Tag Archives: mass incarceration

This week, we speak on the phone with writer and prison abolitionist Craig Gilmore, who begins by discussing his recent piece in Commune Magazine. The article, “The Business of Incarceration” is a review of American Prison, a critically acclaimed 2018 book by Shane Bauer. In his conversation with us, Gilmore critiques the book’s thesis on private prisons, and then tells …

It’s been one year since the August 2018 National Prison Strike. This week, we feature a talk from Ben Turk and Amani Sawari- both of whom were important outside supporters of last year’s national Prison Strike. This talk took place at Bend the Bars 2019, a prison abolitionist conference focusing on the initiatives of prisoners themselves.  This conference, held in …

This week, we share a statement from former political prisoner Ray Luc Levassuer about the recent death of his comrade, Tom Manning. Then, we speak with Micol Seigel about e-carceration, otherwise known as electronic monitoring. Seigel works with the group Indiana Against E-Carceration, who have a series of upcoming events lifting the voices of people affected by e-carceration. In this …

This week, we hear from two people- Faith, who talks to us about the practice of inmate lending- and Jason Renard Walker, who speaks on the retaliation he is facing inside. We spoke to Faith at the Fight Toxic Prisons convergence recently, and she told us about the practice of inmate lending, where prisons bid for labor in the form …

This week, we share an interview with Julie, a researcher who studies the effects of climate change on prisoners.  The conversation was held at last month’s Fight Toxic Prisons conference, and focused on her work on how intensifying extremes of heat and cold impacts prisoners’ health. As this interview is broadcast, a hurricane is bearing down on Louisiana, threatening severe …

This week, we spoke with participants in the struggle to close Dekalb County jail in Atlanta, Georgia. They walked us through the launch of the movement there, when prisoners smuggled out photos of horrendous conditions inside, which were posted on social media by family members. Since then, a wide range of people have worked to support the prisoners, by writing …

Over the past year, the political prisoner support movement has won an exciting number of releases, with long-term political prisoners from MOVE and the Black Panthers finally gaining their freedom.  But many other political prisoners remain behind bars, and their supporters are not slowing down.  Leonard Peltier is a member of the American Indian Movement who has been behind bars …

In her new book, Carceral Capitalism, poet and scholar Jackie Wang confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion. The so-called ‘race-neutral’ technologies like credit scoring, data mining, and algorithmic policing provide a …

Kevin Steel speaks to us about being sentenced to twelve years in prison at the age of 17.  Speaking to us from the 4th annual Fight Toxic Prisons conference- which you can hear at points in the background- Kevin touches on a lot of different topics, including the Influence of the Black Panthers and other groups on his youth, hunger …

This week, we finish our conversation between Toussaint Losier and Micol Seigel. This is part three of a series in which we hear Losier, author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement, speak to Seigel about his research while writing his book, in which he builds a cohesive picture of the long history of incarceration. In this final part of the conversation, Losier …