Kite Line

For this episode, we share the first part of a conversation between Micol Seigel and Amanda Hall. Hall talks to us about how her firsthand experience of incarceration led her to her current work in prisoner and re-entry support. We will air the second part of this conversation next week.

You can find out more about Amanda’s work and Dream.org on their website.

On the morning of May 31st, Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Atlanta Police Department raided a house and arrested three staff members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund is a non profit organization that supports those arrested for protesting or otherwise prosecuted for involvement in social movements. Over the last year, the fund has focused on supporting those arrested for their involvement in the national movement to Stop Cop City, which opposes the construction of what would be the largest police training facility in the US, set to be built over an urban forest in South Atlanta and most notably featuring a ‘mock city’ for urban combat training and riot control.

The solidarity fund has posted bail and offered jail support to those arrested in relation to the movement.

This week’s house raid is just the most recent attack on the struggle to Stop Cop City, which has experienced extreme repression by the state of Georgia this year. In January, an activist opposing the construciton of Cop City, Manuel Terran, also known as Tortuguita, was shot and killed by Georgia State Troopers, with over 57 gunshot wounds. Georgia police have made over 90 arrests in the past two years related to the movement, and 42 of those arrested are being charged with domestic terrorism.

The attempt by Georgia government to attack a nonprofit providing legal support, however, is a new development in this ongoing campaign against Georgian’s civil rights. This is a part of a prosecutorial strategy of characterizing the entirety of Atlanta’s popular Stop Cop City social movement as a terrorist organization. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp released a statement with this week’s raid, promising to “track down every member of a criminal organization, from violent foot soldiers to their uncaring leaders.”

UPDATE: On June 2nd, Judge Altman questioned the prosecution’s basis for the case and granted bond to all three defendants. He said, ““I’m concerned about some of the same things that the defense attorney mentions about the line between legitimate free speech and crossing into illegal violent acts… Paying for camping supplies and the like—I don’t find it very impressive. There’s not a lot of meat on the bones of the allegations that thousands of dollars are going to fund illegal activities.”

The National Bail Fund Network is collecting donations for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund on a temporary basis as of May 31, 2023. All funds raised here will be used to support bail and legal defense funds of those being arrested and prosecuted in Atlanta.

More information at bit.ly/localbailfunds

This week on Kite Line we air a discussion from 2021, in which we speak with prison abolitionist journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law.

We share the first part of our discussion on their recent book, Prison by Any Other Name: Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms. The book is an in-depth look at the various “alternatives to prison” that are held up as substitutes for incarceration, but which, in many cases, bring surveillance into our homes and communities. The alternatives mentioned in our discussion today – electronic monitoring, probation, court mandated psychiatric confinement or Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOTS), and the sex offender registry – are just a few of the methods critiques in their book.

Law has been on the show before, and you can hear her talk about women’s resistance within prisons here, and on a panel about carceral feminism here.

The U.S. was shaken this week by the death of Lashawn Thompson in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail.  He had been moved to the psychiatric ward after being jailed on a simple battery charge.  Physically healthy when he was arrested, he was left in a cell infested with bed bugs and other vermin.  Michael Harper, an attorney for Thompson’s family, said he had been “eaten alive,” with over 1000 bites on his body.  This is only the latest scandal to rock Atlanta-area jails, which hold thousands of people in brutal conditions of neglect.

In order to think more broadly about the context of medical and psychiatric care in prison, we are sharing an earlier Kite Line episode this week featuring a conversation on the subject between Michelle Jones, Anastazia Schmid, and Micol Seigel. Recorded in 2016 while Jones and Schmid were both still incarcerated, we are happy to report that both women have since been released. Jones is one of the authors of the recent book,  WHO WOULD BELIEVE A PRISONER Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848–1920.

This week, we share the final part of a conversation about policing sex. Micol Seigel talks to Anne Gray Fischer about her book, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification. Today, their focus turns to Boston and Atlanta, discussing Boston’s vice district, known as the Combat Zone, and how the police used this zone to attract middle class white people for sexual tourism, while targeting, arresting, and banishing Black women in the area.

