Podcasts about beyond prisons

James (Jimmy) Soto was released from Stateville Prison in November, 2023, after suffering 42 years and 2 months in custody for a crime he did not commit. A month before his release he had received his bachelor's degree from Northwestern University. He and his co-defendant, Tyrone Ayala, also exonerated, were the longest serving wrongfully convicted people in Illinois history. At our Homecoming Party for Jimmy several men toasted him, and thanked him for the legal research he did as a jailhouse lawyer for them while inside. Knowing that Jimmy was planning to pursue a law degree, one of his compatriots said, “I saw what this brother did with a yellow pad and a pencil, now with a law degree, Look Out!” After his release, Soto said he felt “elated” but also full of “righteous anger…It should not have taken 42 years for this to happen.” A talented writer, artist, public speaker, and thinker, Jimmy Soto is a Justice Fellow at Beyond Prisons at the University of Chicago, and a paralegal at Northwestern School of Law.

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. They talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars, and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms. It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.Maya Schenwar is Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better, and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the co-founder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. They talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars, and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms. It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.Maya Schenwar is Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better, and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the co-founder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. They talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars, and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms. It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.Maya Schenwar is Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better, and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the co-founder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. They talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars, and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms. It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.Maya Schenwar is Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better, and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the co-founder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. They talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars, and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms. It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.Maya Schenwar is Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better, and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the co-founder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

Today I am delighted to have Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on Speaking Out of Place to discuss their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. We talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms.  It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children. Maya Schenwar is a writer, editor, and organizer who serves as director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also Truthout's board president and editor at large. Maya is the co-editor of We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition and co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, among other books. In addition to Truthout, Maya's work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The Nation, and she has appeared on Democracy Now!, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NPR, and other television and radio programs. Maya is a cofounder of the Movement Media Alliance, as well as Media Against Apartheid and Displacement. She lives in Chicago.Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the cofounder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.

Maya Schenwar returns to This is Hell! Maya will be joined by the co-editor Kim Wilson who are co-editors of the new collection, "We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition" from Haymarket Books. Maya is editor in-chief of truthout. Kim is the cofounder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. Rotten History from Renaldo Migaldi follows the interview. Check out their new edited volume here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2446-we-grow-the-world-together Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thisishell

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with folx from LGBT Books to Prisoners and A Room of One's Own bookstore on the Wisconsin Department of Corrections' recently-implemented restrictions on book donations, the condition of prison libraries, and the current state of abolition activism.“On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them,” she continues. “At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives.” --Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?Joining me for a conversation on this topic is Bryan Davis and Nicholas Leete of LGBT Books to Prisoners and Mira Braneck of A Room of One's Own bookstore.LGBT Books to Prisoners was born out of the Wisconsin Books to Prisoners (WI BtP) in 2007. LGBT Books to Prisoners is a prison abolitionist, volunteer-run project which primarily works to send books requested by queer people in prison in the United States. With me today are two volunteers, Nicholas Leete and Bryan Davis.Bryan Davis is a graduate from UW-Madison's School of Human Ecology with a degree in nonprofit management. He first became involved with LGBT Books to Prisoners as a volunteer in 2016 and eventually joined the board of directors. He also worked in the non-profit sector in fundraising, development, and communications for an organization serving children who experience neglect and teens in the foster care system. He currently serves on the Social Justice Center's board of directors located off of Willy Street which manages the building's operations and programming which includes renting space to numerous nonprofits like LGBT Books to Prisoners.Nicholas Leete has been a volunteer with LGBT Books to Prisoners since 2016, and has been a volunteer organizer with the group for the last few years. Additionally, Nicholas is a WORT volunteer and a worker at Rooted, a local food sovereignty non-profit.A Room of One's Own is a local, independent feminist bookstore, in Madison since 1975, currently on Atwood Avenue. They serve as the official bookseller for all books sent out by LGBT Books to Prisoners and also sponsor us through book donations and publicity.Mira Braneck is the receiving manager and books to prisoners programs coordinator at A Room of One's Own.Additional resources:10/16/24 WORT interview with Tone's Madison's editor in chief Scott Gordon on DOC's updated donation policies10/14/24 TONE article, "Wisconsin prison officials furtively changed a library book donation policy while dodging questions" by Scott Gordon9/25/24 TONE article, "Wisconsin escalates its long tradition of prison book-banning" by Scott Gordon and Dan FitchNB: Since airing, we discovered an inaccuracy in our conversation. Michigan state prisons allow publications purchased from seven internet vendors as well as direct from book publishers. You can read more about this here. Copyright free photo courtesy of Freepik.

This is part one of a two part conversation with Joshua Myers on his latest book Of Black Study.  In Of Black Study Joshua Myers examines the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers and Cedric Robinson as well as June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, and what each contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.  In this part of our two conversation on this book, Professor Myers talks about the selection of the six thinkers he centers the book around, and the type of project he is engaged in with the text. We also spend about an hour talking about two of the books chapters, the one centered around the interventions of W.E.B. Du Bois and Sylvia Wynter, as well as looking at each of their relationships to Marxist thought and analytical approaches, and their relationships to science, the humanities and academic disciplinary traditions. As well as what each of them finds among the Black masses and how what they finds there influences their work. Of Black Study is a new release from the Black Critique series on Pluto Press. This is our third conversation with Joshua Myers, both of our previous two have been discussions centered around Cedric Robinson. We have also done a number of discussions with authors and editors of the Black Critique series over the years, including discussions with Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Bedour Alagraa, David Austin, and Michael Sawyer (links below). We strongly recommend this book, for anyone interested in Black Study and/or the critical interventions of the thinkers the book focuses on. It is an indispensable resource. it officially comes out later this week, but you can pre-order your copy now through Pluto Press or through our comrades over at Massive Bookshop. If you pre-order from Massive, 20% of the proceeds go to fund the abolitionist organization Project NIA. We've received word that Pluto Press will also be donating copies of this book to all the participants in the incarcerated study group that we support in partnership with Massive Bookshop and Prisons Kill. So we want to send a big shout-out to Pluto Press and Joshua Myers for that as well.  Part two - which focuses primarily on Myers' chapters on Jacob Carruthers and Cedric Robinson - will come out in the next couple of days.  As always if you like what we do, and want to support our ability to do it, you can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. We have a goal of adding 31 patrons this month and currently we're at 13, so we're still working towards that goal.  Our first interview with Joshua Myers (on Cedric Robinson) Our second interview with Joshua Myers (on his biography of Cedric Robinson) Greg Thomas's interview of Sylvia Wynter from Proud Flesh  From Cooperation to Black Operation (Transversal Texts conversation with Harney & Moten)  Bedour Alagraa's Interview with Sylvia Wynter “What Will Be The Cure?”  Our interviews with authors and editors of the Black Critique series  Beyond Prisons interviews with Dr. Anthony Monteiro (first interview, second interview)    

Brian Nam-Sonenstein, co-host of the "Beyond Prisons" podcast and publishing editor of Shadowproof, appears on "Unauthorized Disclosure" to help the show outline the issue of censorship in United States prisons and jails. **BECOME A SUBSCRIBER at TheDissenter.org for as little as $3/month** Censorship is not limited to banning books. Nor is it only retaliation against an incarcerated individual who wants to write a letter for publication. He describes why free speech advocates should absolutely care and how censorship has intensified as facilities move away from physical mail. (Note: This is a free version of this week's episode. For the full episode, subscribe to the podcast at TheDissenter.org.)

This episode is the 4th and final session of Journalism for Liberation and Combat.  Make sure to check out the audio from all four sessions here on Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Or if you prefer, the videos from all four sessions are up on Black Power Media. And there's a syllabus you can access in the show notes. This episode is a panel discussion with Erica Caines from Hood Communist and Black Alliance For Peace, Kelly Hayes from Truthout and Movement Memos, Brian Nam-Sonenstein from Shadowproof and Beyond Prisons and Brandon Soderberg co-author of I Got A Monster and former editor-in-chief of the Baltimore City Paper.  Each of these folks have much more extensive bios which we will include in the show notes and which get read out later in the episode after Brooke and I situate the panel a bit within the series. We encourage you to follow and support their work and more than that we hope that more comes from our collaboration with these great folks, and through folks who either participated in the seminars or who have watched or listened to this series in video or audio form. This is our first episode of April, we put out 5 episodes in March. So if you like what we do here at MAKC, kick $1 or whatever you can into our patreon to make sure we can continue to provide you with new episodes every week.  Panelists: Erica Caines is a coordinating committee of The Black Alliance For Peace and a member of the Black working-class centered Ujima People's Progress Party in Maryland. Caines is the founder of Liberation Through Reading and is also co-editor of the Revolutionary African blog, Hood Communist. Kelly Hayes is the host of Truthout's podcast Movement Memos and a contributing writer at Truthout. Kelly's written work can be found in numerous other publications and books, including the anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? and Mariame Kaba's bestseller We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Kelly was an organizer with We Charge Genocide and co-founded the Chicago Light Brigade and the Lifted Voices collective. Kelly's movement photography is featured in the “Freedom and Resistance” exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History.  Brian Nam-Sonenstein is an independent journalist and editor living in Maine. He is one of the co-founders of the reader-supported news website Shadowproof.com and the Beyond Prisons podcast. Previously, Brian was the associate publisher of Firedoglake, an early and influential online forum for left journalism and organizing. There, he worked to connect journalists with movement organizers around the country working on a wide range of issues including fighting foreclosures, drug prohibition, anti war mobilizations, whistleblower defense, and environmental justice. Since around 2014, his primary focus has been to amplify abolitionist movements and thought through media, and to help cultivate and spread an abolitionist ethic among journalists.  Brandon Soderberg is a Baltimore-based reporter who covers dirty cops, harm reduction, direct action, and guns. He is the coauthor of I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad. He is the former editor-in-chief of Baltimore City Paper and is the co-founder of Baltimore Beat, a community-focused nonprofit media outlet. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Intercept, Vice, The Appeal, Filter Magazine, and many other publications. Currently he writes about Baltimore for The Real News.

This is the audio version of a panel discussion hosted on March 24 that explores the importance of physical mail in prison and how the prison industrial complex works to undermine imprisoned people's ability to meaningfully communicate with their loved ones. You can watch video of the panel here: https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/video-why-physical-mail-matters Physical mail is a layered issue, and policies that eliminate physical mail are violent and cruel. They seek to destroy the loving and caring connections that people have. They “pile on” more separation than that which already exists and makes it even harder for people to remain in relationship and community with their support systems. They disproportionately affect poor people. They add another cost onto the already long list of things that prisoners and their loved ones pay for. They expand the surveillance mechanisms of the carceral state in ways that I'm not sure we have begun to grapple with. Letter writing has always been an important form of communication between prisoners and their loved ones. Eliminating physical mail reveals the inhumanity of this system and illustrates that incarceration has NOTHING to do with rehabilitation or preparing people to return to their communities, and EVERYTHING to do with using incarcerated people and their loved ones as revenue streams.   Letters exchanged between prisoners and loved ones offer a counter to the dehumanization that we experience. Letters, cards, drawings, and ephemera serve as proof of life in a system that seeks our erasure and death. These documents are how we build or rebuild relationships, how we share news (good, bad, and mundane), how we learn about the conditions inside, how prisoners are able to stay connected to the children and families that are outside, and how we prevent more harm.  Hosted by the Beyond Prisons Podcast, NYU Prison Education Program and Study and Struggle.  Introduction by Kim Wilson. Kim Wilson is an educator, self-taught artist, and cohost and producer of the Beyond Prisons podcast. Moderated by Charlotte Rosen. Charlotte Rosen is a PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University and a member of Study and Struggle, which organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. Panelists: Monica Cosby. Monica describes herself as a “gramma trying to do liberatory stuff,” subscribing to an abolition feminist mode of thinking, being and moving in the world. Her life and work have been shaped and informed by  the communities to which she belongs, including the community of artists, scholars, moms with whom she was incarcerated, and whose survival was/is an act of resistance against a system that would dispose of them. As an advocate and activist, she has collaborated, organized, and worked with Westside Justice Center, Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women's Network, Unitarian Universalist Prison Ministry of Illinois, Women's Justice Institute, Uptown People's Law Center, and others. Monica is a scholar, thinker, and writer, having essays published or reprinted in TruthOut and In the Long Term (published by Haymarket Books). She also wrote Solitary Confinement is Used to Break People; On Leaving Prison: A Reflection on Entering and Exiting Communities; And, Restorative Revelations by Monica Cosby and Analise Buth–published in the St. Thomas Law Journal.   Lawrence Posey (He/Him). Lawrence is 44 years old and originally from Camden, New Jersey. He currently lives in the Bronx. He is a father of two children who are 18 and 15. He was previously incarcerated. Since his  release, he works as a manager at a company called Reserve Inc which is a covid-19 coalition. He is also a student at New York University studying at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, majoring in Film and Business. He recently started his own publishing and production company called Legacy Works Enterprises. In addition to publishing, Legacy Works Enterprises focuses on youth educational programs and social justice. Lawrence is part of a social justice cohort At the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO Works) where he organizes with the Participant Advocacy Council (PAC for short). The PAC cohort has lobbied with Communities Not Cages (CCA) which has fought to eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing,  and advocated for Second Look Act, the Earn Good Time Act, and the Clean Slate Act. Finally, PAC also is in association with Treatment Not Jail (TNJ), lobbying for mental health programs instead of prison.  Mychal Pagan. Mychal Pagan (BA '24) is a student at NYU, and  is curious about the relationships between perception, memory, and narration. He is fascinated by the process of merging poetry with filmmaking, and the art of social photography with data-driven storytelling. His writing and photography have been featured in NYU publications including The Gallatin Review, Confluence, Fire in the Lake, and Missives. And his short documentary series Afternotes can be viewed at the NYU's Prison Education Program website. Sergio Hyland (He/Him). Sergio recently returned to society after serving nearly 21 years straight. He is an abolitionist, and Editor-in-Chief of THE MOVEMENT Magazine, the official magazine of the Human Rights Coalition in Pennsylvania. He also works for the Abolitionist Law Center. Andre Pierce. Andre is a Black man that spent the last 25 years caged in Connecticut State prisons. He earned a Bachelor's Degree with a concentration in Philosophy. He writes,  “my strenuous efforts took place alongside my fight to maintain my sanity in a soul-crushing carceral institution.” He asserts that his extraordinary growth and development cannot be understood as rehabilitation but instead as Black Liberation. Dre, uses his intimate experience of suffering in prison to fuel his passion for prison abolition. Ellis Maxwell. Ellis Maxwell is an educator and community member in Fort Worth, Texas. They believe in making organic political education available to people of all ages, and seek to work with anyone willing to look at their conditioning and try to move differently. Ellis is the editor of the Beyond Prisons podcast. Maya Schenwar (She/Her). Maya is the editor-in-chief of Truthout. She is the co-author (with Victoria Law) of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better. She is also the co-editor (with Joe Macaré and Alana Yu-Lan Price) of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. Maya is a co-founder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund, and she organizes with the abolitionist collective Love & Protect.  Episode Resources & Notes Watch video of the panel: https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/video-why-physical-mail-matters Learn more about this issue and campaign: https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/say-no-to-eliminating-physical-mail-in-delaware-prisons Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook:@beyondprisonspodcast Instagram:@beyondprisons

A few things can be taken for granted about our penal system. For one, much of how we punish and/or rehabilitate prisoners is based on rather ancient codes. Also, religion has strongly impacted how we think about punishment. In these 2006 episodes my guests & I discuss how we can move away from a system that seems to work only sometimes, to a place of restorative justice that from all accounts, produces better outcomes--that is, less recidivism. Good stuff, Maynard.

