead of cells. That means the Bureau of Prisons finds all the men in Elkton are low risk for any kind of violence, which begs the question – Why are they here? Why didn’t they get compassionate home confinement due to Covid? Why didn’t they get some alternative sentence to years in prison? Answer: because the U.S. Prison-Industrial Complex is a self-perpetuating institution that employs thousands of people doing unnecessary jobs, such as watching TV in Patrick’s hospital room.”

Patrick O’Neill is age 65. He and his wife Mary are the parents of eight children and are grandparents. He will complete his prison term in March of 2022 – maybe by Christmas, if gets out on good behavior.

Patrick O'Neill: A Birthday Behind Bars

The following column by Ted Vaden originally appeared in lastgaffe.com, an online blog for people in their retirement years.

I would like to tell you about my friend Patrick O’Neill.

Patrick and his wife Mary live in Garner, where they operate a Catholic relief shelter for women and children in crisis. The couple raised 8 children of their own there, and they now are proud grandparents.

Next Saturday, March 27, Patrick turns 65. He will observe his birthday living in a prison cellblock at the Oakton Federal Correction Institute in Lisbon, Ohio, where he is serving a 14-month sentence for breaking into a U.S. Navy base to protest nuclear weapons.

Patrick is a man of unimaginable faith and adherence to his convictions. A longtime pacifist, he is one of the so-called Kings Bay Plowshares 7, a group of peace activists who on April 4, 2018, cut through a security fence and slipped into the King’s Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Ga. King’s Bay is the world’s largest nuclear sub facility, where six Trident submarines bearing nuclear-tipped missiles are berthed.

The group of activists chose the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to protest the nuclear weapons stored at King’s Bay. Patrick was apprehended banging on a monument to nuclear warfare with a hammer made of melted-down guns.

The seven protestors, all Catholic pacifists, were convicted in 2019 in federal court in Georgia, on charges of conspiracy, trespassing and damage to government property. They pleaded not guilty, saying they had entered the base not to commit a crime but to prevent one - “omnicide,” from nuclear warfare. They were sentenced last fall to terms ranging up to 33 months. Patrick was sentenced to 14 months and entered the Ohio prison on Jan. 14. With time served and good behavior, he could be released in 10 months.

Even though Patrick is in a low-security facility, his incarceration has been anything but easy. First, there is the threat of COVID-19 infection. Hundreds of inmates and staff in the Elkton facility have been infected, and nine inmates have died of COVID. A federal judge denied Patrick’s request to delay the start of his sentence until vaccines would be available for inmates.

Because of the infection, the prison is in lockdown, which means prisoners cannot receive visitors and are confined to their cellblock. “My block includes a range of 110-120 men living in a room with bodies always in constant motion as men move about looking to pass time in meaningful ways,” he wrote in a recent letter to supporters. “Many guys speak too loudly and there’s a public address system where guards make shrieking, sometimes shocking announcements throughout the day. The sensory overload is relentless, something akin to low-level torture.”

Patrick reports that many of the inmates are in prison for sex offenses – not for touching children or for manufacturing porn, but for viewing or sharing it on computers. They receive little or no rehabilitation and are treated by guards and other inmates as the lowest caste in prison society.

It is also a race-reversal society.
“Here, in an ironic reversal of fortune, whites are second-class citizens, so I have to learn and follow the rules, rules which are made by the inmates,” he writes. “I see it as my required affirmative action.”

Patrick is an indefatigable spirit. I first came to know him 28 years ago, when he was a reporter at The Chapel Hill News, where I was editor.  He covered UNC like a bloodhound, producing such scoops as the story that 50 coaches and Ram’s Club officials were receiving free loaner cars from 45 auto dealers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Among the beneficiaries were basketball coach Dean Smith (a Cadillac Sedan de Ville) and former star Phil Ford. The dealers were made members of the Rams Club and given free season’s tickets to football and basketball games.

Within a month after Patrick’s stories appeared, UNC cancelled the program.

