Kite Line

This week, we are returning to the topic of Carceral Capitalism. We interviewed the poet and author Jackie Wang in episodes 89 and 90 of Kite Line. You can access those on our website, kitelineradio.noblogs.org. There, Wang discusses the relationship between the growth of municipal debt and the emergence of fine farming and other ways to extract money from communities of color through ticketing by police and court fees.

After a brief introduction on her inspirations behind the book, both in her own life and during her research, we hear Wang reading the concluding piece to her book, “The Prison Abolitionist Imagination”. She says that she wants to use poetics as a way to denaturalize prisons. Wang says, “I think of poetry not of the practice of writing in verse, but actually as a mode of thinking and being in the world.”

In this episode, we hear from Timothy Stewart-Winter, an Associate Professor at Rutgers University with a background studying sexuality and incarceration. Stewart-Winter wrote the book “Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics” and co-directs the Queer Newark Oral History Project. In this episode, they speak about the policing of sexuality and some of its consequences, beginning with the 1990s and the rise of sex offender registries. Last week, we heard from Joe, who lives with the stigma of being on a sex offender registry after spending time inside. Now, we trace the laws that led to this impact for the 900,000 people in the United States on state sex offender registries. They also talk about the case of the New Jersey Four: a group of queer women of color who were assaulted in New York City in 2003, and how they were put on trial for their own self-defense. In speaking with both Joe and Stewart-Winter, it becomes clear just how disproportionately sex offense laws are used against queers and people of color.

We then end with the last part of a conversation between Micol and Joe. Joe was at the center of last week’s episode, when he talked about his experiences outside after doing time for a sex offense conviction, and his dilemma surrounding his need to apologize to the victim in his case.

This week, we share the first part of a conversation we had with “Joe”. After doing ten years in prison for a sex offense conviction, Joe is now outside and navigating the difficult tightrope that many people convicted of such crimes must walk. A difficult topic to even discuss, Joe expresses the way being on the Sex Offender Registry affects all aspects of his life.

This week, we share a moving keynote speech recently given at the University of Michigan by Michelle Jones. Jones has been featured on multiple episodes of Kite Line, who shared some of her experiences at the Indiana Women’s Prison, particularly issues of mental and physical health on the inside. Now, she speaks of the extensive social, financial, and other repercussions- what she and others call the collateral consequences of incarceration- that formerly incarcerated people face after their release.

Last week, we began hearing the voices of prisoners on the topic of Angela Davis’s book, Are Prisons Obsolete? Up first, we have Anastazia Schmid’s response to the book, followed by Angaza Iman Bahar reading his response to us from Miami Correctional Facility.

This week, we start in on the topic of Are Prisons Obsolete Over the next couple of Kite Line episodes, we will be sharing the words and writings of prisoners- many of whom have been featured on previous episodes- and their responses to Angela Davis’s book, “Are Prisons Obsolete”

For context, the Abolition Study Sessions are a new political education program out of Indianapolis, that invites all people interested in fighting against mass incarceration, the prison-industrial complex, and policing to join them in studying and discussing the theory and history of prison abolition and struggles against the carceral system. At the beginning of each month, the group make copies of the texts to be studied for that month available to people incarcerated in Indiana, and they leave hard copies to be picked up and read by people on the outside. On the final Sunday of each month, the Abolition Study Sessions host a public discussion of the text, which include commentary and questions provided by incarcerated comrades.

The text for the recent Abolition Study Session was ‘Are Prisons Obsolete?’, a foundational text about prisons, written by Angela Y. Davis.

The purpose of the Abolition Study Sessions is to collectively develop the analytical tools necessary to seriously confront and dismantle the carceral system, and to build stronger relationships with comrades who are incarcerated in Indiana and struggling against the system from the inside.

We share a conversation about the book between Faheem, who was featured in two recent Kite Line episodes, and Khalfani Malik Khaldun, who is a long term prisoner in the Indiana Department of Corrections. We follow that with a reading of an essay excerpt by Anastazia Schmid, who we have featured on previous episodes of Kite Line.