Four women with loved ones incarcerated at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, CA join the Beyond Prisons podcast to talk about how prison officials are failing to respond to the pandemic.  Their names are Mary, Dawn, Crystal, and Alice. Nearly a year into this crisis, these women described conditions at CTF that expose a yawning gap between the picture painted in CDCR press releases and the experiences of incarcerated families.  They explain how cold and unaccountable prison officials and politicians have been in response to basic demands for PPE, testing, and quarantining. They underscore how the suffering at CTF reaches far outside the walls and into their homes as they struggle to defend their loved ones while holding down jobs, raising children, showing up for others, and more. They also talk about the power and support they draw from one another as a group, and the importance of building this community during this crisis.  If you haven’t heard our previous episodes on Soledad, it might help for you to go back and listen to those first. We’ve linked to them below. Families are planning a protest for January 16 at 10 AM in Sacramento. For more information, contact Alice at Strongertogether1229@gmail.com. Episode Notes & Resources COVID-19 Dispatch: The Crisis At Soledad (January 2021) https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/covid-19-dispatch-the-crisis-at-soledad COVID-19 Dispatch From California Prison (April 2020) https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/covid-19-dispatch-from-california-prison Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: @beyondprisonspodcast Instagram: @beyondprisons

Brian Sonenstein interviews a woman we’re calling “Alice” to protect her and her family from retaliation from California prison officials.  Alice was on Beyond Prisons in April 2020 to discuss the situation facing people enduring the pandemic while incarcerated at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, California. If you haven’t heard that episode yet, you may want to listen to it first for added context: https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/covid-19-dispatch-from-california-prison In this conversation, Alice tells us about a recent protest held at Soledad and how women have been fighting for months for prison officials to improve health care measures inside the facility, which has one of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in not just the state prison system, but in California.  She describes how corrections officers have refused to wear masks and retaliated against incarcerated people for getting CDCR to mandate them. She talks about how people are struggling to eat without access to the commissary and how unresponsive CDCR has been to family members throughout the pandemic. We also discuss how the public’s attention to COVID-19 in jails and prisons seems to be waning at a time when we’re seeing the highest case counts yet. Families are planning a protest for January 16 at 10 AM in Sacramento. For more information, contact Alice at Strongertogether1229@gmail.com. Episode Notes & Resources COVID-19 Dispatch From California Prison (April 2020) https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/covid-19-dispatch-from-california-prison Shadowproof’s Marvel Cooke Journalism Fellowship https://shadowproof.com/2020/11/17/shadowproof-launches-marvel-cooke-journalism-fellowship/ Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: @beyondprisonspodcast Instagram: @beyondprisons

Garrett Felber joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to discuss Study and Struggle, which he helped launch in 2020 as “a bilingual political education program on abolition and immigrant justice which supports and collaborates with grassroots organizations in Mississippi.” (NOTE: This episode was recorded a few weeks before Felber was wrongfully fired by the University of Mississippi for speaking out against its racist donors and role in perpetuating the carceral state; you can find out more about what happened here.) Felber is a former assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi and the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement and the Carceral State and co-author of The Portable Malcolm X Reader with the late Manning Marable.   He was the lead organizer of the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration conference and Project Director of the Parchman Oral History Project, a collaborative oral history, archival, and documentary storytelling project on incarceration in Mississippi. In 2016, Felber co-founded Liberation Literacy, an abolitionist collective inside and outside Oregon prisons.   Felber is currently a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, where he will be working on his next book project: We Are All Political Prisoners: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre.  Episode Notes & Resources Study And Struggle: https://www.studyandstruggle.com/ Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653822/those-who-know-dont-say/ Follow Garrett on Twitter: https://twitter.com/garrett_felber Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: @beyondprisonspodcast Instagram: @beyondprisons

Vicky Osterweil joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to discuss her new book, “In Defense Of Looting: A Riotous History Of Uncivil Action.” Our wide-ranging conversation includes Vicky’s analysis of the claim that “real” and legitimate protests are nonviolent by nature, while rioting and looting constitute an act of hijacking by malevolent outside forces.  We talk about Black women and armed resistance, and their places within the historical legacy of these tactics, as well as the differences in how these tactics are used by groups that have different relations to power.  The conversation explores how these tactics threaten the perceived invincibility of property relations, we think about how prison riots fit within this framework, and a lot more. Vicky Osterweil is a writer, editor, and agitator based in Philadelphia. Her book, “In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action”, was released in August by Bold Type Books. Follow her on Twitter @Vicky_ACAB Episode Notes & Resources Buy “In Defense Of Looting” from Bold Type Books “I wonder if you fully understand why they’ve kept you so well hidden [...] It’s not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh. Walking amongst us.” — Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: @beyondprisonspodcast Instagram: @beyondprisons

Beyond Prisons welcomes back Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law to discuss their new book, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences Of Popular Reforms.  The book provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking critical analysis of popular reforms to policing and incarceration, such as electronic monitoring, diversion courts, so-called sex worker rescue programs, and a lot more. Importantly, it explores not only how these reforms fail to promote safety, but how they actually increase the size and scope of policing and incarceration. Our wide-ranging conversation touches on how electronic monitoring denies people the ability to do the basic things they need to do to live, and shifts the costs of incarceration away from the government and onto the individual and their family, harming those important relationships in a multitude of ways. We talk about the release of this book at a time of heightened skepticism around reform projects and a growing popular awareness of abolition.  We also discuss why community policing is anti-community, and why it’s important to remember that we don’t need a replacement response for everything for which people are policed and imprisoned; in some cases, it would be better to do nothing instead. This episode is dedicated to Maya’s sister, Keeley Schenwar, who passed away in February. Maya Schenwar is the editor-in-chief of Truthout. She is co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, as well as the author of Locked Down, Locked Out, and the co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? She lives in Chicago with her partner and toddler. You can find Maya’s work at Truthout.org as well, MayaSchenwar.com.  Follow her on Twitter @mayaschenwar and Facebook. Victoria Law is a freelance journalist who focuses on the intersections of incarceration, gender, and resistance. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women and regularly covers prison issues for Truthout and other outlets. Her latest book, Prison By Any Other Name, co-written with Maya Schenwar, critically examines proposed “alternatives” to incarceration and explores creative and far-reaching solutions to truly end mass incarceration.  You can find more of Victoria’s work on her website, VictoriaLaw.net Follow her on Twitter @LVikkiml Visit our website Beyond-Prisons.com for episode notes, resources, and more.  Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well.

Kim Wilson is joined by Dr. Venezia Michalsen for a conversation about her research on women’s experiences with the criminal punishment system on the Beyond Prisons podcast.  Their conversation, which was recorded in February, touches on how women are impacted differently by the system than men and how criminology has focused on studying men’s experiences. They also discuss the ways that women’s survival strategies are criminalized, white carceral feminism and punishment, and much more. Dr. Venezia Michalsen is an American intersectional feminist criminologist whose work focuses on gender and imprisonment and reentry from incarceration.  Venezia received her B.A. in 1998 from Barnard College and her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice (2007) from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She was the Director of Analysis and Client Information Systems (ACIS) at the Women’s Prison Association until she began her career as an academic in the Justice Studies Department at Montclair State University (MSU) in 2008. She is currently an Associate Professor of Justice Studies at MSU. Venezia interrogates the use of incarceration as a response to women’s survival strategies in the face of childhood and adult abuse. She also focuses on women’s experiences of re-entry to the community from prison and jail, and in particular on the role of children in women’s desistance from criminal behavior after incarceration. Her first book, Mothering and Desistance in Re-Entry was published in 2019.  Always an advocate for women who come in contact with the criminal justice system, Venezia’s more recent work has involved fighting for abolitionist policies in her home state of Connecticut. Venezia is the mother of an eight-year-old autistic boy, and her advocacy work for him and other children in special education has led to the formation of Special Education PTA in her town and she is working to increase police training on interactions with disabled people. In her free time, she loves to ride her bicycle, hike at Sleeping Giant State Park, and lift heavy weights. Episode Resources & Notes Mothering and Desistance in Re-Entry, by Venezia Michalsen (Routledge, 2019) “Abolitionist Feminism as Prisons Close: Fighting the Racist and Misogynist Surveillance ‘Child Welfare’ System,” by Venezia Michalsen “The Newest Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration, by Michael Jacobson (NYU Press, 2005) “Motherwork Under the State: The Maternal Labor of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women,” by Susila Gurusami Taylar Nuevelle and Beyond Prison’s conversation with Taylar Nuevelle on Knitting in Prison “Jail will separate 2.3 million mothers from their children this year,” by Prison Policy Worth Rises Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook:@beyondprisonspodcast Instagram:@beyondprisons

Professor, author, and abolitionist scholar Dr. Dylan Rodríguez joins Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein on an episode of the Beyond Prisons podcast.  This is the first part of a two part conversation. In Part 1, Dr. Rodríguez explains his belief that abolition is our obligation, touching on the development of anti-Black algorithms used to keep people in prison, what it means to be vulnerable in the context of doing this work and how vulnerability is the starting point for an abolitionist practice, and the profound impact that Robert Allen’s book Black Awakening in Capitalist America had on shaping Dylan’s own thinking.  We also talk about how academia declares institutional solidarity with white supremacy, and how some academics are the planners and architects of domestic war. Dr. Rodríguez reminds us that terror is not a thing that you can fix with training and he shares some of the conditions he places on conversations about prison reform.  Dylan Rodríguez is President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). He served as the faculty-elected Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate (2016-2020) and a Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He spent the first sixteen years of his career in the Department of Ethnic Studies (serving as Chair from 2009-2016) and joined the Department of Media and Cultural Studies in 2017. Dylan’s thinking, writing, teaching, and scholarly activist labors address the complexity and normalized proliferation of historical regimes and logics of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence in everyday state, cultural, and social formations.  His work raises the question of how insurgent communities of people inhabit oppressive regimes and logics in ways that enable the collective genius of rebellion, survival, abolition, and radical futurity. What forms of shared creativity emerge from conditions of duress, and how do these insurgencies envision—and practice—transformations of power and community?   In addition to co-editing the field-shaping anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016), Dylan is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His next book, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press in Fall 2020 and will be followed in 2021 by White Reconstruction II.  Follow Dylan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dylanrodriguez Support Beyond Prisons Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/

Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein are joined by historian and abolitionist David Stein for an episode of the Beyond Prisons podcast. David penned an excellent article in 2017 with Dan Berger and Mariame Kaba entitled, “What Abolitionists Do." He reflects on this article in this moment of greater awareness of abolition and shares his thoughts and experiences from spending time in abolitionist spaces. David Stein is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA. His book manuscript, Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1929-1986, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press. It describes the political economy of unemployment and efforts to win a federal governmental job guarantee, and how this struggle impacted the ascent of mass incarceration. His research focuses on the interconnection between social movements, public policy, and political economy in post-1865 U.S. history. He has been a member of Critical Resistance since 2006, though his comments in this interview are not on behalf of the organization. Episode Resources "What Abolitionists Do" by Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein David Stein's website: https://davidpstein.wordpress.com/ Follow David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidpStein Support Beyond Prisons Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/

Beyond Prisons host Kim Wilson has a conversation with Dr. Erin Corbett, founder and CEO of Second Chance Educational Alliance, Inc. It's a community-based prison education program in CT. SCEA aims to provide formerly incarcerated men and women with the tools necessary to become fully engaged and contributing citizens. Erin has spent almost two decades in education access in a number of roles. With experience in independent school admission, enrichment programs, and postsecondary financial aid, her commitment to expanding postsecondary opportunities for all populations has served as the foundation of her professional endeavors. Kim and Erin talk about the benefits of post-secondary education for people in prison and the challenges associated with developing a prison education program. They also explore the issue of teaching without access to technology in a world where technology plays such a vital role in our lives, why higher ed in prison attracts people that fetishize prisoners and are invested in the notions of saviorism, and how the teaching authors like James Baldwin are transformative for some students. They conclude the conversation with Erin’s thoughts on what higher ed prison policy needs to focus on, including what questions to ask. Episode Resources Feature in the Swarthmore College Alumni Magazine Blog Post on MSI Unplugged Dr. Corbett on Medium  Dr. Corbett on Twitter: @GrandmaCheesy77 Second Chance Educational Alliance on Twitter: @SCEA_Inc_CT Support Beyond Prisons Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/

Prisons, police and punishment through incarceration. Are they with us forever in the land of the free? Sustained campaigns for change are beginning to pay off. At the community level, it turns out that a whole lot of people and places already make peace without cops. Today, we imagine a world without prisons. It may be closer than we think.Note:  This episode originally aired the summer of 2019.  Guests:-Esteban Kelly, Executive Director, US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. He is also a founder and core trainer with AORTA, a worker co-op whose consulting supports organizations fighting for social justice and a solidarity economy-Kenyon Farrow,  Senior Editor, TheBody.com, and works with  Queers for Economic Justice, Critical Resistance, and FIERCE!-Kerbie Joseph, Community Organizer, ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism) & The Audre Lorde Project Music in the Middle:  “If Everyone Were Blind”  by Victor Simonelli and Glenn Sweety G Toby, from the “Shelter From the Streets Compilation” courtesy of West Side and Stellar Records. In case you missed last week's related episode:  Special-Putting Public Safety in Public Hands: The Newark ModelIn February, Laura went to Newark to report on how the Street Team leverages community relationships to prevent violence, address abuse and transform trauma into power. The episode offers a timely glimpse of what it looks like when more responsibility for public safety is put in public hands.  Support the show and our new series Forward Thinking on Covid-19, and do support!  This shows in made possible by you.  Please support by becoming a Patreon partner today.

