Molly Crabapple Leaves Jail, Tweets About Experience

Her arrest during yesterday's Occupy Wall Street protest made headlines not only across the Internet, but on Al Jazeera as well, and now artist Molly Crabapple is using her experience to try to draw attention to other protestors in similar situations.

The arrest of Crabapple, whose work includes Week In Hell from IDW and Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School, by the New York Police Department yesterday caused a storm of activity on social media, something that Crabapple herself was able to keep track of (She was able to keep her phone until she was in jail, she explained yesterday: "I was handcuffed in a police van for about an hour, tweeting from there") and draw strength from. "Seriously, I am reading over these tweets and I fucking love all of you. THANK YOU," she tweeted, adding later "I got the hottest jail support. f*cking overwhelmed, guys."

Now that she's been released, however, she's using the experience to try and draw attention to others still jailed. "Thing I knew in theory but was reinforced from practice in this?" she tweeted this morning, "Jail is a depressing, horrific place for wasting human potential and only bad people advocate locking humans in cages (even for a day) for drugs or homelessness or standing on street corners. Every day people are thrown in these freezing, crowded cages for walking while black or having condoms while 'looking like a sex worker.' Highly recommend donating to the NYCLU's anti-stop-and-frisk campaign http://www.nyclu.org/issues/racial-justice/stop-and-frisk-practices" (Tweet 1, Tweet 2, Tweet 3, Tweet 4).

Along with retweeting messages from those pointing out that some OWS protesters are still imprisoned after yesterday's arrests, Crabapple added that "there are other brave people in jail now who are going to need #jailsupport too." It seems trite to suggest that, hey! good things can come out of bad circumstances, but if Crabapple's arrest leads to more awareness/activism online around who ends up in jail, why, and what happens to them once they're in there... well, that's something resembling a silver lining, right...?