Kite Line

This week, we finish our conversation with Kelly Grace Price about the campaign to close Rosie’s. Rosie’s refers to the Rose M. Singer Facility, an all-women’s jail on Rikers Island. On average, Rosie’s detains around 630 women, girls, transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex females while they await trial.

Suzanne Singer, the granddaughter of the jail’s namesake, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times highlighting the abuses at Rosie’s.  Her description of the facility is damning and powerful:

“Many of the women incarcerated at Rosie’s should never have been committed there. Eighty-five percent of them are mothers; a similar percentage have substance abuse disorders. Most have suffered trauma and violence at the hands of men, and two-thirds report having a mental illness, according to a 2017 report by the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform.

Seventy percent of the women at Rikers are awaiting trial. Pretrial detention should be eliminated for low-level, nonviolent crimes. Rather, these women should be sent to community-based alternative programs.  The Rose M. Singer Center was supposed to be a beacon to the world, a place where women caught up in the criminal justice system would be treated humanely and kept safe.

The jail has not lived up to that vision, however. Instead, it has devolved into a torture chamber, where women are routinely abused, housed in unsanitary conditions, and denied medical and mental health services. They are treated as less than human, not as our grandmothers, mothers, daughters and sisters.”

Last time, Kelly Grace Price walked us through the basics of the Rose M Singer Facility, including examples of the corruption and greed that permeate the New York Board of Corrections. This time, Price discusses issues with prisoner advocacy groups, and the ways in which Rosie’s puts undo pressures on its female inmates that male prisoners in different Rikers units do not have to face. She references abuses at the Bedford Hills Facility, an upstate institution that many women are transferred to from Rosie’s.

Content Warning for sexual violence.

This week, we hear from Kelly Grace Price, a co-creator of the Close Rosie’s campaign. Rosie’s refers to the Rose M. Singer Facility, an all-women’s jail on Rikers Island. On average, Rosie’s detains around 630 women, girls, transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex females while they await trial.

Price deconstructs the reformist arguments made NYC Board of Corrections and shows how they’re invalid. She also shows how Mayor DeBlasio is gaming the system, using tactics like “wagging the tail of the dog”, and how incoming Mayor Eric Adams is already compromised by his preexisting ties to the New York carceral system.

Suzanne Singer, the granddaughter of the jail’s namesake, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times highlighting the abuses at Rosie’s.  Her description of the facility is damning and powerful:

“Many of the women incarcerated at Rosie’s should never have been committed there. Eighty-five percent of them are mothers; a similar percentage have substance abuse disorders. Most have suffered trauma and violence at the hands of men, and two-thirds report having a mental illness, according to a 2017 report by the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform.

Seventy percent of the women at Rikers are awaiting trial. Pretrial detention should be eliminated for low-level, nonviolent crimes. Rather, these women should be sent to community-based alternative programs.  The Rose M. Singer Center was supposed to be a beacon to the world, a place where women caught up in the criminal justice system would be treated humanely and kept safe.

The jail has not lived up to that vision, however. Instead, it has devolved into a torture chamber, where women are routinely abused, housed in unsanitary conditions, and denied medical and mental health services. They are treated as less than human, not as our grandmothers, mothers, daughters and sisters.”

We start off this week’s episode with an update on Marius Mason’s transfer to a men’s facility.  Marius is an imprisoned environmentalist who, in addition to waging an Earth Liberation Front sabotage campaign, was an important aboveground organizer for social movements in Indiana and Michigan for decades.  He came out as transgender while in prison, and has recently spoken out about his successful transfer to a men’s facility.  To read Marius’s statement about his transfer and to get information on how to write to him, please visit supportmariusmason.org

We then finish sharing the conversation between Judah Schept and Micol Seigel, both of whom contributed to stopping the jail expansion here in Monroe County a decade ago. As a new proposal for jail expansion is on the table, Schept and Seigel have been reflecting on their previous organizing, with an eye towards what lessons we can carry from it into the present.

You can hear the previous episodes with Schept and Seigel here and here.

This week, we hear from a friend and supporter of Jessica Reznicek, who was recently sentenced federal prison after she admitted to sabotaging the widely opposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2017.

In this episode, Monte tells Jessica’s story from her childhood influences to her experiences in the NoDAPL Movement, in solidarity with the struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux.  He analyzes how the harsh sentencing was politically motivated to deter future climate activists. As Monte notes, Jessica is not a terrorist, but someone acting from a place of love, courage, and sincerity in order to defend the conditions for life on this planet.