Sharing my feelings around why we need to take action with Black Lives Matter. A little background and how we as women can do better. #BlackLivesMatter Everyday.  Ways you can help Donate. Petition. Share,: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/ 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice:  https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234 Ways you can educate yourself: Read -  Just Mercy- Bryan Stevenson James Cone: Malcolm & Martin & America; & The Cross and the Lynching Tree Ta Nahesi Coates- Between the World & Me; & A Case for Reparations Born a Crime- Trevor Noah The New Jim Crow- Michelle Alexander White Fragility- Robin Diangelo How to Be an Anti Racist- Ibram X Kendi The Hate You Give- Angie Thomas Listen - Podcasts 1916: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/podcasts/1619-podcast.html NPR’s Code Switch: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ Beyond Prisons: https://shadowproof.com/beyond-prisons/ Ear Hustle: https://www.earhustlesq.com/ The #GroundingsProject: https://groundings.simplecast.com/ Watch - 13th - on Netflix The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson - on Netflix Just Mercy - on Amazon Prime Explained: The Racial Wealth Gap - on Netflix When They See Us - on Netflix Selma - on Amazon Prime If Beale Street Could Talk - on Amazon Prime To my non-white friends, my family, my clients and neighbors: I see you and I hear you. I want to be more actively engaged, but I know I still have so many blind spots, but will continue to grow. You matter, your lives MATTER.   Connect with Jordan: https://www.instagram.com/jgofitlife Apply to be a part of my signature 12-week program, Body Confident Blueprint: https://www.jgofit360.com/body-confident-blueprint Join my FREE Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/JGoFitFam/

Donna Murch and Kay Whitlock join Beyond Prisons to think through the question “how do we get through this?” Donna posed this question on social media in April as the COVID-19 pandemic peaked and motivated this conversation. We begin by thinking through who the “we” is in that question, and then we attempt to define what we mean by “getting through this." Donna points out that racial capitalism and the unraveling of already weak systems is making it clear who the “we” is. Kim shares how this moment has for me triggered an eerie feeling of calmness that is a trauma response to other experiences in my life. And Kay shares how this moment has allowed her to stop pretending and to think about how we can use our collective energy in this moment.  We talk about the importance of imagination at this moment and the need to share the testimony of people directly impacted by this crisis. Finally, we discuss the rise of authoritarianism and how media reports of COVID-19 are filtered through racial-ethnonational lens. We end our conversation with some thoughts on mutual aid and how this crisis has the potential for teaching us greater responsibility for each other.  (Note: this conversation was recorded in April). Kay Whitlock, a longtime activist and organizer in progressive social justice movements, lives in Missoula, Montana. She writes frequently on issues of structural violence in U.S. society. She is co-author of Queer (in)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness & Justice in American Culture and Politics.  She is currently working with sociologist Nancy Heitzeg on a forthcoming book: Prison Break: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform.   Professor Donna Murch’s teaching and research specializations are historical studies of mass incarceration/war on drugs, Black Power and Civil Rights, California, social movements, and postwar U.S. cities. She is currently completing a new trade press book entitled Crack in Los Angeles: Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs, which explores the militarization of law enforcement, the social history of drug consumption and sale, and the political economy of mass incarceration in late twentieth-century California. In October 2010, Murch published the award-winning monograph Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California with the University of North Carolina Press, which won the Phillis Wheatley prize in December 2011. She has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, OAH Magazine of History, Black Scholar, Souls, Perspectives, New Politics, and Jacobin. Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Contact us at beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Contact us at beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter I Facebook I Instagram

Beyond Prisons hosts Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson sit down with Anthony Williams to talk about co-founding the hashtag "#MasculinitySoFragile," leveraging social capital online, how their political consciousness evolved over time, and overcoming isolation through reading. We recorded this episode in early March just as the pandemic was gaining steam. The subsequent weeks have forced us all to contend with a new reality that intensifies our vulnerability and underscores the need for organizing and collective liberation. Anthony talks about cultivating joy as we live with trauma, and tells us why we should all read "Pleasure Activism" by Adrianne Maree Brown.  Anthony James Williams is a Black queer non-binary writer, sociology PhD student, and facilitator. Online, they’re responsible for co-creating and popularizing the hashtags #MasculinitySoFragile and #BlackWomenDidThat. Offline, their prior Black student organizing led the University of California system to divest $25 million from private prisons in 2016. Find them on Twitter @anthoknees or antjwilliams.com.  Episode Resources The painful & personal process of Black Consciousness Sandra Bland: Beware the day they change their mind! The Year in Creating Black Joy social justice work is exhausting: ableism, racism, and joy Credits Created and hosted by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Edited by Ellis Maxwell Website & volunteers managed by Victoria Nam Theme music by Jared Ware Support Beyond Prisons Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/

Author, educator, and activist Johanna Fernández joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to discuss a recent incident in which a Pennsylvania corrections officer perpetrated a hoax on supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal by claiming he had been hospitalized for COVID-19. The conversation extends beyond this incident to discuss American attitudes about violence and safety, the weaponization of health and concern against prisoners, and more. Johanna Fernández is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC Press, February 2020), a history of the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. She teaches 20th Century US history and the history of social movements in the Department of History at Baruch College (CUNY).  Dr. Fernández’s recent research and litigation has unearthed an arsenal of primary documents now available to scholars and members of the public. Her Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD, led to the recovery of the "lost" Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X. She is the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights, 2015). With Mumia Abu-Jamal she co-edited a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy, titled The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor (Routledge, 2014).   Among others, her awards include the Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa, which took her to Jordan, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship of the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.  Professor Fernández is the writer and producer of the film, Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (BigNoise Films, 2010).  She directed and co-curated, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York an exhibition in three NYC museums cited by the New York Times as one of the year’s Top 10, Best In Art.  Her mainstream writings have been published internationally, from Al Jazeera to the Huffington Post. She has appeared in a diverse range of print, radio, online and televised media including NPR, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Democracy Now!. Fernández is the recipient of a B.A. in Literature and American Civilization from Brown University and a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Columbia University. Episode Resources Teach In: US Empire v. Political Prisoners (April 24, 2020 from 6-9pm East) Buy Dr. Fernández's book, "The Young Lords: A Radical History" Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

In this special Beyond Prisons dispatch, Haverford College student and activist Ellis Maxwell shares a conversation they had with their friend Charles Boyd, who is incarcerated at SCI-Phoenix in Pennsylvania. Maxwell is the co-head of Rethink Incarceration, a group that advocates for the immediate abolition of all prisons. They work toward abolition in Pennsylvania in solidarity with incarcerated people and other organizations. Maxwell and Boyd met through Rethink Incarceration. Boyd is incarcerated on a death-by-incarceration sentence and has been in prison for over thirty years. During that time, Boyd has worked on projects including the Alternatives to Violence Project, Right to Redemption, and Let’s Circle Up. Let’s Circle Up was founded by men incarcerated at Graterford - which is now Phoenix - in 2007, and “seeks to build relationships, community, and leaders through experiential, participatory, and collaborative restorative justice education.”  Maxwell and Boyd's conversation was recorded on March 31, 2020. Since then, the prison has been locked down following the first positive test inside. The administration did not inform prisoners until day fifteen of the quarantine. In early April, a prisoner died from symptoms of COVID-19, which was not announced on the news until Monday, April 13. The administration didn’t - and still to this point has not - announced this death to other prisoners. They only found out through outside news broadcasts. As of this recording, one unit at SCI-Phoenix is completely quarantined with no present access to phones. The majority of confirmed cases have come from this one unit, so the entire prison is locked down with less than an hour of time for prisoners to be outside of their cells. In the conversation, Boyd emphasizes the inconsistency and total lack of transparency from the Department of Corrections. He says that “in this crisis who you are, what you do, and how well you deny involvement or outright lie, determines who gets a pass and who doesn’t.” “What alarms me is that I feel more cut off from society today than I have since I’ve been incarcerated,” Boyd said. If you want to get in touch with Maxwell, you can email them at ellis.maxwell@gmail.com. For more information on Let’s Circle Up, visit letscircleup.org. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

On April 4, 2020 Jose Diaz a masters student in NYU’s social and cultural analysis program and student services coordinator for the NYU prison education program was released from Rikers Island after being put there on a technicality. It was through an epic effort lead by the director of NYU’s prison education program Dr. Kaitlin Noss worked to bring together a number of organizations who joined in the effort to get Jose Diaz released.  Jose was incarcerated at Rikers on the same day NYC’s Mayor De Blasio publicly stated there would be no more people sent to Rikers. Rikers Island has long been under scrutiny and calls from the public for its shuttering. Rikers is also infamous for being a warehouse for black and brown folk who are there in one of the US’s most notorious prisons because they are unable to pay their bond. Join myself, Drs. Kaitlin Noss and Zoe Hammer, along with Jose Diaz for a far ranging conversation about the conditions inside Rikers Island, the far reaching implications of quarantine for Black and Brown communities and what Latino Studies brings the table in terms of understanding and making sense of the era of Covid19.   For another excellent discussion from Jose Diaz check out this podcast by the Beyond-Prisons.com crew. https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/released-from-rikers-island-nyu-student-speaks-out-about-covid-19

Beyond Prisons hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein walk through our guide on how to support incarcerated people and their loved ones during the Coronavirus Crisis. You can check it out along with some demands we put together, mutual aid resources, and more on our new website at beyond-prisons.com/covid19. Many, many thanks to everyone who worked with us to pull this together and who have contacted us to volunteer. We’re sincerely grateful. Please share this guide with your friends, your family, on social media, wherever you can, if you find it helpful. We want to get it into the hands of as many people as it can help, and we will continue to update it in the coming days and weeks so please check back.  Additionally, if you have any regional or facility-specific suggestions for people supporting their loved ones on the inside, please submit them using our form. We’re trying to pool information that is helpful to everyone while having specific locally relevant suggestions as well. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

Beyond Prisons podcast host Kim Wilson sits down with Amani Sawari of the Right2Vote campaign to talk about her work on a nationwide effort that grew out of the 2018 prison strike demand to extend voting rights for all justice-involved people. Amani and Kim talk about what it was like for her to teach poetry inside a youth prison and she shares a couple of poems written by her former students. Amani Sawari is a writer, founder of the site sawarimi.org, coordinator for the Right2Vote Campaign and a 2019 Civil Rights Fellow with the Roddenberry Foundation. She graduated from the University of Washington in 2016 with a Bachelor’s degree in Media Communication Studies and Law, and Economics & Public Policy. Her visionary publications aid in distributing messages and building community among participants in the prison resistance movement on both sides of the wall. In the aftermath of the Lee County Massacre that occurred in South Carolina’s Department of Corrections, Sawari was selected by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak to be their spokesperson for their 2018 National Prison Strike. Her coordination of over 400 endorsing businesses, groups and organizations led to the successful participation of incarcerated activists in 17 states and 3 regions abroad including, Palestinians held captive in Israeli Prisons, Leipzig Prison in Greece and at Burnside Prison in Nova Scotia, Canada.  In addition to coordinating Right2Vote, Amani is organizing the Statewide campaign to end Truth-in-Sentencing laws and bring back Good Time in Michigan. Today Sawari’s monthly Right2Vote Report is mailed to hundreds of prisoners in 27 states across the country.  Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware Amani read the following poems by her former students on the episode:   CHANGING WAYS No New Year’s resolution for me No crying decree No promises, just average changes Less time screwing around More time helping my parents in need Less time skipping school More time going to school Not so many fake friends A few more real friends Not so many regrets A few more successes Less running away from reality More facing reality Less dreaming More accomplishments Change after all…is good Change after all Is all I know   Dedicated to my mom   DAILY THINGS I go to bed every night I see a couple bright lights I hear a couple sounds And they sound like gun shots I smell hot Cheetos Eating them in my bed Sleeping in a king size bed Like rolling hills underneath me Touching my heart with fear Thinking that somebody’s gonna come for me Kick down my door Come in my house And hit me But I hit him back And had no fear.   LIFE OF A YOUNG MEXICAN Just a young child Living life wild Rarely had a father figure So I just started busting triggers I was a good boy Back in elementary Who woulda thought I’d get to see the penitentiary Squares at my school never really liked me I felt misplaced I just wanted to be happy I told my mother Let’s go back to Mexico She said “sorry mi’jo” You just got to let it go I said “Fuck it” And went to Denny middle school Everything was different I started acting like a fool Met some crazy vatos back in 7th grade That was when my life really freaking changed I started kicking it with all the fucking “criminales” We would be posted like a herd of “animales” I started sportin’ that blue I started reppin’ the “sur” I use to think it was about hanging and smoking dope Then I realized that this gang life ain’t no joke Got beat up a couple times Sniffed a couple lines Sold a couple dimes

Abolitionist and journalist Jared Ware joins the Beyond Prisons podcast for a conversation on deteriorating abusive conditions within South Carolina prisons. Jared gives us an update on recent organizing efforts by prisoners in South Carolina and their comrades on the outside, who delivered a demand letter to UN offices in the United States, Carribean, and United Kingdom last month. They argue the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) is violating international standards for confinement known as The Mandela Standards.  We discuss the last several years of prisoner-led organizing to call attention to horrendous abuses. This includes intense restrictions on prisoners in general population within higher-security prisons, such as metal plates placed on windows, meal slots on the doors, heavy limitations on movement, and little-to-no programming or recreation.  We also touch on the disgusting, absurd games and propaganda wars SCDC engages in, including collaborations with nonprofits that serve to whitewash the department of corrections conduct and the conditions in which they force people to live. Resources & Additional Reading South Carolina Prisoners Call For UN Intervention As Abusive Conditions Worsen by Jared Ware South Carolina Prisoner Demand Letter To The United Nations South Carolina Prisoners Appeal to the UN for Relief From Torturous Conditions by Kelly Hayes 'No Other Path to Redress': South Carolina Prisoners Appeal to UN After State and Federal Officials Ignore Pleas for Livable Conditions by Eoin Higgins Interview: South Carolina Prisoners Challenge Narrative Around Violence At Lee Correctional Institution by Jared Ware Check out Jared Ware's podcast with Josh Briond, Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Follow Jay and MAKC on Twitter Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

In a followup to the last episode, "Stop Hugging Cops," Beyond Prisons hosts Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson share some resources and discuss alternatives to calling the police. We talk about the chain reaction that is created by bringing the police to a community or into an individual’s life, and we suggest ways to scrutinize the impulse to call the police. Brian also calls on White people to consider what it means for them to call the police on Black and Brown people and offers some thoughts for how white people can do better in situations that generally don’t require intervention. Kim also shares some of what she has learned from transformative justice work and what communities can do to address harm without state intervention. This episode is chock full of insights, ideas, suggestions, and lessons, and it is by no means a comprehensive account of alternatives to calling the police, but it does provide a place to begin. Resources & Additional Reading "Chain Reaction: Alternatives To Calling Police" by Project NIA "Abolition Of Policing Workshop" by Critical Resistance "Alternatives To Police" by Rose City Cop Watch "12 Things To Do Instead Of Calling The Cops" by the May Day Collective and Washtenaw Solidarity & Defense "What To Do Instead Of Calling The Police" by Aaron Rose Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

In this episode of the Beyond Prisons podcast, hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein discuss a video published by Critical Resistance that features Professor Dylan Rodriguez talking about policing and police practice. We encourage you to spend a few minutes watching the video before listening to this episode. We chose this video because Professor Rodriguez helps us to interrogate the way that we think about the police. He makes the case for why "policing" is a more accurate term than "police brutality" and urges us to think about why some people need to demonstrate their humanity by hugging cops. Brian and Kim use the points by Professor Rodriguez to further discuss what it means when abolitionists and other activists are willing to make exceptions for some people to go to prison, and what kinds of conversations we need to have to shift peoples' consciousness about punishment. We push back against the idea that prison and other legal punishments are forms of accountability and lay the groundwork for other upcoming episodes on this topic. Resources & Additional Reading [Video] Breaking Down The Prison Industrial Complex with Professor Dylan Rodriguez: "It's Not Police Brutality" Critical Resistance - Breaking Down The Prison Industrial Complex Video Series Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

Beyond Prisons is back from summer break with a special double episode with Brooke Terpstra, Oaklander forever, movement veteran, and worker who organized with the Incarcerated Workers Organizer Committee (IWOC). Brooke is an organizer with the Oakland chapter of IWOC and was a member of the IWOC national media committee for the 2018 prison strike. In the first hour of this episode, Brooke walks us through incidents of prison-orchestrated violence in California, known as "Gladiator Fights." He shares the history and backstory of why California prisons are organizing these fights, dismantles the corrections department's spin on these incidents, and details the experiences of prisoners and their loved ones who are fighting for survival and to end the practice. In the second hour, Kim and Brian debrief after their conversation with Brooke. They discuss their reactions and experiences reporting on these fights and the trauma of being in proximity to the multifaceted violence of incarceration. Follow IWOC on Twitter: @IWW_IWOC IWOC Website Resources & Additional Reading The Agreement To End Hostilities by the Pelican Bay State Prison-SHU Short Corridor Hunger Strike Representatives. NOTHING NEW: CDCr Fuels and Socially Engineers Violence between Prisoners By Mutope Duguma How CDCr Undermines Peace: An Essay on Gladiator Fights by IWOC Oakland Following Hunger Strike, Corcoran Prisoners Say Negotiations With Warden Have Fallen Apart by Brian Sonenstein Corcoran Prisoners Describe Life Under Lockdown by Brian Sonenstein California Prisoners Say Videos Show ‘Gladiator Fights’ At Soledad State Prison by Brian Sonenstein More Reports Of ‘Gladiator Fights’ As California Prison Officials Tear Up Cells To Find Recording Device by Brian Sonenstein Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

Prisons, police and punishment through incarceration. Are they with us forever in the land of the free? Sustained campaigns for change are beginning to pay off. At the community level, it turns out that a whole lot of people and places already make peace without cops. Today, we imagine a world without prisons. It may be closer than we think. Music Featured: “If Everyone Were Blind” by Victor Simonelli and Glenn Sweety G Toby, from the “Shelter From the Streets Compilation” courtesy of West Side and Stellar Records. Guests: Esteban Kelly, Executive Director, US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and a founder and core trainer with AORTA; Kenyon Farrow, Senior Editor, TheBody.com, and works with Queers for Economic Justice, Critical Resistance, and FIERCE!; and Kerbie Joseph, Community Organizer, ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism) & The Audre Lorde Project. Become a Patron at Patreon. That's also where you'll find research materials related to this episode along with links and more on our guests.

CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL VIOLENCE, CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE Sarah K. Tyson joins Beyond Prisons for a conversation about her work as a philosopher, anti-violence advocate, and prison educator. We explore the contradiction between anti-violence work and its reliance on the criminal punishment system, what it's like to do philosophy in prison, the importance of building relationships with people inside, and so much more.  Sarah Tyson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her research focuses on questions of authority, history, and exclusion with a particular interest in voices that have been marginalized in the history of thinking. She has published essays in: Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration; Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism; Feminist Philosophy Quarterly; Hypatia; Metaphilosophy; and Radical Philosophy Review. She also edited with Joshua Hall, Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration. She recently published Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better, which focuses on women in the history of philosophy and argues for engagement with thinkers not typically considered philosophers, including Sojourner Truth.  Resources Feminism and the Carceral State: Gender-Responsive Justice, Community Accountability, and the Epistemology of Antiviolence. (Brady T. Heiner and Sarah K. Tyson, 2017) Experiments in Responsibility: Pocket Parks, Radical Anti-Violence Work, and the Social Ontology of Safety (Sarah K. Tyson, 2014) Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

On this episode, Anoa is joined by Brian Sonenstein of Shadowproof and the Beyond Prisons podcast. Brian and Anoa discuss Joe Biden's rollout and the calls for "context" around his support for the 1994 Crime Bill. Anoa and Brian parse through the calls for context, providing actual context to the discussion. There is a racist subtext to the conversation. Positioning the conversation as an attack or undermining the effort underway prioritizes the feelings and needs of someone who spent his career supporting and advocating for some of the most draconian laws of the modern political era. Despite all the praise and supposedly "wokeness" achieved after 13th, too many liberals are willing to cast aside real opportunities for progress to slide back. There are several good articles that lay out the issues with Biden's criminal justice record. This doesn't even begin to address his issues across multiple other areas. Accountability and Justice is critical to many communities and that should not be set aside because a wealthy white man who is politically connected decides to run for president a fourth time. More reading: Blacks Relent on Crime Bill, But Not Without Bitterness Experts Doubt Effectiveness Of Crime Bill Joe Biden's Role in '90s Crime Law Could Haunt Any Presidential Bid Don't Run, Uncle Joe

Maya Schenwar returns to Beyond Prisons to discuss voting rights, the current political landscape, and her forthcoming book. Maya is the Editor-in-Chief of Truthout. She is also the author of "Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better" and the co-editor of the Truthout anthology "Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States." She has written about the prison-industrial complex for Truthout, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Salon, Ms. Magazine, and others. Maya lives in Chicago and organizes with the abolitionist collective Love & Protect. She is the co-author of an upcoming book with Victoria Law, tentatively titled, "Your Home Is Your Prison," which they hope to release next spring. Follow Maya on Twitter @MayaSchenwar Additional Reading: Allowing People in Prison to Vote Shouldn’t Be Controversial by Maya Schenwar The Shameful Moralizing On Prisoner Voting Rights by Brian Sonenstein Thoughts On Hand-Wringing Over Prisoner Voting Rights by Kim Wilson Florida’s Amendment 4 Pushes Back On Tradition Of Social Death For People With Convictions by Kim Wilson Voting Rights Act of 1965 Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

Rachel Herzing joins Beyond Prisons for a conversation on political education, transformation, and more. Rachel is the co-director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left, progressive social movements, the working class and people of color. She has been an organizer, activist, and advocate fighting the violence of policing and imprisonment for over 20 years. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex. She was also the director of research and training at Creative Interventions a community resource developing interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services. Learn more about the Center for Political Education at http://politicaleducation.org/ Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Hosts: Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein Music: Jared Ware

Taylar Nuevelle joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to talk about her experiences knitting while incarcerated. In particular, we talk about her love of knitting, the space it created for her in prison, as well as how it was used to punish her. Ms. Nuevelle is a writer and advocate for justice-involved women. In 2017 she created a writing program at the Central Treatment Facility (CTF), the women’s jail in DC, “Sharing Our Stories to Reclaim Our Lives”. She is credited for creating the concept of the “Trauma-to-Prison Pipeline” for women and girls.  While incarcerated at the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA/CTF) D.C. and in the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 2010 to 2015, Ms. Nuevelle volunteered by providing legal advocacy for fellow incarcerated women. Ms. Nuevelle’s writings have appeared in The Washington Post, Talk Poverty, The Nation, the Vera Institute for Justice Blog and Ms. Magazine online. Ms. Nuevelle holds a B.A. in Literature.   You can learn more about her work via Facebook at whospeaksforme. If you’d like to read more of her writings consider becoming a supporter on patreon.com/taylar where she will begin to publish monthly newsletters for patrons only. Visit Taylar's blog at https://taylarnuevelle.wordpress.com/ Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music by Jared Ware

Connie Grier joins Beyond Prisons to discuss a new policy in Pennsylvania prisons targeting materials brought in by educators, religious practitioners, recreational and therapeutic facilitators, and others. Connie is a mother of twin sons, a career educator, a mentor, and a social justice advocate. She is also the founder of The RESPECT Alliance, an organization which has, as one of its core tenets, the addressing of justice issues that impact marginalized populations both pre and post-incarceration. As an educator with 28 years of experience within the K-16 realm, Connie has an intimate relationship with the lack of advocacy and harsh discipline policies that lead to the school-to-prison pipeline and is determined to mitigate and ultimately, dismantle said pipeline, one student at a time. Connie is an Inside-Out trained instructor and has taught courses inside of correctional facilities in Philadelphia and Chester. She is actively engaged in several social justice and criminal justice initiatives focused specifically on women, youth, and families, and has been a Graterford Think Tank Member for the past four years. She specializes in supporting marginalized youth and adults most impacted by the system academically and utilizes interactive workshops, speaking engagements, and mentorship to support in the areas of family reunification and advocacy. View the new PA DOC memo [PDF]. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music by Jared Ware

Nabil Hassein joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to give an update on the campaign to close Rikers Island and the fight to oppose new jail construction in New York City. Nabil is a technologist, organizer and educator based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He has worked professionally as a software developer and a teacher in both public schools and private settings. Nabil also works with grassroots police and prison abolitionist campaigns in NYC including Shut Down Rikers, Abolition Square and No New Jails NYC. Nabil talks about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to spend tens of billions of dollars on new jails at a time when money is desperately needed for housing, education, health care, food, and more. He talks about what the plan for new so-called “modern” jails will and won’t do about gentrification and broken windows policing. And Nabil gives an idea of what it’s like inside the various community meetings held by the city to promote the new jails and (allegedly) hear input from the public. Follow the No New Jails NYC campaign on Twitter: @nonewjails_nyc No New Jails NYC is holding its first public event on Sunday, December 2nd at the People's Forum in midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/

Kim Wilson interviews formerly incarcerated activist Kempis "Ghani" Songster in part one of Beyond Prisons episode 29. In 1987, at the age of 15, Ghani was imprisoned for homicide.  Despite his age, he was certified as an adult, convicted of first degree murder, and given a mandatory life sentence without parole, or what is increasingly known today as death by incarceration. Thus, he became one of America’s many juvenile lifers/condemned children. While in prison, he developed and facilitated programs to help people behind the  walls with him, as well as programs to help people on the outside.  He also co-founded outside organizations such as The Redemption Project and Ubuntu Philadelphia, and is a founding member of Right To Redemption, which helped launch Philadelphia’s Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI). After 30 years of incarceration, Ghani was released from prison at the age of 45.  Since his release, he has joined the staff at the Amistad Law Project, a grassroots abolitionist law collective working for the release of others, as they fight to end the sentencing of human beings to life without parole/death by incarceration and to abolish prison industrial complex.  He has also joined the membership of Ecosocialist Horizons.  Ghani continues to organize actively for healing justice and a more livable planet. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/

Jared Ware joins episode 28 of Beyond Prisons to discuss this year's prison strike. Recorded in the midst of the strike on August 30, co-hosts Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson have a conversation with Ware about the strike's progress, as well as the challenges of organizing and why the press is woefully unprepared to report on the action. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/

This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by prisoners’ rights advocate Jared Ware. Jared is an activist, writer, producer of the prison abolitionist podcast Beyond Prisons, and co-host and co-producer of the anti-capitalist podcast Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Ware is part of the press team for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak publicizing the ongoing nationwide prison strike. Jared gives us necessary background on the strike, which began on August 21st, the 47th anniversary of the death of Black Panther prison organizer George Jackson, and is set to continue until September 9th, the 47th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion. Jared describes the important role that jailhouse lawyers are playing in organizing strike actions, and how authorities at prisons around the country are trying to suppress all participation in what is likely the largest prison strike in US history. Jared explains the different forms of resistance manifesting within prisons as part of this strike—from work stoppages and commissary boycotts to sit-ins and hunger strikes—and how detained immigrants impacted by America’s fascist border policies are participating in the strike as well. Jared discusses his work with the press team for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and the importance of amplifying the voices of those incarcerated. We learn why prisoners themselves are drawing connections between incarceration and slavery, and how the strike is part of a broader, longer-term effort to undermine and ultimately abolish the prison system. We also discuss the importance of shows of solidarity from non-incarcerated people, and talk about ways people can get involved. Follow Jared on Twitter @jaybeware. A transcript for this episode will be provided upon request. Please send an email to deleteuracct @ gmail to get a copy sent to you when it is completed. If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon page for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!

Following up on last week's episode about Angela Davis's book "Are Prisons Obsolete?" we decided to talk to Jared Ware, a freelance journalist and prison abolitionist covering the prison strike going on right now. Jared is also co-host of the podcast Millennials Are Killing Capitalism (there's a great episode there on the prison strike as well) and a producer for the Beyond Prisons podcast. You can follow him @jaybeware on twitter. For more information and updates on the strike, visit https://incarceratedworkers.org/campaigns/prison-strike-2018. Music by Amaryah Armstrong and theillalogicalspoon★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Josh interviews Jared "Jay" Ware about prison abolitionism. Kathy and I finished our most recent Orange Is the New Black recap (Season 6 Episode 3). Jared "Jay" Ware is a prison abolitionist, freelance writer, co-host of the podcast Millennials Are Killing Capitalism and producer of the Beyond Prisons podcast. His work has been published with Shadowproof.com, The New Inquiry, In These Times, SF Bay View, Worker's World, Off Tha Record, and Hampton Institute. Students for a Democratic Society had a storied and important history in American political activism. Hopefully, most people remember the police and state violence that resulted in the deaths of Mike Brown, Tamie Rice, Eric Garner, and Sandra Brown as well as the situation in Ferguson Missouri. We have talked about Michelle Alexanders book "The New Jim Crow" many times before on this podcast. Angela Y Davis book "Are Prisons Obsolete" is a relatively quick read but very fundamental to understanding prison abolition. The site Critical Resistance is a very good starting place for investigating stories about abolition and resistance to statist power. It is also the home to "The Abolitionist" newspaper. I suspect Jay was referring to Elizabeth Hinton's book "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime" A good place to start on the thinking of Michelle Foucault is in his book "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison." Bryan Burrough's book "Days of Rage" discusses revolutionary violent groups in the United States. My favorite book about John Brown is "Patriotic Treason" by Evan Carton. W.E.B Dubois scathing critique of popular notions of slavery and of reconstruction was called "Black Reconstruction in America" Jay's interview with prisoners after the Lee Correctional Riot provides an important counter-narrative to the "official story" of what happened in South Carolina a few months ago. It is important to read the full list of demands around the August 21st Strike. We have covered Restorative Justice many times on the podcast, this is the first time we have talked about Transformative Justice. This is a piece from Mariame Kaba from her site Prison Culture. Some of the people Jay shouted out were: Jailhouse Lawyers Speak Kinetic Justice (Free Alabama Movement) Mariame Kaba Frantz Fanon Jackie Wang's book "Carceral Capitalism" I will try and fill in the ones I am missing over time. The DOJ Letter I was referring to was in response to the Federal First Step Act. Elizabeth Warren has been getting blasted by police, prosecutors, and correctional officers for her statement that our criminal justice system is racist (I suspect most of this is political posturing since what she said is factually correct). If you want to know more about why what she said was factually correct, you can listen to all of the early episodes of this podcast or read this overview of the evidence. The National Review article that mentions John Pfaff as an answer to Elizabeth Warren's claim can be found here. John Pfaff's response can be found in this Twitter thread. Tom Cotton's argument about Mass Incarceration was a real thing (can't make this stuff up).

