FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The National Political Prisoner Coalition mourns Paki Wieland, who died on Thursday, March 12, 2026, at her daughter’s home in Conway, Massachusetts, after several years of treatment for lung cancer. She was 82.
Wieland was arrested for civil disobedience more times than most people could name, over more decades than most activists last. She was never a political prisoner in the sense this archive usually means — she did not serve years, and she is not in our database. She belongs to the other end of the same continuum: the person who is arrested, processed and released, and who comes back the following week. That repetition was not incidental to her politics. It was the method.
A life measured in returns
Born Elizabeth “Paki” Wieland on September 15, 1943, in New Orleans, to Barrett and Emily Wilson, she spent most of her adult life in western Massachusetts. She trained and worked as a social worker and family therapist and taught at graduate level, taking a master’s in education from Antioch in 1979, a master’s of social work from Boston University in 1986, and a doctor of ministry from the University of Creation Spirituality in 1992.
She was repeatedly arrested protesting the weapons production of the defense contractor L3Harris in Northampton. She drove a recreational vehicle to North Dakota to support the pipeline protesters. She belonged to Massachusetts Peace Action from 2018, to Western Mass Code Pink and the Pink House in Washington, to the Raging Grannies, to the Committee to End the Wars, and to Occupy Wall Street.
She was planning the International Women’s Day program with Western Mass Code Pink when she died.
“Arrested — multiple times”
Representative Jim McGovern, who represents her district, issued a statement the following day. “Paki and I bonded after we learned that each of us had been arrested — multiple times — for civil disobedience,” he wrote. “I often turned to her for advice and guidance — strategizing and working together on how to eliminate nuclear weapons, stand up to defense contractors, and fight back against those who seek war and destruction.”
“She never stopped speaking out, never stopped organizing, and never stopped challenging the rest of us to live up to our values,” he added.
Why an archive of prisoners marks this death
This coalition documents people the state imprisoned for what they believed and did. Almost every one of those records begins with someone who was willing to be arrested and kept going anyway. Wieland spent sixty years being that person, in a country where the ordinary consequence of protest is a night in a cell and a court date rather than a life sentence — and where the difference between those two outcomes has always depended on who is protesting, and about what.
“Most people who are arrested for their politics in this country are released within a day, and the release is the point at which the public stops paying attention,” a coalition spokesperson said. “Paki Wieland went back. For sixty years she went back. The archive exists because people like her kept the question open long enough for the rest of us to notice who was still inside.”
She is survived by her family. Memorial arrangements have been announced by her family and by Massachusetts Peace Action.
The National Political Prisoner Coalition maintains a public archive of more than 8,500 political prisoners in the United States, from the colonial period to the present.