For more information on Jessica’s case and needs, check out https://supportjessicareznicek.com/

Our main story this week is a contribution from our friends at Perilous Chronicle. Perilous is an independent digital research and media project focused on prisons, and moments of protest, unrest, and repression inside them in the US and Canada. This week, Perilous Chronicle’s Ridley Seawood guides us through the The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) at Moose Lake, with a focus on how the program functions as a shadow prison: using civil commitment to indefinitely detain people deemed potentially dangerous to the public. This feature contains mention of both sexual assault and violence.

In 2008, Monroe County moved to build a new, expanded jail -framed as a “justice campus” using humanitarian rhetoric.  In response, a diverse group of local residents founded an organization called Decarcerate Monroe County (DMC).

Judah Schept, who returns as our guest alongside Micol Seigel, was an organizer in the successful DMC campaign to block jail expansion here, as well as a profound critic of what his book terms “progressive punishment,” in which humanist rationales are used to justify state violence and the expansion of caging.  This discourse has reappeared locally with Monroe County’s renewed drive to build new jail facilities on alleged human rights grounds.  It is also a strategic feature of many prison and policing projects across the country right now in the wake of last year’s George Floyd Uprising.

This week, they continue to discuss the proposed jail expansion and discuss the pros and cons of common alternatives to incarceration. They compare the jail expansion they fought 12 years ago to the jail expansion Monroe County now has on the table. They discuss various “intercepts”- moments that are supposed to come in between a person and incarceration.

Perilous is a project supported by a network of people who seek to gather and track information on prison uprisings, riots, protests, strikes, and other disturbances within public and private jails, prisons, and detention centers in the US and Canada since 2010. You can find out more about their work on their website: https://perilouschronicle.com/

In 2008, Monroe County moved to build a new, expanded jail -framed as a “justice campus” using humanitarian rhetoric.  In response, a diverse group of local residents founded an organization called Decarcerate Monroe County (DMC).  Here is how they later summarized their activities:

This month, we are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, a high point of the cycle of prisoners’ struggle of the 1960s and 1970s.

We share experiences from former Attica prisoners Joseph Hayden and Carlos Roche, and attorney Elizabeth Fink, who all describe the events of that day and the days leading up to the event.

Afterwards, we return to Frank Smith, known as Big Black, a prisoner at Attica who participated in the uprising and successfully organized the security for outside negotiators who entered the prison.  He was ferociously tortured by guards in retaliation for his participation in the rebellion, and gave the interview we are sharing today while being held in extended solitary confinement after the uprising.  This was recorded in February 1972, just months after the rebellion. A state official was present for the interview, for the purpose of intimidation and surveillance, which imposed limits on what Frank was able to say about the uprising itself, but he could speak to prior conditions within the prison.

In this episode, Smith talks more about the societal structures that helped to lead to Attica: capitalism, racism, a skewed judicial system.

The audio of Barkley and Smith is available via The Freedom Archives. The full interview with Smith courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives. We have links to our other episodes about the Attica Prison Rebellion on our website, kitelineradio.org.

Three years ago on Kite Line, we aired an episode about the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. This week, September 9th to September 13th, will mark fifty years between us and the event. We share this piece again today, with updated contributions from its author, analyzing the growing challenges to our collective survival, both inside and outside the prisons.  What the author calls the commune – the enduring forms of collectivity and care developed through rebellion – is the best chance we have for survival.  This dimension of the Attica Uprising, such as the prisoners’ experiments with peacemaking and sharing tasks even while facing terrifying constraints, offers rich lessons for us today, as we navigate a period defined by economic decline, escalating white supremacy, and ecological crisis.

This month, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, a high point of the prisoners’ movement of the 1960s and 70s.  On September 9th, 1971, prisoners revolted, building on their own organizing and local grievances, as well as responding to the assassination of George Jackson by guards at Soledad Prison in California.  Right now, marking both events and continuing a long tradition of struggle, prisoners and their allies across the US are conducting a Shut ‘Em Down campaign against prison slavery.

Frank Smith, known as Big Black, was a prisoner at Attica who participated in the uprising and successfully organized the security for outside negotiators who entered the prison.  He was ferociously tortured by guards in retaliation for his participation in the rebellion, and gave the interview we are sharing today while being held in extended solitary confinement after the uprising.  This was recorded in February 1972, just months after the rebellion. A state official was present for the interview, for purposes of intimidation and surveillance, which imposed limits on what Frank was able to say about the uprising itself, but he spoke to conditions within the prison.

Content Warning: Descriptions of physical violence and racial abuse at the hands of prison officials.

The full interview was originally broadcast by WBAI, and we share this excerpt now courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives.

We also include our monthly collection of prison disturbances as compiled by Perilous Chronicle.