On the other hand, there was also a sustained pattern of arresting and banishing Black women in Atlanta, despite the presence of the Black political leadership there. White middle class businessmen created a campaign of sexual policing of Black people. Their group, Central Atlanta Progress Inc., shamed the Black leadership by threatening economic repercussions.

First, we have our monthly round up of prison disturbances, as compiled by Perilous Chronicle. Afterwards, Angela Davis shares a statement in support of the Stop Cop City movement. And we finish sharing a panel hosted by Haymarket Books on the abolitionist struggle to Stop Cop City.  In this section, we hear organizer Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders and journalist Micah Herskind, who walk us through the current state of repression and momentum in the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest.

You can hear our previous episodes with this panel on our website: kitelineradio.org

This week we continue sharing a panel hosted by Haymarket Books on the abolitionist struggle to stop Cop City.  In this section, we hear Hugh Farrell in conversation with Sarah Haley, a leading historian of Black feminism in the South, organizer Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders, and journalist Micah Herskind. Haley roots contemporary resistance to Cop City within a longer Black abolitionist trajectory, while Olufemi and Herskind walk us through the current state of repression and momentum in the Stop Cop City movement.

Our first parts of the panel are here and here.

You can find out more at: https://defendtheatlantaforest.org/

If you want to watch the panel online, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWwJkxxMuhQ

This week, we continue sharing Haymarket Press’s panel, “the Abolitionist Struggle against Cop City.”  In this segment, Stuart Schrader and Micah Herskind fill in the past  40 years of historical context for why the Cop City project is being pushed through specifically in Atlanta.  Schrader teaches at Johns Hopkins University and wrote Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.  He speaks about the surprising connections during the 1980s between the local political class, civil rights leadership, and Atlanta’s role in the Guatemalan civil war and genocide of indigenous people.  The Atlanta Police Department started training counter-insurgent police in Guatemala and Cop City appears to be a continuation of this tragic history.  Herskind, on the other hand, discusses the contemporary context in Atlanta, focusing on the relationship between expanded police funding and broader trends in social cutbacks and carceral expansion targeted at Black people there.

This week we begin sharing a panel hosted by Haymarket Books on the abolitionist struggle to stop Cop City.  In this section, we hear from Kwame Olufemi, of Community Movement Builders, and Sarah Haley, a leading historian of Black feminism in the South.  Olufemi powerfully situates in the Cop City proposal in Atlanta’s recent history.  He juxtaposes popular demands for a Rayshard Brooks Peace Center, named for a 2020 victim of police murder, with the government’s preference for Cop City, an urban warfare training center.  The city of Atlanta actively sabotaged the modest peace center plans while pushing through the expensive Cop City proposal despite overwhelming opposition.  Haley goes deeper in time to put Cop City in the context of long cycles of anti-Black violence, plantation-based prisons and alleged carceral reforms. Special thanks to Haymarket Books for hosting the panel.

During a dramatic week of action in the Atlanta forest this past week, hundreds of forest defenders sabotaged a construction site for the unpopular “Cop City” development.  Police responded with an act of extreme collective punishment against the entire movement, attacking a nearby Stop Cop City music festival, tasing, beating, and arresting concertgoers at random.  34 people were detained, with 23 being charged with domestic terrorism, just for being present.  Maggie Gates, a 25-year old farmer from Bloomington, was tased and arrested and is now facing these charges.  People across the country and in Bloomington have mobilized in solidarity, contesting these disturbing charges and extreme police violence.  Other media outlets in Bloomington, such as the Herald-Times, have inaccurately reported that the arrests happened at the construction site project. This false statement has been repeatedly debunked, as Gates and the other arrestees were not arrested at the construction site, but rather at the music festival.

The movement in Atlanta remains unbowed, with continuing actions across the city and a large downtown rally organized by Community Movement Builders and Black Voters Matter.  Overhanging all of this is the police murder of Tortuguita in the Atlanta forest in January.  Police have stonewalled any investigation even as the police narrative has been undermined by emerging facts.  Tortuguita’s family released the results of an independent autopsy showing that Tortuguita was sitting crosslegged and with their hands up when police shot them to death.  Among more than a dozen other wounds, they were shot in both palms.

You can find out more about the movement to Stop Cop City here: https://defendtheatlantaforest.org/