Activist and paralegal Sean Damon joins episode 27 of Beyond Prisons. Sean is a legal worker and organizer with twenty years of experience in union, community and social movement organizing. He works for Amistad Law Project, a West Philadelphia-based public interest law center focused on the human rights of incarcerated people. He is also a co-founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration. Follow Sean on Twitter: @seanwestwispy Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/

Panagioti Tsolkas, an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, joins the Beyond Prisons podcast for a discussion of prison ecology and the intersection between the criminal legal system and the environment. We talk about how his organization came into existence and he gives us some examples of issues they're working on in Florida (where they're based) and around the country, like access potable water, excessive heat and cold, mold and mildew, sewage problems, and toxic land use. This includes organizing prisoners in opposition to the construction of a 10,000 acre phosphate mine near their facility. Panagioti shares his experiences engaging incarcerated people on these subjects and tells us how this organizing has been received. We also talk about how this organizing has brought environmental organizers closer to prison issues, as well as the Fight Toxic Prisons 3rd annual convergence taking place in Pittsburgh, June 8-11—an event which will include the voices of people on the inside and outside. Follow the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons on Twitter @FightXPrisons and visit their website at https://fighttoxicprisons.wordpress.com/. Visit their Facebook event page for more information on the national convergence. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Bret Grote, legal director for the Abolitionist Law Center, joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to tell us about his organization's work and what an abolitionist approach looks like for lawyers. The conversation touches on the impact the Abolitionist Law Center has had in Pennsylvania and the work it's done on solitary confinement, juvenile life without parole, health care, and more. We talk about political and politicized prisoners and the dangerous but common practice of withholding medicine and treatment in prisons. Bret also shares his thoughts on the election of Larry Krasner as Philadelphia's new district attorney and the movement to elect "progressive prosecutors." Bret Grote is the Legal Director of Abolitionist Law Center, and a licensed attorney in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He is a 2013 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and was recognized as the Distinguished Public Interest Scholar for his graduating class. He was the Isabel and Alger Hiss Racial Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2012. In addition to his work at Abolitionist Law Center, Bret has been a volunteer investigator, organizer, and researcher with HRC since 2007. Follow the Abolitionist Law Center on Twitter @AbolitionistLC and visit their website at www.abolitionistlawcenter.org for more on their work and how you can support them. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Victoria Law returns to the Beyond Prisons podcast to talk about prison publications and curating art and writing by incarcerated people. Victoria tells us about the zine she's organized for nearly 16 years, Tenacious, which is a DIY publication featuring the work of incarcerated women from around the country. She talks about her introduction to zines, her experiences curating content from incarcerated people, and how she's had to deal with obstacles to communication in putting the zine together. We discuss how zines like Tenacious help incarcerated women overcome their isolation and learn how to cope with their imprisonment by creating a platform for sharing knowledge. We talk about the topics women write about and how it can be a space for escape and liberation. We also talk about why this zine, in particular, is important because of the way most free literature projects predominantly serve men. Victoria tells us about her learning process, the work that goes into making the publication, and her efforts to fund it, as well as the reasons why these publications are meaningful opportunities for incarcerated people. Victoria Law is a freelance journalist. She is a co-founder of Books Through Bars--NYC, which sends free books to incarcerated people nationwide and the editor of Tenacious, a zine of art & writings by women in prison. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women and the co-author of the upcoming Your Home is Your Prison, which explores how proposed “alternatives” to incarceration expand the carceral system. You can follow her on twitter at @LVikkiml and see more of her work at victorialaw.net. For more history about Tenacious, see: http://www.grassrootsfeminism.net/cms/node/117 To buy current and past issues on-line, go to: http://tenaciouszine.storenvy.com/ Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

In a special two-part episode of Beyond Prisons, we discuss communicating with incarcerated people and interview pen pal and activist Ciara Kay. Ciara Kay joins us in Part 2 to tell us about how she got involved with pen palling and her experience corresponding and organizing with Michael Young, who is incarcerated in Louisiana. She talks about their friendship over the past few years, as well as their work and the challenges they've faced countering retaliation Michael has experienced for demanding mental health care. We also discuss the work that goes into organizing prison solidarity campaigns and what it's like to organize when there's little-to-no existing public attention on your cause. Ciara explains how she and other members of her community organize regular letter writing meet-ups, and how different pen pal friendships can be from person to person—from those who want to talk about what they're dealing with every day to those who see it as an escape and a place to talk about anything but prison. Ciara Kay is an aspiring scholar of the amerikan carceral regime, with a particular interest in sexuality and gender as intrinsic to racial formation within the context of amerikan capitalism. She is a full-time retail worker and candidate member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Ciara organizes a letter-writing group, "Northampton Black & Pink Pen Pals," a space for folks to build relationships with incarcerated LGBTQ+ individuals who are seeking pen pals on the outside. Recently, this group's work has developed to include a letter-writing campaign on behalf of Michael Young, Ciara's pen pal of two years. Ciara and Mike have collaboratively written pamphlets detailing Mike's abuse and his struggle for justice at Rayburn Correctional Center in Angie, Louisiana. In February of 2018 they launched a letter-writing campaign directed at Attorney General Jeff Landry of Louisiana and Warden Robert Tanner of Rayburn Correctional Center demanding an end to Michael's abuse in prison. The two are continuing to escalate their campaign and are actively seeking support from other groups around the country. For more information, visit http://facebook.com/nohoblackandpink and http://supportmikeyoung.wordpress.com. Resources Black & Pink Pen Pal Program The Radical Power of a Prison Pen Pal Captive Genders Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

In a special two-part episode of Beyond Prisons, we discuss communicating with incarcerated people and interview pen pal and activist Ciara Kay. In Part 1, we talk about forming relationships with people on the inside through email, phone, or snail mail and the obstacles you face attempting each. We also discuss how pen palling, building relationships, and maintaining communication with people on the inside is an abolitionist practice. Finally, we cover the importance of earning each others' trust and how to approach (and how not to approach) becoming someone's pen pal. Resources Black & Pink Pen Pal Program The Radical Power of a Prison Pen Pal Captive Genders Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Today is the 150th anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois’s birth. To mark this occasion, I interviewed Du Bois scholar, Dr. Tony Monteiro. In this conversation, Dr. Monteiro talks about the year long project he and his colleagues launched in Philadelphia including a weekly radio show on WURD, where works of Du Bois are read. As part of The Year of Du Bois, Dr. Monteiro has helped form Du Bois reading groups throughout the city at historically Black churches such as Mother Bethel AME Church and The Church of the Advocate—to name just two. The significance of Du Bois in our times is also explored. Dr. Monteiro talks about Du Bois’s methodology and why his work focused on solutions to the pressing problems of his time and why this continues to be relevant today. In addition, Dr. Monteiro describes why Du Bois insisted on an analysis of problems that wedded sociology and philosophy, as well as discussing why Du Bois focused on the Black working class. Of particular interest to Beyond Prisons listeners would be the discussion of the special police force that Du Bois describes in his writings. On Du Bois’s poetics and social science in the Souls of Black Folk, Dr. Monteiro says,  “Humanity cannot be reduced to quantitative, or statistical or other types of variables. There is the immeasurable…” and this is, in part, why reading Du Bois is such a wonderfully rich and rewarding experience. There is much to be learned from reading Du Bois and this episode helps to highlight some of Du Bois’s most significant contributions, providing insight into why his work continues to be relevant. My interest in Du Bois’s work began many years ago when I was a grad student searching for a way to make sense of the problems of mass incarceration, and particularly reentry. I would read Du Bois and even taught the Souls of Black Folk in my classes. Under the guidance of Dr. Monteiro, I expanded my understanding of Du Bois and began to make connections between what I was working on (prisons and reentry) and Du Bois’s sociology, philosophy, poetics, and phenomenology. Trained as a policy analyst, I found Du Bois’s work brought something to the understanding of social problems that was missing from policy analysis. In my own writing, I describe the approach to the study of problems in public policy analysis and criminology as being rooted in methodological fetishism, which is the tendency within disciplines to esteem a single model/methodological approach. In public policy analysis the preferred/esteemed approach is cost-benefit analysis. In my view, this limits the possibility of critical inquiry—that is, it limits our understanding of social problems and doesn’t address the how or why, but focuses only on the what. Du Bois’s approach upsets this tendency because he drew upon empirical sources, and worked to understand the inner life world of Black people—thereby moving beyond quantitative analysis. This is why we chose to invite Dr. Monteiro back to the show and why reading Du Bois matters to us here at the podcast. We’ve put together a very short list of readings and links that listeners might find useful: The Year of Du Bois: https://www.yearofdubois.org The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study by W.E.B. Du Bois: https://archive.org/stream/philadelphianegr001901mbp/philadelphianegr001901mbp_djvu.txt The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois: http://sites.middlebury.edu/soan105tiger/files/2014/08/Du-Bois-The-Souls-of-Black-Folks.pdf Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia: http://scua.library.umass.edu/digital/dubois/dubois9.pdf The Souls of White Folk: http://files.umwblogs.org/blogs.dir/5632/files/2012/08/The-Souls-of-White-Folk.pdf Darkwater: Voices from within The Veil: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15210/15210-h/15210-h.htm Du Bois 150th Festival: https://dubois150th.com Outlaw, L. T. (2000, March). W.E.B. Du Bois on the Study of Social Problems. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Study of African American Problems: W.E.B. Du Bois's Agenda, Then and Now, 568, 281-297. Monteiro, A. (2007). W.E.B. Du Bois and the Study of Black Humanity: A Rediscovery. Journal of Black Studies, 607. Monteiro, A. (2011). Race and the Racialized State: A Du Boisian Interrogation. Journal of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy Online, 26(2). Katz, M. B. (2000, March). Race, Poverty, and Welfare: Du Bois's Legacy for Policy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Study of African American Problems: W.E.B. Du Bois's Agenda, Then and Now, 568, 111- 127. Gordon, L. R. (2000, March). Du Bois's Humanistic Philosophy of Human Sciences. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Study of African American Problems: W.E.B. Du Bois's Agenda, Then and Now, 568, 265- 280. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

The prison is an institution that is sustained by violence and justified by myths. On this episode, we're talking about the "radical imagination" required to build a society without such an institution.To guide us through this very broad topic are Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson, hosts of the Beyond Prisons podcast. Brian is a journalist (with a regular column in the Portland Phoenix) and a co-founder of Shadowproof.com. Kim Wilson has a Ph.D. in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the University of Delaware, and aside from being an activist and podcast host, she is also an artist, whose work you can see at kimwilsonart.com. Their podcast focuses on all issues related to prison abolition, and we can't recommend it enough.Check them out at shadowproof.com/beyond-prisons!

In Episode 19 of Beyond Prisons, hosts Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson catch up with activist, writer, and educator Mariame Kaba. Mariame shares her experiences advocating on behalf of Bresha Meadows, a teenage girl who killed her abusive father and was detained while facing the possibility of trial as an adult and a lifetime of incarceration. She recount's Bresha's story and explains how activists worked to make sure the family's needs were met and help them navigate the collateral consequences of detention, including an enormous financial burden and the shame and stigma that makes people internalize their struggle. Mariame explains how children who are abused face limited options and harsh punishment for trying to escape their abusers and even harsher punishment for defending themselves. She talks about the racialized aspect of this arrangement, and how black children are dehumanized and not seen as children but as criminals in training. She discusses the work that Survived and Punished put into assembling a tool kit to help people who are victims of abuse and are criminalized for survival actions. The tool kit has information on what the group thinks works for supporting immigrant survivors, trans survivors, how to engage with the media and legal teams, how to raise money and build a base of support, and more. Their website also has interviews and videos that provide more information. Mariame reacts to a common question asked of abolitionists, which is what to do about people who have caused serious harm to others. She talks about the fear of criminals in society and the severe misperceptions among the public of who is incarcerated and what it means to be in prison. The effectiveness of prison as a tool to fight sexual violence, murder, and other serious crimes is questioned. The conversation continues with Mariame's view of abolition as a collective project that embraces people who sense there is a problem with American institutions and are interested in figuring out what to do about it. She explains what she means when she says hope is a discipline, not an emotion or sense of optimism, and how this informs her organizing. Self care is examined as a community project. Finally, Mariame shares what books are on her shelf and what she's reading right now. Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, and curator. Her work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, transformative justice, and supporting youth leadership development. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She was a member of the editorial board for Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal from January 2003 to December 2008. She was a founding advisory board member of the Chicago Community Bond Fund and she's a member of the Critical Resistance community advisory board. Kaba currently organizes with the Survived and Punished collective and, in addition to organizing and serving many other organizations, she is an educator and also runs the blog Prison Culture. Follow Mariame Kaba on Twitter: @prisonculture Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Professor Alex S. Vitale joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to discuss his book, "The End Of Policing," which provides a historical analysis of law enforcement and police reform in the United States and argues for alternatives. Vitale tells us about how he came to write this book and walks us through the early history of police in the United States. He discusses the popular myths surrounding policing, underscoring their conflicts with the roles police have played as managers of inequality from colonialism, to the emergence of a mass industrial working class, to slavery. Vitale discusses the litany of problems inherent to the most popular police reforms touted by liberals in recent decades. He discusses how these reforms fall short and why they distract and fail to address root causes. He also talks about how these reform approaches lack a critical analysis of the legal frameworks police use and how the strategy of professionalizing police forces has been more about restoring public confidence than addressing issues of safety and justice. We discuss how police don't make schools make schools safer, don't deter gang activity, how they perpetuate homelessness, and more, and examine the enormous investments we make in law enforcement that could be put to much better use empowering communities in ways that reduce harm. Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project there. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in the New York Daily News, New York Times, Nation, Gotham Gazette, and New Inquiry. Follow Alex Vitale on Twitter: @avitale Get a copy of "The End Of Policing" from Verso Books—50% off for entire month of December 2017. Support our show and join us on Patreon. Special thanks to Andrew Dilts for his support and shout out to listener Malik Raymond for volunteering to transcribe our episodes. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Dr. Breea Willingham joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to discuss her prison research, her writing workshops with incarcerated women, and her experiences as someone with family directly impacted by the system. Dr. Willingham talks about how her experiences inform her work despite the traditional resistance of the academy to approaches that are not considered "objective"—even if it is highly relevant to the research. We talk about the farce of objectivity in both academia and journalism, and the need to put forward the perspective of people directly impacted by a particular subject. We also examine Dr. Willingham's work regarding writing programs for incarcerated women. She talks about her research, in which educated, white, middle and upper-middle class women instructors were forced to negotiate their race and class privilege in their workshops, and their reactions upon finding that their students were human beings, too. We also touch on how some activism and scholarship approaches incarceration voyeuristically, treating other people's misery as a curiosity or source of inspiration. She discusses how writing workshops are liberating for incarcerated women and provide a way for them to resist their confinement, providing one of the few therapeutic opportunities for women to share and work through the trauma that so often paves their paths to prison. Dr. Breea Willingham is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Plattsburgh State University of New York. She worked as a newspaper reporter covering crime and education for 10 years before entering academia. Dr. Willingham's research areas/interests include: Black women’s prison writings, higher education in prison, Black women and police violence, the impact of incarceration on Black families and children, and women in the criminal justice system. She is currently writing a book about teaching and writing in women’s prisons. Visit Dr. Willingham's website: breeacwillingham.weebly.com Follow Dr. Willingham on Twitter: @drbreewill Support our show and join us on Patreon. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Artist, writer, and organizer Devyn Springer joins the Beyond Prisons podcast for a special two-part episode. In part two, Devyn speaks with hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein about hip hop scholarship and pedagogy as liberatory approaches to education. We also discuss his photography, writing, and poetry. Devyn explains his scholarship focuses on hip hop as a means of resistance. He talks about how, as one of most influential art forms of the past century, hip hop has always been about race, class, and gender, and that it tells stories and histories. He discusses the importance of having students see themselves in the material he teaches, explaining how the work of Walter Rodney has influenced his own practice. We also discuss Devyn's photography and writing, including a piece he wrote about the Pulse Nightclub shooting. He sees his art as a way to combat the normalization of oppression and  the idea that oppression is an essential part of human existence and human nature. We explore a piece Devyn wrote on writers block as a socioeconomic condition. He talks about the struggle to create art that exists for beauty itself when he's only given a platform to discuss his identity and trauma. He explains how marginalized artists and writers are only called upon to appease someone else's diversity quota, and how white artists are primarily the only ones permitted to create art simply for its beauty, while artists of color must make a statement about their identity in order to be given a platform. He raises the class aspect of this dynamic, explaining that staff writing positions are rarely available and that when opportunities are available, they are low paying and exclusively for him to write from the perspective of his identity as someone who is Black, Muslim and queer. The anxiety this creates hinders the writing process itself. Finally, we discuss the concept of self-care with Devyn, which he sees as "being an adult" and "doing what you need to do to secure your livelihood." He argues self-care should be done to "alleviate your conditions temporarily so you can continue doing your organizing and your work." Devyn Springer is an Atlanta-based artist, writer, organizer, and educator with a background in African & African Diaspora studies and a concentration in Art History. He has worked with various organizing groups in Atlanta such as Rise UP, It's Bigger Than You, Black Lives Matter, and is a member of Workers World Party. He is the assistant editor of two peer-reviewed academic journals, South and ATL. His first book of poetry & art is titled "Grayish-Black,” and you can follow him on Twitter @HalfAtlanta, and see some of his visual art at Urbansoulatlanta.com Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Artist, writer, and organizer Devyn Springer joins the Beyond Prisons podcast for a special two-part episode. In part one, Devyn speaks with hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein about his work with mental health response networks in Atlanta. Through Rise UP, Black Lives Matter, and other groups, Devyn has worked to confront mental health emergencies through deescalation and by building relationships in the community. We discuss how the presence of police, and threat of violence that accompanies them, exacerbates manic episodes. We also talk about the dangers of making police the first responders in times of crisis, as well as the defunding and dissolution of mental health services in the community, which have shifted to prisons and jails. We talk about how these facilities do not and cannot provide an adequate therapeutic environment, and how situating treatment in the justice system has encouraged a defensive posture, in which we are dealing with crises more than providing ongoing support and treatment before they happen. Finally, we examine the recent killing of Scout Schultz, a student at Georgia Tech who had a history of mental illness, as well as the response to Scout's death by other students. Devyn Springer is an Atlanta-based artist, writer, organizer, and educator with a background in African & African Diaspora studies and a concentration in Art History. He has worked with various organizing groups in Atlanta such as Rise UP, It's Bigger Than You, Black Lives Matter, and is a member of Workers World Party. He is the assistant editor of two peer-reviewed academic journals, South and ATL. His first book of poetry & art is titled "Grayish-Black,” and you can follow him on Twitter @HalfAtlanta, and see some of his visual art at Urbansoulatlanta.com Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein @jaybeware Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Journalist Victoria Law joins the Beyond Prisons podcast to discuss her work with imprisoned women and her book, "Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women." Law talks about how and why she wrote the book, which centers women’s struggles against incarceration and describes women’s resistance and organizing in prison. From this perspective, she also discusses the challenges and importance of compiling testimony from women on the inside, as well as the risks women have to take to speak out. She gives examples of the different kinds of resistance women engage in, and how their struggles to obtain education and access to programming and treatment are often overlooked examples of resisting the conditions of their confinement. We also discuss how criminal justice journalism traditionally relies on narratives provided by law enforcement and how incarcerated women are often perceived as untrustworthy. Law provides insight on the history of women's imprisonment and explains how reform has evolved systems of surveillance and control for women over time. Victoria Law is a freelance journalist. She is a co-founder of Books Through Bars--NYC, which sends free books to incarcerated people nationwide and the editor of Tenacious, a zine of art & writings by women in prison. She is the author of "Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women" and the co-author of the upcoming "Your Home is Your Prison," which explores how proposed “alternatives” to incarceration expand the carceral system. Follow Victoria Law on Twitter at @LVikkiml Find her work at victorialaw.net -- Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

