Biography
Steve Jacobs is an Iowa Catholic Worker who has been arrested repeatedly at Whiteman Air Force Base and Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker drone protests. Convicted in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia under 18 U.S.C. § 1382 (entering a military reservation) for participating in the School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch) annual nonviolent civil-disobedience action at Fort Benning, Georgia in November 2000. The action targeted the U.S. Army Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) — formerly the School of the Americas — which had trained Latin American military officers later linked to assassinations, torture, and massacres. Defendants typically received 3 to 6 months in federal custody.
The September 8, 1930 Laisve, page 5, reproduces an International Labor Defense political-prisoner directory. Its row prints Steve Jacobs, a term of extended one year (Pratęsta 1 m.), the year 1928 in the sentencing-year column, and confinement or correspondence location Ohio Penitentiary, Roseville, Ohio, as printed. This is an attributed historical directory entry; printed years and nominal terms are not exact intake dates or measured time served, and mailing boxes do not independently identify a prison. The directory contains stale or conflicting chronology, so this row does not override independently established conviction, death or release facts. Source: https://www.spauda2.org/laisve/archive/1930/1930-09-08-LAISVE.pdf#page=5
The March 21, 2019 Des Moines Catholic Worker report individually names Steve Jacobs among eight people arrested while blocking the Iowa Air National Guard Drone Command Center entrance on Sunday, March 17. All eight were taken to Polk County Jail. The account distinguishes Al Burney, who bailed out, from the other seven, who remained overnight, pleaded guilty before a jail judge on Monday morning and were fined and released. The reported fines ranged from $100 to $1,000; it does not assign a particular fine amount to Steve Jacobs, name the judge or specify the legal charge.
The contemporary Kansas City account and Jacobs’s reproduced court statement identify the Columbia, Missouri Catholic Worker as pleading guilty before Judge Elena Franco on July 19, 2011 for the May 2 protest at the new nuclear-weapons-parts plant. His sentence was a $500 fine, ten days suspended and two years of probation. The suspended term is not time served; the account describes his departure to the clerk’s office, not a new jail admission. Contemporary source.
The October 2016 Catholic Worker account includes this activist among the Creech arrestees taken to Clark County Jail on October 9 for unlawful assembly. The report explicitly lists twelve people released five to seven hours later, distinguishing them from Marcus Page-Collonge’s separate overnight detention. Contemporary report, The Nuclear Resister.
