Just Out of Jail, Anti-Nuclear Protester Decides to Work This One From Sidelines

When Marion Pack moved to Orange County in 1981 from a small Ohio town, she took a job in the lingerie department of May Co.’s South Coast Plaza store.

At lunchtime, she would tear off her name tag, grab her clipboard and head out to collect signatures for the nuclear freeze movement.

Nearly four years later, Pack was arrested across the street from her old store while demonstrating against the Winter Conference of Aerospace and Electronic Systems last February.

Today, Pack is back.

Fresh from serving a five-day jail sentence for her 1985 civil disobedience, the 39-year-old director of the Orange County Alliance for Survival returned to the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel Tuesday and Wednesday and was headed back there this morning.

Different Mission

But this time, Pack, who lives in Norco, had a different mission--to direct demonstrators from the sidelines and stay away from police handcuffs.

Pack was convicted earlier this month of blocking a public roadway during Wincon ‘85--a misdemeanor. She served her first three days in Orange County Jail and the next two at a county honor farm, finishing her sentence Sunday.

Though jail taught her a multitude of lessons, she said, she felt it would be a good idea to spend some time with her husband and three children before going back again.

“You become an unperson,” Pack said Tuesday afternoon in her Santa Ana office. “It’s like giving up your self-determination in going to jail. And that’s really a scary thought.”

Pack kept busy during her stay behind bars, talking to other women prisoners about poverty, crime and nuclear war and recruiting one fellow inmate as an alliance office volunteer and another as a protester at Tuesday night’s candlelight vigil, which was aimed at the weapons technology conference.

Saw Poverty-Crime Relationship

While she was in jail, she said, she “saw the definite relationship between poverty and crime.”

“If you really want to get rid of crime, the thing you want to do is get people out of poverty,” she said. “You don’t do that by increasing the defense budget while you cut every other social program in the country.”

Pack said she chose a jail sentence because probation included a promise not to engage in civil disobedience of any kind for one year. This was her third jail term for anti-nuclear demonstrating, and she has no plans to curtail her activism in the coming months.

“But our intentions are not to break laws,” she said. “They are to voice our concerns.”