Convictions: Prisoners of Conscience

Since 1990 tens of thousands of people have made pilgrimages every November to the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia to call for the closing of the Pentagon's School of the Americas (SOA), now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC. CONVICTIONS: Prisoners of Conscience focuses on some of the 200 SOA protesters who collectively have received 80 years of prison time for their nonviolent civil disobedience. Sentences have been as long as 18 months, with fines up to $10,000. They hope going to prison will call attention in their home communities -- and in Congress -- to the grassroots campaign to shut the school. Briefly profiled are Father Joe Mulligan of Detroit, Michigan, seminary student Sarah Jobe of Durham, North Carolina, teacher Shirley Way of upstate New York, and Leisa Faulkner Barnes, a mother of five sons, of Sacramento, California.