Jill: Well,
we made the decision that we were going to go to the mat for these homeowners
and that we were going to do everything in our power to make the banks do what
they're supposed to do, which is negotiate to keep homeowners in their homes.
That's why we bailed them out to the tune of some $4.5 trillion dollars in
bailouts, plus another $16 trillion in free loans. That was in order to keep
homeowners in their homes and protect our communities from the devastation of
foreclosure, which is not just a problem for the homeowner. It's really a
problem for the whole community. And it becomes a blight of vacant buildings,
which is a real problem; brings down everybody's home value and brings all
kinds of problems into the neighborhood. So, we were--
Rob: I
guess what I'm trying to get at is, you basically engaged in a protest, engaged
in civil disobedience and you got yourself arrested. Was that a conscious
decision to take those steps?
Jill: It
was a conscious decision that we were going to use all peaceful means, having
exhausted every other avenue. We made the decision that if it came to being arrested,
we were willing to be arrested to support these women and bring attention to
their just cause. It's not only their cause. It's the cause of another million
homeowners who will be thrown out of their homes this year. So we felt, yes,
we'd been forced to cross that line.
Rob: How
do you feel about having been arrested, now that that's happened?
Jill: I
feel that it should be a required experience for anyone who wants to hold
office and pretends to represent the public interest. They need to know what's
going on in our prison system from the inside. So, yes, it was really quite an
enlightening experience to go through that.
Rob: What
was enlightening about it?
Jill: To
see that people are basically treated like animals, and in fact many ways worse,
within the prison system. And that if people treated their dogs that way they might
very well might go to jail for animal cruelty. It was really eye opening to see
how absolutely stripped of human rights prisoners are, even when they haven't
been accused yet of a crime. You know, even when you're just being processed,
you're really treated like--brutally, brutally.
And I was in a cell that was intended for one person and--well, I was
transferred in the middle of the night. So, I was in two different cells over
the course of almost 24 hours. Two cells. In each case, the cell was meant for one
person and in each case there were three people in the cell and in some other
cells there were many more.
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