On this week's show, we interview Juan Demetrixx, an organizer of Howard University Resist, and Jared Ware, journalist and producer of the "Beyond Prisons" podcast. Demetrixx talks about what he witnessed on the ground in Charlottesville a little more than a week ago. Ware highlights Redneck Revolt, one of a large contingent of left-wing groups that was present in Charlottesville. Later in the interview, Demetrixx and Ware share their perspectives on confronting or challenging white supremacists and the response of Donald Trump's administration to the violence in Charlottesville. The second half of the show is spent reading a statement from Palestinian American activist Rasmea Odeh, who had her sentencing hearing in Detroit. The judge refused to let her read this statement. She will be deported. And also, we highlight a settlement in lawsuit against CIA torture psychologists and pay tribute to the black comic and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, who died on August 19.

Beyond Prisons is on a brief hiatus until the end of August, when we'll return with a great episode featuring journalist Victoria Law. But before we go, we wanted to share our conversation with members of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak ahead of the historic Millions For Prisoners Human Rights March in Washington, DC on August 19. Jailhouse Lawyers Speak is a national collective of incarcerated people who fight for human rights by providing other incarcerated people with access to legal education, resources, and assistance. They inform people of their human rights under the United Nations charter and provide guidance on prison policies and lawsuits. Their advocacy work often makes them targets for retaliation and repression from corrections officers within prisons, which is why they chose to remain anonymous for our conversation. In general, jailhouse lawyers provide support primarily to poor incarcerated people and their families who cannot afford proper legal representation. They are largely incarcerated people who have taught themselves, or been informally mentored by other jailhouse lawyers, and don't have law degrees. They describe their work and some ways that people outside prisons can support it. We also discuss Black August and the fundamental teachings of black revolutionary George Jackson, whose life and work provides a major influence for JLS. Finally, JLS members share their perspective on the 13th Amendment and the upcoming Millions For Prisoners March - which they called for in collaboration with the IAMWE prison advocacy network - and give their ideas for how people can support the demonstration from around the country. Follow Jailhouse Lawyers Speak on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaillawspeak Follow JLS on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlkJailhouselawyer/ --- Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware  

Hosts of the "Unauthorized Disclosure" weekly podcast welcome Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein, co-hosts of the "Beyond Prisons" podcast, to the show. Wilson and Sonenstein discuss their new show, which covers prisons and prison reform from an abolitionist perspective. It elevates people directly impacted by the system of mass incarceration by featuring their voices. In the latter half of the episode, a short segment highlights how CIA torture architects James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen invoked the cases of accused Nazi war criminals to argue they should not be held responsible for torture.

On episode 10 of Beyond Prisons, we talk about Thomas Gordon, who is incarcerated at James T. Vaughn Correctional Center, a state prison in Delaware. Vaughn was the site of what has been called the Vaughn Rebellion, an uprising last February in response to horrendous living conditions that was met with brutal repression by corrections officers. Thomas wrote an open letter after the rebellion, which described their demands for human rights, including a proper diet, an adequate grievance process, and access to programs and education. Thomas's friend Emily Abendroth joins hosts Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson to talk about her friendship with Thomas, the open letter, and what she's learned from their correspondence. We discuss the risks and dangers Thomas faces in doing this work, the response from state officials and the media to the rebellion, and how officials have sought to increase their power in the aftermath by blaming staffing and security issues instead of addressing the root causes outlined by those incarcerated at Vaughn. Emily Abendroth is a poet, teacher and anti-prison activist living in Philadelphia. She is an active organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (a grassroots campaign working to end life without parole sentencing in Pennsylvania) and is co-founder of Address This! (an education and empowerment project that provides innovative, social justice correspondence courses to individuals incarcerated in Pennsylvania) and LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty (a media project conducted across the prison walls to highlight the voices and analysis of those serving death by incarceration sentences).  Her published works include the poetry book ]Exclosures[ and The Instead, a collaborative book with fiction writer Miranda Mellis, as well as numerous poetry chapbooks. Follow Emily's work at: Lifelines-project.org, Decarceratepa.info/cadbi, and https://www.facebook.com/DecarceratePA Full Disclosure: Kim has two sons incarcerated at James T. Vaughn Correctional Center. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

Dan Berger joins Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson for episode 9 of Beyond Prisons to discuss his book, "Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era." We begin the conversation by looking at whose voices are heard in conversations on mass incarceration and the importance of telling the history of this struggle from the vantage point of incarcerated people. Dan explains that although jails and courtrooms have been critical battlegrounds for Black people's human rights movements throughout American history, the influence of Black prison organizing is often glossed over, despite its central role in struggles from emancipation to the 1960's era civil rights movement and beyond. We discuss the increasing use of prisons as props in mainstream culture, where the focus is placed on the phenomenon of mass incarceration instead of the problem that is prison. We also talk about the erasure of Black political prisoners, who have their revolutionary ideas stolen from them by white American and European intellectuals. In addition to telling us what abolition means to him, Dan shares how letter writing with Black political prisoners was formative to his understanding of race, capitalism, and incarceration in America from a young age. Dan Berger is an associate professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the author of several books and won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for "Captive Nation." Buy "Captive Nation" from UNC Press. Follow Dan Berger on Twitter @dnbrgr. Read Dan's work at AAIHS. Free Alabama Movement: http://www.freealabamamovement.com/ Jailhouse Lawyers Speak: https://www.facebook.com/BlkJailhouselawyer/ Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware

In episode 8 of Beyond Prisons, we have a wide-ranging conversation on the subjects of prison labor and slavery. First, we hear more from Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, an incarcerated member of the Free Alabama Movement, and a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a group of incarcerated human rights advocates and prison abolitionists, on the connection between slavery and the 13th amendment, and how society justifies the exploitation of prisoners through academia. We are then joined by Jared Ware, our producer and a fellow abolitionist. Jay worked with the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) during the nationwide prison strikes against slavery. He helped manage their Twitter account, which was a crucial source of information as the strike unfolded. The three of us talk about prison jobs programs, organizing against prison slavery, abolishing the 13th Amendment, and the upcoming Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March in Washington, D.C. We also attempt to complicate the discussion of prison labor by considering the economic relationship between the minimum wage labor movement and the use of prison labor, the ethics of working in prisons, and the relevance of prison jobs to the broader labor market.   Free Alabama Movement: http://www.freealabamamovement.com/ Jailhouse Lawyers Speak: https://www.facebook.com/BlkJailhouselawyer/ Read "Lawsuit May Serve As Template For Challenging Forced Immigrant Labor In Private Prisons," by Jared Ware. — Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware  

In episode 7 of Beyond Prisons, Brian and Kim are joined by Krystal Rountree, founder of iamWE and national organizer of the upcoming Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March on August 19 in Washington, D.C. Krystal discusses the hard work being done to organize the march and their goal to end prison slavery by removing the exception clause from the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which states, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Krystal shares how people on both sides of the walls and across the country can participate in this important action and show solidarity with the marchers. She also talks about the risks incarcerated people are taking to participate, and the struggles people face on the outside to support them. This episode also features currently incarcerated people from the Free Alabama Movement and Jailhouse Lawyers Speak sharing their thoughts on prison slavery and struggle.   Krystal is the CoFounder and Director of iamWE, a Prison Advocacy Network based in the Carolinas. iamWE is a hands-on Human Rights Organization dedicated to advocating for prisoners. Their current focus is the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March whose aim is to end Legalized Slavery by removing the exception clause from the 13th amendment. In addition to the work of iamWe, Krystal is also a local community organizer and works with women and children impacted by domestic violence and poverty. Visit iamWE's website: http://iamweubuntu.com Learn more about the march: http://www.iamweubuntu.com/millions-for-prisoners-human-rights.html Free Alabama Movement: http://www.freealabamamovement.com/ Jailhouse Lawyers Speak: https://www.facebook.com/BlkJailhouselawyer/ -- Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware 

In episode 6 of Beyond Prisons, Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson speak with Maya Schenwar about her book, "Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better."  Maya discusses her experience living a "dual reality" as a journalist covering incarceration and as someone with a sibling who has been incarcerated multiple times while struggling with addiction. She shares her thoughts on the detachment common among journalists who cover the justice system and how their relationships with law enforcement are accepted as standard. "The view from nowhere is a view from power," she said. She also talks about the importance of pen-palling with incarcerated people and how it has shaped her work and knowledge of the issue.  We talk about the struggles facing incarcerated mothers and pregnant women—from the various ways they are forced into the prison system to their experiences finding basic, humane medical treatment behind bars and the harm of separating families. In this emotional interview, we hear from Maya about her sister's struggle and how her family has been impacted by this experience. If you have read the book, you'll want to tune in because Maya shares what has happened since it was published. "When you break up particularly a mother and her newborn child, you are saying this person should not be reconnected with society, this person should be isolated, and separated, and shamed, and disposed of," Maya said.  Finally, she tells us what abolition means to her. Maya is the Editor-in-Chief of Truthout and the co-editor of "Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States." She has written about the prison-industrial complex for Truthout, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Salon, Ms. Magazine, and others. Maya lives in Chicago and organizes with Love & Protect and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Get your copy of "Locked Down, Locked Out." Read Maya Schenwar's work at Truthout: ">www.truthout.org Visit Maya's personal website: mayaschenwar.com Follow Maya on Twitter: @mayaschenwar   --   Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes and on Google Play Sign up for the Beyond Prisons newsletter to receive updates on new episodes, important news and events, and more. Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Music & Production: Jared Ware  

