Podcasts about resistance behind bars the struggles

This week, we're featuring two interviews concerning prison conditions in North Carolina. First up, you'll hear from Elizabeth Simpson of Emancipate NC, one of the signatories to a public letter to this state's department of corrections calling for the release of hundreds of prisoners in North Carolina. This comes in response to over-crowding and understaffing of prisons following the emergency transfer of 2,000 prisoners from prisons in the western part of the state effected by Hurricane Helene. [00:01:15 - 00:18:50] Then, Mona Evans of Benevolence Farm, a post-release residence and re-entry program in North Carolina for people coming out of the women's prisons talks about their programs, re-entry and some of the realities faced inside womens prisons in this state.   [00:20:04 - 01:04:40] In this conversation I mentioned Victoria Law's latest book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration (Haymarket Books). You can find our 2013 interview with her about her 2nd edition of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women at this link. Other projects Mona mentioned include: Arise Collective re-entry program DownhomeNC engages in a number of progressive causes in this state, including the bail fund that Benevolence Farms is currently running. You can find our 2020 interview with them here. . ... . .. Featured Track: Women on the Inside by Sistas In The Pit from The We That Sets Us Free: Building A World Without Prisons

A new report highlights the experiences those sentenced to death by incarceration in Pennsylvania's women's prisons. Joining to discuss her article about it as well as a previous recent report on the ways in which prisons use menstruation as a form of punishment, is Victoria Law, is a freelance journalist and the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (2012) and “Prisons Make Us Safer”: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration (2021). She also co-authored the book Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (2020). Read Victoria Law's latest piece: These Women Face Death by Incarceration, But They're Organizing for Their Lives: https://truthout.org/articles/these-women-face-death-by-incarceration-but-theyre-organizing-for-their-lives/ Read Victoria Law's previous piece: Prisons Use Menstruation as a Form of Punishment: https://time.com/6265653/prison-menstruation-punishment/ —- Subscribe to this podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1637968343?to=page Get in touch: lawanddisorder@kpfa.org Follow us on socials @LawAndDis: https://twitter.com/LawAndDis; https://www.instagram.com/lawanddis/ The post Women Sentenced to Death by Incarceration in PA w/ Victoria Law appeared first on KPFA.

The second in a series of Critical Conversations organized by Study and Struggle discussing prison abolition and immigrant justice. ———————————————— The Study and Struggle program is the first phase of an ongoing project to organize against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi through four months of political education and community building. Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher. The second webinar theme is Abolition, Intersectionality, and Care and will be a conversation about what it means for abolition to be intersectional and how abolition demands a reimagination of what it means to be in community and to care for one another. ———————————————— Speakers: Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He's the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), forthcoming from Verso Press this summer. Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant police misconduct attorney and organizer whose writing, litigation, and advocacy has focused on policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color for the past two decades. She is currently Researcher in Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she recently launched the Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action initiative. She is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Say Her Name: What it Means to Center Black Women's Experiences of Police Violence in Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, Surviving the Streets of New York: Experiences of LGBT Youth, YMSM and YWSW Engaged in Survival Sex, and Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color, in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology and has published numerous articles, policy reports and research studies. Victoria Law is a freelance writer and editor. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, and co-author of the new book Prison By Any Other Name. She frequently writes about the intersections between mass incarceration, gender and resistance. Pauline Rogers, is formerly incarcerated, and, Co-founder of the Reaching & Educating for Community Hope (RECH) Foundation in Jackson, Mississippi. Jarvis Benson (moderator) is originally from Grenada, Mississippi and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 2019. He currently lives in Washington DC and works on youth leadership development, voting accessibility, and social justice initiatives on campuses across the country. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/T5xefwldPLk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A conversation about abolitionist politics and transformative justice between Asian activists, authors and organizers. This panel explores abolitionist politics and practices among Asian organizers and cultural workers whose projects include prisoner support, anti-deportation work, disability justice, gender and sexual justice, anti-imperialism and anti-borders, and transformative justice. Speakers: Victoria Law is a freelance journalist that covers the intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women and the co-author, with Maya Schenwar, of Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reform. She is also the co-founder of Books Through Bars NYC. Mia Mingus is a writer, educator and community organizer for transformative justice and disability justice. She is a prison abolitionist and a survivor who believes that we must move beyond punishment, revenge and criminalization if we are ever to effectively break generational cycles of violence and create the world our hearts long for. She is passionate about building the skills, relationships and structures that can transform violence, harm and abuse within our communities and that do not rely on or replicate the punitive system we currently live in. For more, visit her blog, Leaving Evidence. Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist whose research focuses on the racial wealth gap, credit scoring systems and the push for alternative data, and the intersection between racism, financialization, criminalization, and punishment. She has experience in Asian American, immigrant rights, and anti-war activism. Anoop Prasad is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco and also a part of Survived and Punished and Asian Prisoner Support Committee. Anoop's work has focused on defending formerly incarcerated people from deportation with a particular focus on Cambodian refugees and domestic violence survivors. Sarath Sarinay Suong (he/him) was born in the refugee camp of Khao I Dang after his family fled Battambang, Cambodia during civil war and immigrated to his hometown of Revere, Massachusetts. To cope with the violence and pain of growing up poor, queer, and refugee, he became a community organizer, centering the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Sarath moved to Providence, Rhode Island in 1998 to attend Brown University where he majored in Ethnic Studies with a specific focus on Southeast Asian resettlement, resilience, and resistance. There, he became a co-founder and former Executive Director of Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), a community organization of Southeast Asian young people, queer and trans youth of color, and survivors of state violence organizing collectively against state violence. Sarath is also a founding Co-Chair of the Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for Education (ARISE), an organization dedicated to working with Southeast Asian youth to organize for education justice. Sarath sits on the advisory board of the Immigrant Justice Network . And he is currently the National Director of Southeast Asian Freedom Network (SEAFN), a movement family of Southeast Asian grassroots organizations founded to fight against detention and deportation. Harsha Walia has organized in anti-border, Indigenous solidarity, migrant justice, feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements for two decades through many community groups and organizations. She is also the author of Undoing Border Imperialism, co-author of both Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration, and Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and contributing member of the Abolition Journal. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/GL2ZbqlJRQI Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

