“Hey, hey!” one of the men who’d recently entered our cell—the police had barged into his apartment in the middle of the night and accused him of dealing—suddenly yelled, ending the chant. He was a good-looking young guy in a red jacket. “Y’all bugging! There’s nothing they can do for you except delay your paperwork! And my paperwork! And if I’m still here tomorrow morning, I’m going to start amping it up. Then you’ll have something to complain about, because you’ll be getting beat up!”

This was the first threat of violence to occur in our cell, unless you count the milk request from early on and my violent feelings toward Sam Zimmerman, when, after beating me in the (controversial) tie-breaker, he stretched out his arms, yawning, and announced to the cell, “Does anyone want to play some chess?” This was somewhat different, but not, I think, too different. The alleged drug dealer soon calmed down and shared with us his philosophy of what to do when you enter a jail cell. “You see how we walked in, found a seat, didn’t say nothing to nobody, and got comfortable? That’s what you have to do. That’s all you can do. This here is bullpen therapy. You just have to cool it until they let you out.”

He stopped for a moment.

“I’m twenty-two years old,” he said. “I’ve copped a charge every year of my life since I was thirteen.”

We let that sink in. We were tourists here; for him, every time he saw a cop, there was a chance he’d end up in this place. Once in, he was in the business of getting out, not making a point or practicing “civil disobedience.”

I think, for the record, that he was wrong. But he’d been heard. Five minutes later, as if to contradict him, Gene, the ringleader of our recent protest, along with some of his cellmates, was called up for his arraignment.

Three or four hours later, so were the rest of us. We were taken upstairs to a small one-person cell that fit five of us for an hour in relative comfort. An excellent lawyer—a friend of a friend named Karen Newirth—came and talked to me through some bars in the back of the cell, passing along a hello from my girlfriend, Emily, and explaining my options. I was being charged with two counts of disorderly conduct (violations) and one count of obstructing government administration (resisting arrest, in other words, a misdemeanor). If I pleaded guilty, the prosecution was offering to dismiss the misdemeanor and just make it a violation. If I decided to plead not guilty, Karen suspected that the prosecution, rather than go to trial, would eventually offer to reduce the sentence to adjournment in contemplation of dismissal (A.C.D.), essentially a six-month probation. Karen doesn’t believe people ought to have criminal records, of any kind, even very minor ones, and so thought we should hold out for the A.C.D. Returning to my cell, I consulted with a young man named Stacks, who despite being twenty-two had already done a fair amount of time, as he himself put it. Stacks argued that if I could stay out of trouble for six months, probation was fine; but that if I intended to go back to protesting, an arrest while under probation could be worse than an arrest with just a violation on my record. I liked Stacks’s reasoning and told him he should become a lawyer. He looked at me to see if I was making fun of him, saw that I was not, and said, “Thank you for the compliment.” He was, in fact, trying to go to school to be a paralegal. He’d been picked up for smoking marijuana in a park after dark. “Just some bullshit,” as they say.

Soon I was out—I took the violation and was levied a hundred-and-twenty-dollar fine—and soon Field was out, and so was everyone else who’d been arrested Thursday morning on Wall Street. The first thing I did was hug Emily; the second thing I did was go upstairs and relieve myself in the perfectly adequate courtroom bathroom. In the hallway of the courthouse were some young people waiting for the protesters to get out. Out on the street was another group of people, with coffee, donuts, and sweaters for those who weren’t ready for the cold. Austin, who’d been so irritating on the inside and been released early that day, entirely redeemed himself by coming back to see the rest of us out. He was dancing in a circle on the street when I left the courthouse, chanting, by himself, “What do we want? Donuts! What will cure the debt? Donuts! What does the revolution need? Donuts!” Some of my fellow arrestees would go to a bar in the neighborhood, then a rave in Brooklyn, then hop in a car and drive up to Vermont to visit another occupation and tell their story. But Emily had spent hours at the courthouse trying to get them to move my docket along, and we went home.

In the next few days, I watched the horrible video from U.C. Davis, showing a police officer deliberately, nonchalantly launching a thick stream of pepper spray into the faces of kids who were sitting peacefully in front of him. I answered a lot of e-mails from friends wishing me well. I went to the bathroom many times, and whenever I pleased. And late one night on the online Livestream I watched an absurd discussion, at the general assembly in Zuccotti, of whether to cancel a planned trip by an O.W.S. delegation to Egypt, ostensibly as election monitors—a trip that would send twenty young activists to Cairo and cost thirty thousand dollars. People were split roughly in half, which meant that there was no way that the proposal to send the letter (and cancel the trip) would pass. (If we send the letter to cancel this costly trip, one joker asked during the discussion period, “can we do it on very expensive paper?”) The discussion lasted until one in the morning; the proposal couldn’t reach ninety-per-cent consensus; it looked like the trip to Egypt was going forward. There was one more item on the agenda that night, but I closed my laptop and headed for bed.

What does it all add up to? I went out into the street and got arrested because I was angry that the cops had tackled our drummer; irritated that most of the Wall Street types walking by could be so contemptuous of people who were more committed, more engaged, more interested in the future of this country than they are; and because I was curious—about what the process of arrest was like, what the inside of a jail was like. I learned more than I expected to. To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing, and degrading, and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage: because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up. From the brown phone in our cell at the Tombs, I’d called Emily a few times, and I called the office of n+1, the magazine where I’m an editor. But it felt like those people, my friends, might as well have been on a different planet. They could do what they pleased when they pleased. We could not. I left the world of jail with plenty of relief but more than anything with a sense of unease that I still can’t quite shake. We will be judged as a society and as a culture by how we treated our meanest and most vulnerable citizens. If we keep going the way we’re going, we will be judged very, very harshly—and sooner, perhaps, than we think.

Photographs by Mark Greif.