Tag Archives: Indiana Prisoners

This week we share the first of two episodes on Jay Smith’s story, also known as Abu Faheem Shabaz, who was recently released from the Indiana Department of Corrections after spending years inside. As he states, Shabaz was part of the carceral system since childhood, and he describes coming of age within the walls of detention facilities. He shares with …

This week concludes our series on the mass escape from the Woomera immigrant detention center in 2002. Aren Aizura, who helped organize the solidarity camp outside the prison over Easter weekend of that year, tells us more about the aftermath: follow-up organizing with captive refugees, and the Australian government’s push to move the prisons to remote, unreachable islands. Despite these …

In the second episode of our series on the mass escape from the Woomera refugee detention center in Australia, Aren Aizura parses out the stakes of the protest camp, its participants, and the escalation to the breakout.  From there, Aren moves to the escape itself, the emotional meeting between refugees and outside supporters, and the complicated choices they each faced …

Our focus for this episode returns to the impact of incarceration on families. First we have a discussion between our friend Lucy and one of her fellow classmates at Indiana University, Rafael Green, III. Rafael describes having multiple family members in prison during his childhood, and the way that affected both his childhood, and the lives of other family members …

This week, we explore various spaces of exception. We spoke with Matt Peterson, a documentary filmmaker and contributor to a multimedia project called the Native and the Refugee. Along with Malek Rasamny, he has worked in both native reservations and Palestinian refugee camps, drawing links between each as spaces of exception, excluded from the national constitutional order, but also drawing …

The Bomani Episode This week, we focus on a topic that is close to many of us on the outside: the story and struggle of political prisoner and Ohio death row inmate Bomani Shakur (known to the state as Keith Lamar). We begin our episode with an update on Marius Mason, news from the Kinross Correctional Facility, Holman Prison, and …