Tag Archives: prison

Our news this week focuses on the prisoners who are fighting California’s wildfires for as little as a dollar an hour while actually fighting fires. In total, about thirty-eight hundred male and female inmates are fighting fires in California. They constitute around thirteen percent of the state’s firefighters. Their low salaries save taxpayers a hundred twenty-four million dollars a year. …

This week we share the first part of a lecture by Elizabeth Hinton delivered at IU on October 12.  In her talk, she traces the creation and rise of mass incarceration as a strategy of America’s ruling class.  Her historical research, which culminated in a book last year called “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” demonstrates …

This week is the first episode of several about the intersection between the media and prison struggles. In January of 2015, journalist Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison for his role reporting on Anonymous’ hack of Stratfor, a private security and espionage company. Today, we are sharing a talk he gave at the Fight Toxic Prisons conference …

The phenomenon of mass incarceration has made the United States the world leader in carceral punishment. With only four percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 20% of the world’s incarcerated persons. In fact, the U.S. Is the pioneer of mass incarceration and the attendant police militarization and prison industry that are its foundation. Programs like “three …

This week, we have two contributions –one closer to home and one many more miles away- but both aim to describe an unfair relationship of power each contributor’s community faces. We first hear an essay from a prisoner in Southern Illinois, followed by a statement sent to us from a member of the community of the Mapuche people in Chile. …

This episode is an interview with Kwame Shakur, who is currently incarcerated at the Pendleton Correctional Institution. On August 11th , Indiana prison activists held a demonstration at the state capitol building in Indianapolis opposing new Indiana department of corrections regulations restricting incoming prisoner mail. The new policy prohibits all mail which is not hand written on white,lined paper. Though …

In this episode, we continue our conversation with Ray Luc Levasseur. He is a former underground combatant with the United Freedom Front, which carried out a campaign of attacks from 1975-1984 against South African Apartheid and US intervention in Central America. He spent 13 years in solitary confinement after his capture. This week, he shares with us his thoughts on …

Ray Luc Levasseur is a former underground participant in the United Freedom Front, which carried out a campaign of attacks from 1975-1984 against South African Apartheid and US intervention in Central America. He spent 13 years in solitary confinement after his capture. In the first episode of our series on Ray Luc’s experiences in prison and in struggle, he tells …

This week’s story is that of Kara Wild. An anarchist prisoner from Chicago, Kara is a trans woman who has been in a French prison for over a year and a half. We first give some background on her case, and then hear from her friends and loved ones, who share some stories about Kara. We close with a song …

We cover a range of news in this week’s episode- from a brief history of Black August and the upcoming August 19th prison demonstrations, to current prison conditions in regards to education, visitation, and forced sterilization. We then read a letter from prisoner Keith Malik Washington about the continued suffering from extreme heat in Texas prisons. The rest of the …