The chaotic capitalistic response to the pandemic has failed us all. So what does a competent response to COVID-19, that puts people over profits, actually look like? We’re joined by Victoria Law, freelance writer and author of “Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women” to discuss the case of Lisa Montgomery and the Trump administration’s rush to carry out her execution before he leaves office. We also host a roundtable on COVID-19 relief, vaccine roll-out, and stimulus with Women Fight Back’s Rachel Hu, Hannah Dickinson, Naomi Li and Julia Thomas.

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.

On January 2019, more than two thousand women confined at Michigan’s only women’s prison were put in quarantine. The quarantine comes in the wake of a possible scabies outbreak at the facility -- which has a long history of abuse and multiple cases of medical neglect. While many of the women held captive there displayed no symptoms, and pointed out other health hazards, such as black mold and infested showers, all of those who refused the state’s systemic administration of medical treatment were put in solitary confinement. In this episode, we speak with Sara and Tracy -- two poets that were locked up at Huron Valley during the quarantine. We also speak with Victoria Law, abolitionist writer and activist, and author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women.

Victoria Law is a freelance journalist focusing on women's incarceration. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women which I highly recommend and co-author of Your Home Is Your Prison (coming out next year). Since 2003, she has edited Tenacious: Art and Writings by Women in Prison. She recently published an article in In These Times magazine called "Corporations Are Profiting From Immigrant Detainees' Labor. Some Say It's Slavery." Her website is victorialaw.net

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

Did you know that the first mass clemency won in 1990 for 25 domestic violence survivors incarcerated for self-defense happened because of incarcerated women organizing themselves on the inside? Or did you know that in the 1970's, a California women's prison cancelled a Christmas visit with incarcerated women & their children with no explanation. The women then broke windows, dragged Christmas trees outside into the yard, set them on fire, and refused to go back inside in protest! Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women provides much-needed documentation of collective organizing and the daily struggles inside women's prisons. For this episode, Monica and Page sat down with the author of this book, Victoria Law, and discussed her process in compiling these important, hidden stories of resistance and survival of incarcerated women in the U.S. ​​

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 special Mother's day episode, guest host Alexis Pauline Gumbs explores revolutionary mothering with a panel of guests including China Martens, Mai'a Williams, Victoria Law, and Cynthia Dewi Oka. Self-described Queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Spill: Fugitive Scenes, coming later this year from Duke University press. China Martens is the author of, among many other works, The Future Generation: The Zine-book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others, and co-editor of Don't Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities. Mai'a Williams is a former journalist for teleSUR English and author of two books of poetry. Victoria Law is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. Cynthia Dewi Oka works at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and her book of poems, Nomad of Salt and Hard Water, was a 2015 Pushcart Prize Nominee.