`Jail terrorists, not teachers': in Middletown, New Jersey, 228 teachers and secretaries are jailed for striking. The story behind this story: `plain old union busting.' (News).

Envision this bad dream: You've violated no state statute, yet you're sentenced for "contempt of court" by a state judge whom no one elected. You're handcuffed and driven to jail, where you're placed in a hot, windowless, 15-by-20-foot room with 36 other people.

Your dinner, delivered in milk crates, consists of hot milk and mushy bologna sandwiches, with crushed lemon cookies pushed into the bread.

This nightmare was reality for New Jersey Education Association/NEA member Lorraine Pron, one of 228 striking Middletown Township teachers and school secretaries who were jailed in December, from one to five days. The charge against them: violating a state judge's back-to-work order.

"You turn over all your rights in jail. When you're thirsty at home, you just go get a glass of water. But in jail you're not really sure what you're drinking," shudders Pron, a seventh grade language arts teacher at Bayshore Middle School. "I was completely shocked by this experience."

Shock. The Middletown school board carefully calculated the effect that incarceration would have on law-abiding, middle-class educators like Lorraine Pron. But it did not predict the shock wave this mass jailing would send around the world.

"During the strike,…