Welcome to Beyond Prisons: a new podcast examining incarceration in America through an abolitionist lens.  In our first episode, hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein introduce the idea behind the podcast, dissect and critique the current conversation around prison reform, and discuss the need for a broader vision for justice that should guide those efforts. What is prison abolition and what would it mean to live in a world without prisons? What's missing from current efforts to reform the criminal justice system? What kind of topics will this podcast cover? We tackle these questions and more in our first episode. Going forward, we will conduct interviews and delve much deeper into the various issues we touch upon in this first episode. So, stay tuned! -- Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Music & Production: Jared Ware -- Transcript Brian: Hello everybody and welcome to the first episode of Beyond Prisons. I am one of your hosts Brian Sonenstein and I’m joined by my co-host Kim Wilson. How ya doing, Kim? Kim: I’m doing well. Hi Brian, how’s it going? Brian: It’s going alright. I’m excited to be here. I’m glad we’re getting this off the ground. Kim: Yeah, me too. Brian: So what Kim and I are trying to do is something a little bit different. Oh, my dogs are barking in the background. (laughs) Kim: We’re gonna have dogs, we’re gonna have cats. We might have you know, who knows what else is going to show up so I say let’s just roll with it. Brian: I know, it’s fine. Kim and I decided to start this podcast to talk about the issue of prison reform and mass incarceration, and offer some different perspectives than a lot of the things you hear going on in the news right now. So I thought we could introduce ourselves a little bit. Kim, why don’t you go first? Kim: Ok, well, I’ll tell you a little bit about what my motivations were, and I think that will be a nice segway into my intro. But the motivating factor behind me getting on board with this podcast really stems from a place of frustration. I’m frustrated with the policy choices around mass incarceration, around prison specifically, and I’m seeing so many things that are impacting communities that I care about and that many people that I know live in, and I feel like we could be doing something better and so I’m coming at it from that perspective. That said, on a personal level, I’m the mother of two incarcerated men who are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole or at least that was their sentence. My professional and academic interests in incarceration began long before either of them had any encounter with the criminal justice system and I’m thinking of that in a broad sense particularly when we talk about schools and school to prison pipeline, which I’m sure we’re gonna spend quite a bit of time talking about in later episodes. And then I’m also coming at this as an activist who started out very much on board with prison reform and the prison reform movement if you want to call it that, and quickly evolved from that perspective to one of being strongly committed to prison abolition. So that’s a little bit about me, where I’m coming from, and what I’m hoping that this podcast is going to be about. What about you, Brian? Brian: Well, so I am a journalist. I’ve been writing about incarceration and the criminal justice system for about five years now. My work has primarily been to address these issues from the perspective of the people who are most directly impacted by it and that’s how I actually got to know you Kim. I’m also deeply interested in the issue of prison abolition after having been an activist myself for a number of years on a number of issues from drug policy to whistleblowing. I’ve seen a lot of people have interactions with the system and none of them have been good, including friends of mine. I grew up in sort of a blue collar, very small town in New England and saw a lot of people who fell into drugs and other problems, wind up in the system and it just destroyed not only their lives but the lives of their families and friends, and so I just had a growing interest in this. I’m very interested in the topic of reform, I’m also interested in critiquing reform, which is something we talk a lot about here. And we’re also going to try to break away from sort of this large statistical view of incarceration where we’re focusing on numbers. What we’re gonna try to do is bring perspectives from the people who are involved and use those to sort of guide our arguments about what the criminal justice system should be like. So why don’t we talk about like the major narrative around mass incarceration, you know maybe we can start by just critiquing that there. So I don’t know, when you think about mass incarceration , what are some things that jump out to you, like what are the things you know about it? Kim: You know, coming at this from several different points of view and those things have deeply informed where I am today regarding mass incarceration. I think that’s an important thing to talk about because, again, as someone who was trained as a policy analyst, the policy perspective or that school of thought can really be distilled in terms of cost-benefit analysis and I want, as you pointed out, for us to move beyond statistics and to think about the real issues, to dig down deep into the racialized nature of mass incarceration, which is one of the things that jumps out to me. I mean, I think it’s important to address the numbers and to account for those and also to explain what those numbers mean in the context of people’s lives in the context of communities. How do those numbers translate into problems for the people who are behind the numbers, right? So I think that first and foremost addressing the racialized nature of mass incarceration and more broadly what we refer to as the prison industrial complex. That’s one of the main things that I want to talk about and I don’t feel is actually discussed enough in public policy circles. Now, that said, I think that there are public policy institutions that are doing this kind of research and that are publishing reports and white papers and what have you that do address the racialized nature of mass incarceration. But this doesn’t actually seem to make it into the spaces where policy makers are making decisions and that gap right there really frustrates me and it’s something that has frustrated me for a really long time. We know, for example, that Black people are disproportionately represented in the system and what does that mean?  You know, what does that mean in terms of communities? And I want to talk about that and to explore that. We know, for example, that in terms of placing this in a global context that the U.S. has one of the largest prison populations in the world. So what does that mean you know and what does that look like on the ground and what does that mean in the context of the politics of today? Because I don’t think that we can really launch a podcast in 2017 and not talk about the current (laughs) political situation in this country. Brian: Right. Kim: If that’s not a source of frustration for people, I don’t know what is and it’s certainly a major source of frustration for me. Then there is the gender component of mass incarceration. We tend to talk about men who are incarcerated and particularly black men. To neglect an oversight of talking about women and how those numbers have grown exponentially over the last decade and a half, and I think that’s an important piece that needs to be addressed as well. So there’s a lot of stuff that I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about mass incarceration. I think that that this is a good place to start. I’m also thinking about mass incarceration in broader terms and this goes to the title of our podcast as well, Beyond Prisons. I want us to imagine what that means. What does it mean to see something beyond prisons? Can we imagine a world not only without prisons but what are some of the creative solutions that we can come up with through these conversations that are going to be I would say not only realistic but that are necessary in light of the fact that we have, what, over six million people under correctional supervision in this country with about two million of those incarcerated? So when we think about, when I’m thinking about incarceration in this country, I’m thinking about it in really broad terms. I’m thinking of policing. I’m thinking of surveillance. I’m thinking of all the various ways, the mechanisms that are used to control certain populations in this country particularly marginalized groups in this country. What about you? Brian: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that on a very basic level, one of the things that I want to do is talk about what we as Americans by and large think prisons do, who goes there, what happens there, and this includes even through the lens of the reform movement. But as activists, when we’re thinking about policy that we could be implementing and if we’re thinking about what comes next after prison, I think one of the most important things that we can do is have conversations that could lead to a cultural shift among people that will lay a stronger foundation for these policies, and I think we can get there. As we know, prisons and the system in general are largely out of the public view. Attempts to, I know this as a journalist and you know this as both a scholar and a parent, but any attempts to get more information about the system or to question actions by officials, you get the silent treatment or worse. I think in order to really lay the groundwork for a lot of this policy, we need to have conversations and clear some things out about punishment, and about crime, and about safety and the role of prisons in all of this, right? And I think that there is this idea that people are criminals instead of people that do things that are against the law or maybe have low moments. I think there’s this idea that when you go away to prison,  you deserve harsh treatment and certain things as punishment and there’s no thought that these people are eventually going to get out. They’re going to have to reintegrate into society under even more difficult situations than the average person trying to get a job out there today, when you have this scarlet letter of a conviction hanging over you. What I hope that we can do in addition to all the things that you said that I totally agree with. In addition to getting into the various issues that go on in prison, and at the front end and back end, before people go in and after, I just really want to challenge our assumptions, and I want us to really think about the myriad costs that are associated with decisions that we make with punishment. And even on just a basic and theoretical level, we talk about prison sentences, right. We talk about sentencing reform, but we attach arbitrary years on prison sentences because I mean there really is no science behind a lot of this and it’s just interesting to think a lot of times—I hear people on the left and liberals are always talking about how oh, the Republicans are so anti-science. Well, the truth is that as a society, we have this looming system that is very pseudo-scientific and very anti-scientific in a lot of ways. And so these are the ideas and little things that we want to chip away at. We’re gonna bring guests on to talk about these things and a lot of the things that you and I are going to chat about today. We’re gonna gloss over a lot of things, we’re gonna mention a lot of things, but trust that in coming episodes, we will dig into these issues deeper. So, what else? What else should we talk about here? Kim: Yeah, I mean playing off of those points that you just made about prison, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about as I was preparing for this episode today was something that Angela Davis writes about in ‘Are Prisons Obsolete?’  And she says, ‘stop thinking of prisons as inevitable, ‘ right? We think of the prison as this natural thing, and that we can’t imagine life without it. And I think that our name again captures that, but our approach to what we’re attempting to do with these conversations is to think about what is life without a prison. It’s not some Utopian ideal. It’s not politically naïve to talk about a world without prisons, a society without prisons, and the difficulty that I’ve encountered in my work with people, including a lot of liberals. It’s mostly liberals who I’ve been working with around issues of prison abolition, that any time I say, ‘Ok, imagine a world without prisons? What does that society look like?’ The first thing I hear is, no, no, no, you can’t possibly mean you want to get rid of prisons. And again, this really is super, super frustrating because it’s not even... I’m giving you a magic wand. You can make the world whatever you want it to be, right? It’s like, it’s a theoretical exercise in a lot of ways. And people don’t even want to imagine that world. Brian: Why do you think that is? Like why do you think people—I have my own thoughts on this, obviously, but I’m curious of your thoughts on why people are resistant to the idea of having that radical imagination. Kim: Well I think a lot of people are afraid, right. I think that there’s a lot of fear that they watch these television shows, they see things depicted in the media and presented a certain way, and their fantasy about what someone in prison looks like or is capable of is informed by these things. They don’t necessarily—even if they have an experience with someone who’s been to prison, they tend to have this wall up, like okay, I like the idea of improving conditions for people in prison, but what are you talking about? This is going a little too far. You can’t really be talking about getting rid of prisons. And, I’m like actually I am. So institutions where we put people in cages for long periods of time without any consideration as to what that is doing to someone. It’s a problem. It’s problematic. We need to have, I’m fond of saying, the courage, the backbone, like we need strong backs to be able to say this is wrong, right? And how do we disrupt this system? How do we change this system? How can we make something that is different from what we have now, right? Not just substituting and moving this around or you know they say rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, right? You know, just a couple of days ago, de Blasio, Mayor de Blasio of New York, announced that they’re closing down Rikers and that’s great, and I’m cheering for the fact because Rikers was a really shitty place. It was a horrible place by all accounts and it needed to be closed. However, what he’s proposing is setting up new prisons. So for me, and this is where I have to depart with the reform movement: Substitutes for prison, including other prisons, doesn’t really help the issue. It doesn’t address the social, the economic, the political problems that have created the issues that we have regarding mass incarceration, and I think until we get to that, until we get to that point where we can, I mean, good grief, have a conversation about what a world without prisons could look like. And to move people just a tiny little bit to say ‘ok, what does transforming this society mean? How do we deal with really scary things? Okay, so someone’s committed murder or someone’s being raped. These are horrible things and how do we address the victim’s legitimate concerns here while also addressing what is happening in terms of incarceration that we know doesn’t actually act as a deterrent, right? It doesn’t work, so what do we do about this? We need a better way to approach this and I’m thinking of this podcast and our conversations as a way to explore various approaches to what that landscape would look like. I’m looking at it also in terms of how do we challenge white supremacy as part of this project? I see a lot of talk about prisons and carcerality that want to leave out the race component. And that’s one of the hang-ups I think that we have and that we confront, particularly in the terms of policy making and policy choices that are being made because these policies around prison are meant to appear race neutral, and they’re not. We need to have not only a language but a process by which we can assess, analyze, and understand what racialized carceral system is, and what do we do about that. Brian: I agree. I completely agree. And I think that there is a lot of danger in compartmentalizing reform efforts instead of taking these broader approaches like abolition. My head is spinning. There’s so many things I want to say in response to what you just said. I mean one thing I want to say is that I think that for people who don’t really know what prison abolition is, they’ve never heard of it, or maybe they have somewhat of an idea. I think that one of the helpful ways to think about this too is that there is not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to prisons, much the same way that much the one-size-fits-all of prisons doesn’t work for the justice system. I think when we’re talking about getting rid of prisons, like you said, we’re not talking about replacing it with a different kind of prison. I really resent a lot of this talk about looking over to Sweden and see how awesome it is to be a prisoner in Sweden. I think that’s totally the wrong way to look at prisons. It’s also a hard conversation, I think, and I wonder if you ever butt up against this, Kim. The needs and the problems are so bad for people who are incarcerated that the needs are very immediate, right? So I’m not sitting here saying we shouldn’t support these reform efforts that look to increase the quality of life of prisoners, because we need to help people right now. But we can’t do that at the expense of a broader vision. I see a lot in these reform efforts of reducing or showing greater leniency toward low level non-violent offenders, but at the same time, we are going to increase penalties and introduce new penalties for violent offenders or for other drug crimes. They talked about introducing a new Fentanyl mandatory minimum sentence in the last criminal justice reform bill. It probably will be added to this one, I assume, with Republicans being in control of legislature. Another thing that I want to say and I’m jumping around a little bit here, but I’m just thinking about your comments, is a lot of times what we see in reform is euphemism, to make it look like things are changing or to modestly or slightly tweak a prisoner’s experience. But the abuse and the fundamental issue of why a certain thing in prison is bad remains the same. So, for example, with solitary confinement, we say that solitary confinement is torture and I think that it is pretty widely accepted now that solitary confinement is torture. And at the same time, the reforms that we get are two extra hours out of your cell per week, and reformers call that a victory. Or only certain groups of people are not allowed to go into solitary confinement, or they opened a new housing unit that is basically solitary confinement in everything but name. So it’s really tricky and that’s another reason why I think it’s important to consider abolition and to take it seriously because a lot of these problems. We are at where we are today because a lot of these politicians have been kicking the can on these issues ever since we had prisons. I mean, Attica, the reform efforts followed Attica. Rebellions have been going on for years and years and years. Things haven’t gotten materially better. I think when we think about abolition, another thing to think about like you were saying, is how do we think about somebody who’s committed an act of murder, an act of rape? How do we think about justice? But it’s also that the prison and the system that we have set up does nothing to sort of head off these things from happening by changing the material conditions and environments, social contexts and racial contexts like you were talking about, that people live in, that limit their options and push them in or silo their paths in life. So it’s not just what can we do differently when someone commits a crime but it’s like how can we invest in communities. All the money we spend on federal, state, and local jails, all that money could be so much better put to use with education, jobs, healthcare in society in ways that would reduce the number of people winding up behind bars. Kim: Absolutely! And I think to your first point regarding reforms and changing things in the immediate and looking to European models of prisons and what not. I think that there is a space for having a comparative analysis as to what other countries are doing that are better than what is happening here in the U.S. and if it improves the conditions of people on the inside, then Ok, great. However, what an abolitionist’s perspective actually does is that it provides a framework for understanding and placing that conditions have to be improved right now, however, the long term goal is not to just sit back and say, yeah, we improved conditions, but how do we not use prisons as an anchor for the problems that are happening in society? How do we or what other things can we use? And you mentioned some of those things: investing in communities, providing healthcare, mental health. Mental health is such a big part of this problem, not criminalizing drugs and seeing that these things don’t actually improve safety or security, but are used as the pretext for increasing the carceral state. I think that one of the things that we’re going to do in upcoming episodes is really delve into what do we mean by prison abolition. Today, I think that we can just give a quick definition of that, a working definition so people have that and to talk a little bit about what we mean when we say prison industrial complex so that we understand the language that’s being used here. Because I think particularly in this day and age, particularly in this political climate that our words matter and our words matter more than they have in the past. So providing clear definitions gives us a place to begin. It may not improve or increase understanding very much, but at least it gives us a place to begin so that we know that we’re talking about this thing over here, and not that thing over there. That said, one of the things I talk about when I talk about prison abolition and again using a lot of Angela Davis’ work, using the work of people from Critical Resistance, as well as Insight, and a number of other groups is to really think about it as a political vision. To think about how prison abolition constitutes a set of long term goals. There are things that we are doing right now, however, the goal is to eliminate and get rid of imprisonment, to get rid of policing and surveillance as the mechanisms that we use to address social problems. I think that’s really the most concrete way of putting it in really simple terms. It sounds easy but once we start unpacking that, I think there is just so much happening in that. So that framework include, for me at least, that framework of abolition is also anti-racist. It is when we talk about gender disparities. We’re including trans’ rights. We’re talking about immigration policy. We’re talking about all of these things that are happening right now and the kinds of policies that are being implemented by this administration that work against an abolitionist framework. I feel a sense of urgency now more than I have I think before. And I think I’ve had a sense of urgency for a long time. I don’t know. What do you think about that? Brian: I totally agree, and I think that we really need to have goals. And I think a lot of what’s happening in the prison reform movement and even just sort of larger on the left, I think you see that it’s a little different when you talk about when you talk about something like single-payer healthcare, for instance. I think we need to have these goals that even if they seem politically unfeasible in this moment, we have to have something to work toward. Like you said, provide a framework for what we’re doing, not only so that we don’t shut off any avenues to fully realize reform or anything like that, but just so that we’re going somewhere with this. This is the work of movements. You know, we might not see this in our lifetime. A lot of people that I talk to about abolition for their first time kind of scoff at you. They’re like, yeah right, there’s no way that would ever