Another Patrick story was about cars with Rams Club stickers being allowed to park in fire lanes outside Kenan Stadium on football Saturdays. Shortly after, then-Athletics Director John Swofford (now ACC Commissioner) encountered me on campus to ask why the newspaper was so negative about the athletics program. I told Swofford we were just covering the news and told Patrick to keep doing his job – which was not necessary to tell him.

Over the years, Patrick has continued as a freelance journalist, but he has devoted himself foremost to his Catholic activism protesting nuclear arms, the death penalty, racial injustice and mistreatment of immigrants. In his peace work, all in the form of nonviolent protest, he has served more than two years in jail and prison, even before this current term.

After Patrick was sentenced last October, he emerged from the courthouse with an upbeat attitude. The judge, moved by testimony from Patrick’s children and others, gave him a lesser sentence than the 26 months allowed by law.

He said then: “I’m pleased with the outcome. I’m sad that I’m going to be away from my family for quite a while, but I think that the purpose of the Kings Bay Plowshares was to be willing to face the possibility of redemptive suffering, and so it is. It’s not the most severe thing. It’s certainly something that I can tolerate.”

In prison, not surprisingly, he has been an advocate for his fellow inmates, seeking better treatment and more opportunity for pastoral care. He says he sees his sacrifice as a blessing:

“I pray in gratitude each morning for redemptive suffering and humility. The unpleasantness of solitary is also a gift, as I experience a small taste of the suffering that most human beings face every day all over the world. I hope to feel a little more empathy for my sisters and brothers who barely survive in the world.”

Only Patrick O’Neill would see forced isolation in a COVID-invested prison as a gift.

Happy Birthday, Patrick. Happy Easter.

Local Garner Activist Patrick O'Neill Reports to Federal Prison

Local Activist Patrick O’Neill Prepares to Serve 14 Month Sentence

By Margaret Damghani

During his most recent stint in jail in Woodbine, Georgia, the result of actions he will soon report to prison for, longtime Garner resident Patrick O’Neill threw parties for the men on his cell block.

He remembers saving up peanut butter, tuna packets, jelly, crackers and powdered drink mix, and enlisting the help of two friends he’d made in jail to set up the food and drinks. He took a piece of tape he found in an old book to hang up a flyer, inviting the entire cell block, making sure to include the guards so that it wasn’t torn down as contraband.

“It was fun to do that, and to give dignity and a loving encounter to people that are in the most oppressive situation you can basically be with in this country,” he reflected. 

One gathering loudly sang “Freedom” by Richie Havens, and O’Neill remembers reading from Isaiah and sharing a reflection on the Pharisees.

“Jesus was always with prostitutes and tax collectors, the outcasts. I said ‘Guys, He’s here with us, at the jail. This is exactly where Jesus hangs out, here with us,” O’Neill recalled saying.

The Protest Path to Prison

That was over two years ago, and O’Neill has been on house arrest since then. He was sentenced to report to prison in Ohio on January 14 for 14 months and ordered to pay $33,503.51 in restitution for charges stemming from an act of anti-nuclear protest at the Naval Submarines Base Kings Bay. The offenses can be summarized as trespass, conspiracy and destruction of property.

The coordinated action took years of planning and saw O’Neill and his collaborators, called the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, stealing onto the base in Georgia on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They engaged in acts of vandalism, ultimately providing a written statement of their opposition to nuclear weapons and peacefully accepting arrest, and resulting in jail and prison time for all seven.

Much of what the group did was symbolic, following in the tradition of other Catholic Plowshares peace actions, part of a decades long movement in the Christian pacifist community. O’Neill, for his part, brought with him a hammer made out of melted down guns to use against a statue of a Trident missile on the base, but did not ultimately do much actual damage. 

The action statement from day of arrest read:

“We come in peace on this sorrowful anniversary of the martyrdom of a great prophet, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Fifty years ago today, April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee as a reaction to his efforts to address “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” We come to Kings Bay to answer the call of the prophet Isaiah (2:4) to “beat swords into plowshares” by disarming the world’s deadliest nuclear weapon, the Trident submarine.”

