After a year in jail, activist ready to resume protests

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- If incarceration was supposed to make Steve Jacobs see the error of his ways, his year in federal custody in Leavenworth, Kan., was a failure. That was clear from the T-shirt he donned immediately upon his release.

"SHUT DOWN THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS," read the message on the shirt -- a reference to the Army facility at Fort Benning, Ga., where Latin American military personnel trained in the 1980s and 1990s.

Jacobs, a white-bearded grandfather whom fellow inmates called "Pops," was one of 26 people -- including four elderly nuns -- convicted of trespassing during a protest at the school in November 2000.

Because he had committed the same offense the previous year, Jacobs was sentenced to a year in the minimum-security camp at Leavenworth.

"We won," Jacobs said as he hugged his wife, Lana, outside the penitentiary Friday before driving home to Columbia.

But even as he declared victory for completing the sentence, he also noted that the U.S. government continues to fund the school. Protesters say graduates of the school have been linked to murder, torture and other human rights abuses.

Now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the school closed in 2000 and reopened under the control of the Department of Defense. Officials say the school's mission is to spread democratic principles among Latin American leaders who come there to study.

Jacobs believes his prison time was worth it even though the school remains in operation.

"I think that a lot of people will think: 'You could have been out organizing students, holding protests, lobbying Congress.' But I was able to do all that from prison," he said.

As a Navy hospital worker in the mid-1970s, Jacobs helped care for Vietnam War veterans saddled with physical and emotional wounds.

Those men, and his Catholic upbringing, persuaded him to pursue peace, and he was arrested for the first time during a nuclear weapons protest at the Pentagon a few months after he was discharged.

In Columbia, where he studied nursing at the University of Missouri, he met his wife. The couple operates the St. Francis and Lois Bryant shelters for homeless men and women.