Kite Line

This week, we share audio in support of Dan Baker and Loren Reed, and from Panagioti Tsolkas, who tells us about the important #CagingCOVID campaign and their upcoming February 1st day of action. As we’ve previously documented on Kite Line, facilities across the country have systematically failed to protect prisoners from COVID-19 and its uncontrolled spread.  We are sharing two testimonies on this horrific failure, both collected by the #CagingCOVID campaign, one from Kevin Rashid Johnson in Indiana and the other by Ricardo Pena III in Texas.

You can find out more about Dan Baker here, and Loren Reed here.

You can hear more audio from the #CagingCOVID campaign here.

On Kite Line this week, we share two interviews with advocates working on the physical well-being of those locked inside. The first conversation we hear is with Olivia, who is part of a group trying to get the word out about unsafe conditions at the California Medical Facility, or CMF, a prison for inmates with medical conditions. This facility has been overrun by the coronavirus, as a result of carelessness by the administrators.

Our second call is with Peter, who talks to us about his advocacy for a friend in the DuPage County Jail. His friend, Strawberry Hampton, who was recently featured on the show, suffered abuse at the hands of prison staff and wanted to report the violation via PREA, the Prison Rape Elimination Act. However, reporting the PREA grievance was much less straightforward than one would expect it to be.

You can listen to our previous episodes on PREA here and here.

This week on Kite Line, we have a wide variety of ongoing prison news- ranging from the recent executions of prisoners in Terre Haute to a prison disturbance in St. Louis. Afterwards, we share a conversation that was sent to us from an outside supporter of the ongoing Saskatoon Correctional Facility hunger strike. In this conversation, Cardinal explains what led to the hunger strike, and how outside support has been helpful to those inside.

This week, we share an urgent statement from the Free Alabama Movement about their ongoing hunger strike and economic blackout. Afterwards, we speak with David Pellow, Fabiana Lake, and Camber Wilson, who recently coauthored a report on ‘Environmental Justice Struggles in Prisons and Jails Around the World,’  via the Prison Environmental Justice Project.  Environmental justice is an even more important question now, as toxicity and health deficits render prisoners even more vulnerable to the ravages of the pandemic.

You can find their report here.

You can find more information about the Free Alabama Movement at freealabamamovement.org/

Happy New Year! This week, we broadcast kites from Strawberry Hampton in Illinois and Daniel Dawson in Saskatchewan, who both called in this week to update us on their conditions. Strawberry Hampton, a Black transgender woman and niece of Fred Hampton, shares the horrific abuses she has suffered inside. Hampton received a rare transfer to an all-women’s facility after she was abused in a men’s unit. She is back inside, and continuing to face verbal and physical abuse. Content warning for descriptions of assault.

In our second conversation Daniel Dawson gives important updates on their hunger strike in Saskatchewan. It was originally called last month as COVID-19 spread uncontrollably inside the facility.  Prisoners were simultaneously denied any effective quarantine support and were cut off from contact with family members.

You can support Strawberry at her Patreon here.

Special thanks to Perilous Chronicle for sharing the conversation with Dawson. You can see their work at perilouschronicle.com

Today, we broadcast Part 2 of our series on Compassionate Release. Compassionate Release is the principle that sentences should be adjusted given “particularly extraordinary or compelling circumstances which could not reasonably have been foreseen by the court at the time of sentencing”.

We now continue to hear from Alison Guernsey, who tells us about the barriers thrown up against this form of sentence reduction, such as excessively long sentences due to mandatory minimums.

While it is usually considered from the perspective of individual prisoners suffering, for example, from a terminal illness, compassionate release has become an urgent, collective demand in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it spreads within crowded, poorly ventilated prisons across the US.

You can listen our first episode on Compassionate Release here.

You can hear Dr. Garrett Felber’s Kite Line episodes on the history of Black radicalism in prison here and here.  Felber was fired this week from his position at University of Mississippi due to his anti-racist work.

We begin this week with a follow-up conversation with Cory Cardinal, who has spoken with us on our past two episodes regarding a hunger strike at the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada. Previously, Cory detailed his experiences during and after the hunger strike. And now, he gives us some updates and tells Perilous about the inmates’ rights issues that led up to the hunger strike, and how these changes in the system have been impacting prisoners.