Progress Through Resistance

At 64, O’Neill is a prolific freelance writer, devoted father of eight, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker House in Garner with his wife Mary Rider. He also volunteers time in the hospital ministry at WakeMed. Sprinkled throughout, a lifetime of actions to bring awareness to various social issues add up to over 25 arrests, 7 at the Pentagon protesting war, and over 2.5 years in prison.

He served 90 days after his first arrest in 1982 for impeding traffic, when he participated in a sit-in at Fort Bragg protesting the overthrow of democracies abroad.

In federal prison in Atlanta in the mid 1980’s, O’Neill got the chance to know many among the group of Cuban refugees known as the Marielitos. Many wrote ‘Libertad’ on their bedsheets as a form of nonviolent protest, and when a mattress was set on fire, the guards reacted in retaliation to the entirety of the Cuban men there by seizing anything deemed flammable, including personal photos, letters and bibles and burning them in a large bonfire. O’Neill, working on the landscaping crew, saved as many personal items as he could. 

He ended up finding ways to slip information to the press about the treatment of the Marielitos on the inside, resulting in more than one story in the Atlanta Constitution, and solitary confinement for him. It would be the year after he was released that an announcement about a deportation agreement led to what is commonly referred to as the ‘Atlanta Prison Riots’, though it is doubtful that O’Neill would agree with that characterization.

He was in jail for 15 days in Alamance County in 2009 for participating in a dramatic scene in front of the doors to the jail. Dressed as an ICE agent, he demanded the police arrest a woman costumed as the statue of liberty to call attention to issues in immigration policies and detainment.

Progress Through Compassion

O’Neill’s experiences have made him far more familiar with many realities many do not think about; the reasons people end up in jail, the cycles that previous offenses and poverty make it hard to escape, and the treatment of inmates.

“I’m not gonna go into the stories about guards beating them and people suffering with withdrawal,” O’Neill said. “It’s just kind of a place of despair. We are basically dealing with the same moral issues Jesus spoke about 2000 years ago, and a lot of people don't’ really think about that.”

O’Neill is inspired by other Christian pacifists who engaged in non-violent civil disobedience such as Philip Berrigan, a personal mentor, and Thomas Merton, a well-known Catholic theologian and activist, but his upbringing also influenced his life’s work.

Progress: The Roots of Justice

His mother, a resourceful woman who raised O’Neill and his brother after his father died, was not an activist but made it clear that she would not be sacrificing her children to the ‘war machine’.

His father died in a preventable construction accident when he was pre-school aged, and his mother was able to provide for her two sons by paying off the mortgage on their home with life insurance, and successfully winning in trial against the company his father had worked for.

And, of course, underlying all is his Faith. All four of his grandparents that immigrated to this country were Catholic, and O’Neill met his wife in 1977 when he was doing pastoral work at St. Gabriel Catholic Church in Greenville and she was a student at ECU.

That pastoral work is what brought him to North Carolina from where he was raised in Queens, and opening the first Catholic Worker house in North Carolina in 1991 brought him to Garner. 

“My wife and I started an intentional community that does hospitality to women and children in crisis. It’s a pacifist community,” O’Neill said. “We have times that people will stay for a short period of time, we’ve had people stay for years.” 

Rider, a home health care and social worker, supports her husband’s actions and often takes part as well, having been arrested similarly for nonviolent civil disobedience throughout the years. She was also raised in the Catholic Faith, and was influenced by being in a military family, born at Marine Corps Base Quantico.

“I think I had a heightened awareness to a lot of these issues. Even at 14 or 15 I was opposed to war,” Rider said. “I could see what it did to the people of Vietnam, and I could see what it did to my father.”

Catholic Workers model their lives after the Works of Mercy from Matthew 25, and O’Neill can also speak at length about the spiritual disciplines and practices of St. Ignatius and mysticism, and notes that preparing to go to jail has a spiritual aspect to it.