happen. The prison is such a fundamental institution in our society that obviously it’s much bigger than any one issue. I think that something that you were touching on or something that it made me think about when you were talking is that if you bring an abolitionist framework to this, it does inform the way you look at other policies and other areas of government and society instead of just sort of being content to fiddle with whatever problems are going on. It makes you want to investigate the root causes more, to question the system more. It also sort of gives you more empathy in a way. I feel like even the worst political foes that I could imagine, I definitely would like to understand more about why they are the way they are. That doesn’t mean I’d excuse their behavior, but just sort of a strategy. I feel so much that political fighting and everything today is like very in the moment and lacks a broader context. So, anyway, I think abolition is something that if there were ever a good time to talk about it, it would be now with things as awful as they are. I feel like we almost have more space to talk about abolition than we might have had a few years ago. Kim: Absolutely! Absolutely! Yeah, I think that one of the things that I wrote down in my notes in my preparation for today had to do with reforms, and one of the things that Angela Davis says is that the idea of reforms doesn’t go beyond the prison. So if all of your solutions begin and end with prisons, then there is really no room for alternatives in that reform model, and that’s the problem that I have as an abolitionist with the reform movement – that all of the solutions maintain these carceral institutions, so whether we’re talking about house arrest or surveillance, parole, probations, what have you, then it’s not really an alternative. You’re trying to give something a different look without doing much about the actual problem and this resonates with people. This is very appealing and again, this is extremely frustrating for me because again, as someone who was trained in policy and public policy research and what have you, the literature really approaches mass incarceration from those perspectives. So when we’re writing policy documents, when they’re doing evaluations of re-entry programs, for example, there are really no alternatives that are being presented that are not carceral alternatives. And that, for me, has been part of the problem for years. That, for me, the ‘Aha’ moment or the lead-up to the ‘Aha’ moment if we can even call it that, came a number of years ago, where it was evident that the further I dug down into re-entry and what was happening in communities was people returning from prison to certain communities. There’s a pattern there and that pattern is repeated over, over and over again across communities in this country. So the policies weren’t working. But it wasn’t enough to just say the policies aren’t working. What is actually happening here? What is informing these policies, and I think that was where I really started to go into the abolitionist literature because the public policy literature doesn’t discuss abolition. It completely neglects it. Abolition is something that, if you’re a political theorist that was talking about abolition from that perspective, and people are writing brilliant things about Foucault and what have you. But that information, that knowledge doesn’t transfer over to the public policy space. So how do we bring these things together? It’s not just political theorists, but philosophers and other people who are doing work on prison abolition, not just theoretical but practical work as well. How do we bring that knowledge to bear on policy choices so that in the choosing because people talk about public policy in sort of a disconnected way in this thing that’s happening somewhere in Washington and in the halls of the State Capitals and what have you, it’s some kind of mysterious process. No. People are making decisions, and those decisions are informed by people’s values, people’s understanding of the problem, etc., etc. And if we’re not attempting to understand that part of it in terms of what’s happening with so many people and disproportionately, black and brown people in this country going to prison, then we’re actually not being honest about trying to address what is happening here. What we’re doing is something else, but it’s not rooted in an honest, intellectual project that is going to give us public policies that improve the conditions for communities and the people that live in those communities. I think that, for me, that’s one of the strengths of an abolitionist’s perspective, and one of the things in my activism and in my scholarship and in my personal life that I have really committed to understanding in a lot of different ways. And I think that it presents a lot of challenges. It’s a difficult task to be an abolitionist. It’s not an easy thing to say that publicly and it’s even more difficult thing if you write about these issues, or facilitating workshops and conversations with people around these things. They always want to talk down to you and tell you that you’re misinformed somehow and that letting people out of prison is just going to run society. I’m like, have you read the paper? I mean, have you looked around? Angela Davis says this all the time: not having any prisons would actually improve things. No alternative would be better than having prisons and that really gets people’s backs up. They can’t handle that. I think to your point earlier about trying to understand where people are coming from with that, I think that’s an important piece of the overall puzzle in conversation here, and I’m looking forward to these conversations as the podcast unfolds and as we get deeper into these things. Brian: Yeah, and I just think one last thing I’ll say on your discussion of policy-making and peoples’, like you were saying, sort of arching their back and a lot of this stuff. I think it speaks to a lot of political incentives that end up shaping reform and that need to change, and hopefully conversations like the ones we’re going to have on this podcast can help change. Because it’s really hard, you have to admit on a certain level that it’s hard for policymakers to go out and maybe put out a reform that would reduce the number of violent offenders in prison because all it takes is one violent offender to make the news to cause a political backlash to that. I think because of that the incentives are so stacked to be harsher, whereas the political gain for showing leniency is so unfortunately low, and I think we need to completely invert that and sort of show politicians and these political figures, including prosecutors. To a certain degree, they’re followers. They’re going to take certain cues from the public in terms of what the public will support and what the public won’t support. So I do see the tide changing a little bit in terms of how people view ‘offenders.’ Obviously, it’s like a very niche group of offenders are given leniency right now, but it’s hopeful in the sense that it could–if we could have these conversations to get people to think differently, we could change those political incentives so that there is less of a risk for a politician to craft a policy or sign on to a policy that would decarcerate and that politicians won’t so strongly overreact to rises in crime and the public doesn’t prioritize the safety of some communities at the expense of others. Kim: Absolutely! And I think that this whole thing about who we let out of prison, and what is an acceptable kind of level of criminality–if we’re aiming for zero crime in society, we’re neglecting the fact that we’re dealing with human beings. So we need to talk about that. We need to address that on the front end and I don’t see where politicians do this very effectively, and I’m sure we’ll certainly critique the politician’s approach to public policy around incarceration and what have you. But we don’t have a world where we will be crime free. That world actually doesn’t exist. So a world without prisons is possible; a world without crime I’m not so sure. So I think that, how would we handle that crime? What constitutes a crime? So we have all sorts of examples currently in the news: defending yourself against a domestic abuser is considered a crime. So that’s a problem. What do we want to do with that? I mean, what we’re really saying to victims of violence is well we don’t care about you if you tried to defend yourself, then you are really the problem. How has that changed anything for that community, for that person, for their family or anything like that? So I think we need to move beyond the surface level analysis that is really popular and talk about the complexities involved with letting people, not just opening the doors and letting people run out of prison. We’re talking about a more thoughtful approach to decarceration, getting rid of cages. We’re talking about, as you mentioned earlier, providing people with healthcare and for me, particularly mental health, and what that would do. We know that there is a large proportion of the incarcerated population that has a documented mental illness. That’s a problem. And if our approach to these issues is basically to just lock them up for some indefinite amount of time, don’t provide them with any kind of counseling or support while they’re incarcerated, that somehow through the isolation and solitary monastic existence that these people are going to have some kind of ‘Aha’ moment, and magically come out being okay. Brian: That’s what I mean. Yeah, when I was saying earlier that I just feel like incarceration is so anti-science. I mean listening to the way you just described it, it sounds ridiculous! And we have at this point mountains of evidence showing how incarceration harms, and I would argue that we have very little evidence suggesting that incarceration as an end in itself works to do anything other than perpetuate misery. So, yeah, sorry I just wanted to chime in here. Kim: No, Absolutely! Brian: Because it always baffles me that we cling to this institution so strongly, but it’s complete pseudo-science the more that you dig into it. Kim:  Uh-huh, Absolutely! Absolutely! And I think that’s a valid point and that we need to talk about that more not just on here, but in the context of public policy choices that are being made. Targeting specific groups of people or to put people in prison who have drug problems makes no sense. It makes absolutely no sense. You don’t actually change the conditions for that individual by putting them in prison. Not just putting them in prison, but putting them in a cage and not giving them any kind of assistance. These things don’t happen, like they don’t just fall out of the sky and all of a sudden they walk out of prison and they’re going to magically never use again. And that seems to be the sort of approach towards carcerality here, why reforms are a huge problem because it relies on this notion that if you lock someone up and you take away everything that is meaningful to them, that is of value to them, their ties to the community no matter how strained those are, their ties to their family no matter how difficult that family might be, those are still ties that we are basically cutting off and say, Ok, we’re going to remove you from society, from everything that is near and dear to you, and now we’re expecting you to be ok. So when you come out, you should be ready to conquer the world. And then we set up this system of obstacles for a person who’s returning from prison and into the community, and we say, well you need to follow all these rules. Okay, so you go to prison from a community where most of the people that you know have also gone to prison, but we have laws in this country that prevent the association of people with a felony conviction from associating, so that can get you back into prison. That’s just so ridiculous! Who else would you know? It’s like if your parent went to prison and you’re their child and you also went to prison, we’re basically saying, well mom, dad, aunt, uncle, cousin, whatever the ties are, you can’t be around each other. So now we’re undermining the support system that would be there by making the association a criminal act. It’s like, God! How is this supposed to work? Brian:  Yeah, and I think one of the things that we all are going to need to talk about, and it’s going to be hard given just American culture in general, are these limits of individual responsibility. I think, as you were talking about earlier, that a lot of the way carcerality bleeds in, and the punitive structure bleeds into post-release and things like that, and you were talking about drug treatment programs and things like that. You know, even in that situation- let’s take drug treatment programs for instance. A lot of these programs are 12-step programs that are built around the individual basically accepting full responsibility for their actions, making no excuses outside of themselves, and supposedly being able to stay sober with that as their backing. And the truth of it is that there are limits to personal responsibility for somebody like that. I mean, if you live in a context in which drugs are always around, or maybe you have a chronic health issue and that’s how you became addicted to opiods. I mean, taking responsibility like that is just another, it’s like another one of these examples of sort of puritanical anti-science approach. It’s like disproved by incredible amounts of evidence. But we’re going to need to really as Americans dial back our desire to pin 100% total responsibility on people who commit crimes. And I just want to…I think this is a good time to talk about in terms of abolition too, Kim and I’m wondering what your thoughts are on this. When we talk about prison abolition and you said this earlier in a way, we’re not just talking about letting people out of prison. We need to… there still will be accountability after prison, right. There still will be justice. And hopefully, it won’t look like this. So, yeah, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. Kim: Yeah, I mean we need to talk about and explore new forms of justice. So the whole theatre that’s associated when someone gets sentenced to a long prison term is one of the problems. I obviously experienced that with my sons and this idea that somehow justice was being served within that context felt so…it’s painful and it’s still painful today. To think back on this and part of what that does is it creates further divisions within communities because we’re all in this together. We’re all in this together, and like you said, the American ethos of individual responsibility and resiliency and this kind of ‘you can do it, and I built it myself…and I didn’t need any help, and it’s not my responsibility to take care of you, etc., etc.,’ which is at the core of American society. People really really believe that, uncritically believe that. They don’t examine what they say around resiliency and individual responsibility at all, and we have medical models that are informed by this perspective. A lot of this probation and parole are informed by this perspective. A lot of re-entry programs are based on these perspectives, and the need to rely on personal transformation strategies as the preferred approach to dealing with crime and to dealing with people’s problems. Because I think we conflate that. We make people their problems. We don’t separate the two. We don’t say, Ok this person has a problem…we say, these people are a problem. So drug users are a problem, not wait a minute, let’s think about what is actually happening here. And as you pointed out, we’re living in a really un-scientific time. The lack of critical thinking around these things or the willingness to approach this from a scientifically informed perspective is another huge issue that we’re probably going to talk about in one way or another throughout every conversation that we have because it’s there. It’s part of every single issue, and to lay blame at an individual’s feet is…one of the things that I say quite a bit is that when we individualize, we moralize. It makes it really easy to moralize. We do a lot of finger wagging and we can say, oh you need to get your act together, you need to stop doing drugs, you need to stop doing this, and we’re very much invested in this notion of choice; that an individual chose this path as opposed to this other path. And when we do that, what we’re doing is obscuring the fact that there are conditions and that there is a system in place that perpetuates these conditions that can strain your choices. So if you can’t eat because you don’t have a job and because you can’t go to your mama’s house because of whatever reason or because there are federal policies that prevent you from crashing on her couch because she lives in HUD housing or something ridiculous like that. And you’re back on the street. I mean, what would you do? Because I think about that quite often and I would do whatever I need to do to eat. I would do whatever I needed to do to survive, and I live in L.A. I have been in supermarkets out here where I’ve seen people arrested who are hungry. They’re coming in and they’re stealing a loaf of bread or something small like that, and the police are called because that is the system that we have. Instead of the manager just giving them the damn loaf of bread and keeping it moving, it’s like…No, we have to call the police. Now you have another set of problems there. I think that part of our…part of what I’m hoping we’ll do is to unpack that a little bit more in a more critical way, and bring people on as guests who can discuss these issues in a really well informed way to get us to think about this stuff beyond the superficial, beyond this sort of knee-jerk reaction to petty crime. But, that said, I also feel that we need to talk about violent crime, and that without the conversation or a set of conversations about violent criminals that we would be doing a disservice to what we’re saying we want to do with this podcast. I think that we need to address what happens when the unthinkable happens, and how do we deal with that and how do we address that? How can communities come together and what does a justice model look like that says, ok, well we need to talk about that more… We need to address the fears that people have and discuss ways that someone who has committed a really horrific crime can be held accountable. It doesn’t produce more harm. It doesn’t perpetuate the pain that already exists because I don’t think, in speaking from my own experience…the pain doesn’t go away. The pain when something horrible happens in your family with crime …that pain doesn’t leave. It doesn’t get better with time. It is just as fresh today as it was the day that it happened, and I think that is something that for me, on a personal level, that I want to talk about more and to bring in families that have been impacted in these ways by crime on both sides. I think that’s an important conversation to have, and something that in transformative justice circles and restorative justice circles has been happening for a lot of years, and there are ways to approach those conversations. But we can’t do that until we talk about accountability. But if accountability is happening in very narrow terms of ‘lock them up and throw away the key’, that doesn’t cohere with an abolitionist perspective, and as you can see, there is a lot to talk about. Brian: There is. Kim: There is no shortage of topics here. I think we barely scratched the surface today. I’m excited about what we can do with this podcast. I don’t know. Do you have any additional thoughts? Brian: There’s just one more thing that I wanted to bring up, and I am curious what you think about this, too. I think a lot of times when people bring up these arguments somebody might say to you, Well, Kim, what about the victims? What about the people who the crimes are perpetrated against? Don’t you think that deserve our empathy too? I don’t know what you would say. I would say our system is not designed at all right now to really empower victims in any meaningful way outside of punishment. I think prosecutors by and large aren’t really interested in what a victim would like to do. I wrote about earlier this year that the vast majority of crime victims, including violent crime victims would prefer rehabilitation over incarceration. There’s a lot of myths that, I would also say that maybe people wouldn’t be victims if we didn’t have incarceration and were addressing these root causes. That was really the last thing that I want to bring up. I’m just thinking about some of the things that might come to your mind when you’re thinking about prison abolition for the first time, sort of these ingrained defenses that we have as Americans against imagining a world without prisons. Like you said, a lot of this, we will be digging in very deeply on all these subjects with guests, and I’m very, very excited. So, yeah, we want to know what questions you have. You can email me at brian@shadowproof.com. We would be happy to take tips from people and hear how people react to the show and a lot of ideas that we have. Honestly, I want to hear what sort of problems people have with a lot of these ideas because I think that a lot of these conversations are going to be really uncomfortable for a lot of people. They’re gonna be really difficult. We’re going to be talking about violence, and sexual offenses and things like this that we react to in a certain way. But we need to have these conversations if we’re really going to make a meaningful impact on this issue. What about you, Kim? Do you have any final thoughts? Kim: Yeah, I think that there are a number of victims groups around the country that have been very outspoken against things like the death penalty, and I’ve been working with some groups, some people in Delaware around this as well, whose families have been the victims of violent crimes. And it’s a difficult conversation, but I can tell you that from my own experience, talking with these families, they have been out front of the death penalty abolition movement, and they have said things not in their name, like you can’t kill someone because you lost someone in their name. And this notion of state sanctioned violence as a way to mete out justice is deeply problematic for a lot of people, not just on a moral level because they do think that it’s wrong, but in terms of what this actually does. What does this actually do? It doesn’t feel good, but then again, I think that the people who are best able to talk about this issue are the victims. I don’t want to speak for anyone. If anything, another goal that I have for this podcast is really to amplify and marginalize people’s voices, and to let people speak for themselves rather than talking over them or for them. You’ll hear me say a lot, I’m speaking for myself, because I think that needs to be clear that I’m not talking for other folks here. I think that in general, I look forward to hearing what people have to say. I think that these are courageous conversations that we need to have, that they’re going to require us to have really strong backs to address. We’ll certainly give people trigger warnings around certain issues. There might be a trigger warning around the entire podcast. I mean, I don’t even know. That includes just as much for my own benefit as for anybody else’s because this isn’t easy. I’m on board with this project because it gives me a way to sort of channel this energy that I have and to bring this work to a much bigger audience, and to include a lot more people in this conversation. Before I forget, if people want to contact me, I’m at wilsonk68@gmail.com and I look forward to hearing about what people have to say and if they want to chime in, and if they want to have ideas for future topics. Certainly, I’m open to these things. Hate mail you can send somewhere else. I’m not interested in the hate mail and the abusive nonsense that I’m sure we’re going to get as a result of putting ourselves out there on these issues. It’s been, this has been great. I enjoyed this conversation. I think it was a lot easier than I thought, huh. Brian: Yeah, I know seriously. I’m really glad to be doing this with you Kim so thank you very much and thank you everybody for listening. We will have another episode out soon. You can subscribe to us on Itunes Beyond Prisons and stay tuned for our next episode. Thank you so much.