Afterwards, we talk about Compassion Release, as Alison Guernsey tells us about the history and barriers involved in this form of sentence reduction. Compassionate Release is the principle that sentences should be adjusted given “particularly extraordinary or compelling circumstances which could not reasonably have been foreseen by the court at the time of sentencing”.  While it is usually considered from the perspective of individual prisoners suffering, for example, from a terminal illness, compassionate release has become an urgent, collective demand in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it spreads within crowded, poorly ventilated prisons across the US.  Many of the authorities’ claims of pursuing compassionate release on a meaningful scale last spring have fallen flat, with release only being doled out for a tiny proportion of prisoners.  Even many prisoners held for technical violations of their probation or parole are still being denied conditional release.

WFYI reported earlier this week that only 27 people have been released in Indiana’s state prison system due to COVID concerns, out of a prison population of 26,000. Thanks again to Perilous Chronicle for their conversation with Cory Cardinal- you can find out more at perilouschronicle.com.

This week, we hear from two people who explain the rapidly deteriorating COVID-19 situation in facilities in both Saskatchewan and Indiana.

As we reported last week, prisoners at the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada organized a hunger strike last week to protest the rapidly-spreading COVID-19 outbreak at the facility. The hunger strike lasted several days and ended Monday, November 30th. Cory Cardinal, an Indigenous prisoner and a leader in the hunger strike, spoke with us again about the facilities response to the hunger strike.

Afterwards, we speak with Kelsey Kauffman, who details how the various IDOC protocols are seeding COVID-19 outbreaks in facilities across Indiana. In addition, Kauffman reads a letter from a prisoner, who describes the stress of being isolated in a cell with a potentially infectious cellmate as “something from a horror movie”. Kauffman lays out potential options for freeing a large percentage of vulnerable prisoners, as COVID-19 continues to run rampant through Indiana prisons and their surrounding communities.

You can find out more about the data Kauffman’s team has been collecting about the pandemic in Indiana prisons here.

The letter she mentions, addressed to Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, can be signed here.

We also cover Thursday’s tragic execution of Brandon Bernard. You can find out more about Brandon here.

This week, we share two interviews with prisoners confronting rampant COVID-19 infections in their facilities. Cory Cardinal, imprisoned at the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada speaks about the hunger strike they organized last weekend to protest the rapidly-spreading COVID-19 outbreak at the facility.

Prisoners at the Charles Egeler Reception and Guidance Center (RGC) in Jackson, Michigan protested “deplorable” conditions and the Michigan Dept. of Corrections’ dangerously inadequate response to the COIVD-19 pandemic. In an interview with H.H. Gonzales, a prisoner at RGC, he speaks on the protest and the current conditions inside the facility due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Special thanks to Perilous Chronicle, you can see links to the full articles associated with these interviews at perilouschronicle.com

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We are also saying goodbye to our friend Karen Smith, long-time Kite Line contributor, who passed away in a car accident earlier this week. You likely heard Karen on many episodes of the show, including the past two episodes, in which she detailed the terrible conditions facing Florida prisoners during the pandemic. As we mentioned in this week’s show, here are some of the Kite Line episodes and other articles that feature Karen and her work:

Fundraiser for Karen’s family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/karen-smith-family

Florida Prisoner Solidarity: https://www.flprisonersolidarity.org/

Memorial from fellow organizer, Panagioti Tsolkas, with links to many articles about Karen and her work: https://antistasisproject.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/next-step-we-burn-it-down/

Karen on the National Prison Strike in 2018: https://www.wuft.org/news/2018/09/05/gainesville-activists-support-national-prison-strike/

The Final Straw Radio, Karen on Operation PUSH: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2018/01/07/operation-push-strikes-in-fl-prisons/

It’s Going Down, Prison Strike Roundtable: https://itsgoingdown.org/inside-outside-all-on-the-same-side-prisonstrike-round-table/ 

Kite Line- https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-november-15-2019-more-kites-from-the-inside/

Kite Line- https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-november-20-2020-punished-for-self-preservation/

Kite Line- https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-november-27-2020-careless-with-peoples-lives-violence-neglect-in-florida/ 

Kite Line- https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-march-2-2018-reflections-in-defiance-kites-from-florida-indiana-and-greece/

Kite Line- https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-january-5-2018-operation-push/

Kite Line- https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-april-24-2020-the-deepening-crisis/

For our episode this week, we share more from Florida Prisoner Solidarity. Recently, they told us about the drastic retaliatory measures prisoners were being subjected to in the Florida Department of Corrections. These punishments were often given as a response for prisoners advocating for themselves in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. This week, they continue to shine a light on the conditions, including how prisoners are targeted and punished for speaking out.

You can find out more about their work at https://www.flprisonersolidarity.org/