Progress Through Sacrifice

“It’s going to be hard for my wife. Taking care of the kids. Jail is just another address for me. I’m going to be lonely in jail. But I’ll make the best of it. That’s what I’ve always done whenever I’ve been in,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we so easily accept this kind of suffering we impose on others, and it’s done with a cavalier attitude. ‘You get what you deserve’.”

There is a cohesiveness to the stories O’Neill tells from his life. The last work of mercy, to bury the dead, is one that many do not find themselves having to fulfill. During that time in the prison in Atlanta, when many of the Marielitos were suffering depression and away from their families, the suicide rate in the prison was, sadly, higher than usual.

“They were detained because they had no rights, just like the guys in Guantanamo had no rights. You can't go into a court of law and defend your rights. A lot of them were despairing. I supervised over a half dozen burials while I was there,” he said.

Progress Through Prison

This time, the stress of the pandemic is weighing heavily, but O’Neill said he will make the best of it as he always does. A request to not report to prison until after getting a Covid-19 vaccine was denied. His penchant for getting involved, such as with the Marielitos, often results in consequences for him, and he doesn’t count on having any days served for good behavior taken off of his sentence until it's granted.

“Sometimes I get the feeling of ‘Lord take this cup from me’. I wouldn’t mind just going to prison and doing my time, and not finding a cause to have to get involved in again, it just seems like that’s the way the spirit leads me. I kind of go into things kicking and screaming. When there is an issue of injustice involved, I feel like I have to speak up. it’s scary to do that. I’m not going to say it’s easy,” he said.

O’Neill spent the last few days before he’ll travel to Ohio with his large family, and he already has concrete plans to run a book club, starting with Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and may host a prayer group as well. It certainly wouldn’t be in character for him if he didn’t find someway to be of service while he’s there.

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The Fr. Charles Mulholland Catholic Worker is at 124 Perdue St, Garner NC 27529. Info at https://www.catholicworker.org/communities/houses/nc-garner-charles-mulholland-catholic-worker.html

Helen Phillips: A Tribute

By Patrick O’Neill

Two prominent members of the Garner community have died during this pandemic. One, former Garner Mayor Ronnie Williams who's death Sept. 12 at age 72 was reported by The News & Observer. The other, Helen Sturdivant Phillips, a woman who kept Williams busy as an activist member of the Garner community.

Born January 15, 1927, Mrs. Phillips, who died June 2 at age 93, was always proud of the fact she shared a birthday with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man I consider the greatest American who ever lived. Mrs. Phillips, who turned 2 the day King was born, may be the greatest Garner citizen who ever lived.

No, Mrs. Phillips never got elected to public office, and she was not rich and famous, but she was someone who delighted in standing up for the rights of others, for speaking truth to power, and for being a voice for those Jesus called outcasts.

Born a sharecropper's daughter, Mrs. Phillips lived in our town at a time when African Americans were considered second-class citizens, or worse, less than human. She lived through Jim Crow, facing discrimination and racism in then-segregated Wake County.

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In a 2011 speech Mrs. Phillips delivered at The Town of Garner's 1st annual Martin Luther King Birthday celebration, she captured the essence of what life was like for a Black woman growing up amidst racism in Garner and Wake County.

"I hate to talk about my own hometown, but I got to tell it," Mrs. Phillips said to laughter in that 2011 speech. "Garner had two local restaurants," she said, never divulging the names of the two restaurants. "You could order your food at the side door and you waited and picked it up at the back door."

Blacks -- then known as "Coloreds" -- could not eat in Garner's segregated restaurants.

When Mrs. Phillips got a job in downtown Raleigh, she would catch a Greyhound bus near "the big tree" on Garner Rd. "We'd flag the bus down, get in the bus, give the man a quarter, go all the way back to the back, plenty empty seats (in the front of the bus), couldn't sit there," she said.

Her white co-workers would send Mrs. Phillips on food errands to the F.W. Woolworth's lunch counter. "How much is that pie a slice?" Mrs. Phillips said she asked the server. "Ten cents," the woman answered. "'You can buy it, but you can't eat it (in here).' Hudson-Belk was the same way. You had the bathrooms segregated, water fountains was segregated -- coloreds here, whites here."

Once as a child, Phillips complained to her mother because she was thirsty, and she wanted to drink from the "whites only" water fountain -- the colored water fountains were often broken. Said her mother: "Just you remember, we are colored, and we have to drink from the colored water fountain."

Rex Hospital was also segregated, Mrs. Philips said. "You could work there," she said. "You might get sick. You might get hurt, but you couldn't be treated there. You had to go to St. Agnes Hospital, the only hospital for blacks."

But as she grew older, Mrs. Phillips saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and things kept changing for the better, and then she lived to see the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first African American president.

All the while, Mrs. Phillips stayed hopeful: "Deep down in my heart I knew one day, if I lived, I would be able to drink from the white fountain. I would be able to sit anywhere I wanted to sit. I would be able to have freedom of speech, to express myself. I had that confidence that one day, if I continued to live, if God would spare me to see that day."

“I knew one day — one day, we were going to be free. I am so glad the Lord let me live to see this day, that I can stand before you, and say, ‘I’m free. I’m free. Thank God, we’re all free.’”

She told herself, "One day, Helen, you'll be able to sit where you want to sit, you won't have to go to the backdoor, and you'll have freedom of speech. And once I got the freedom of speech I've been speaking ever since."

Mrs. Phillips was active in local politics, and she made sure to make her opinions known. In an interview I did with Mayor Williams when he honored Mrs. Phillips during Black History Month, he told me Mrs. Phillips would call him "several times a week," and he appreciated her "motherly-like support." But most importantly, Williams praised Phillips for her strong commitment to Garner, her citizen activism and her willingness to persevere in her causes.

"What I've always admired about Mrs. Phillips is her drive to accomplish what she sets out to do," Williams said. "She has been a leader in Garner as long as I've known her. She's been an activist. She's been a promotor of Garner, and she is the best example I know of anyone who deserves to be recognized and honored during Black History Month."

She may not win every battle, but "she's working toward winning the war," Williams said.

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A widow, Mrs. Phillips married Graham G. Phillips on March 14, 1953. She was a mother of eight children. In the program from her funeral, her daughter, Sherry Phillips wrote: "Helen loved people, politics, watching the news, and most of all voicing her opinion. She loved the Town of Garner, and also loved the people in Garner. She spent many years advocating for the needs of the citizens of Garner.

"... Helen especially loved gardening, which consisted of planting flowers, mowing her lawn, and ensuring each flower was strategically placed."

In a 2016 speech titled: "Why are we still marching?" that she wrote for Garner's Martin Luther King birthday celebration, Mrs. Phillips said, "More than 50 years since major Civil Rights changes became the law of the land, the fight for basic justice is still being waged. Voter suppression laws have passed in the N.C. General Assembly. Major budget cuts have hit education, health care and nutrition programs."

While racism and white supremacy have not gone away, Mrs. Phillips did live to see the blossoming of the "Black Lives Matter" movement with millions of Blacks and whites marching together throughout the nation to decry police killings of African Americans.

Ahead of her time, Mrs. Phillips simply told the truth.

"Segregation is no stranger to me," she said. "I continue to embrace whatever comes my way. We, as a human race, must continue to strive for justice and equality for everybody. Martin Luther King's life and legacy, rooted in love, grounded in nonviolence, teaches us whatever happened in the past, and what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, we, at the end of the day, we should know we are all God's children and members of the human race.

"I knew one day -- one day, we were going to be free. I am so glad the Lord let me live to see this day, that I can stand before you, and say, 'I'm free. I'm free. Thank God, we're all free.'"

Mrs. Phillips said it was her hope that "the people can all live together in peace and harmony. Not that you're black and I'm white; I'm poor, you're rich.

"Because we breath the same air; you breathe the same air that I breathe -- God's air. And once it's cut off that's it. We have got to learn to live together and think about one another because when we die and leave this world that's it. We need to learn how to live together down here with one another. What hurts me hurts you. That's the way I look at it."