Kite Line

Last April, the Indiana Department of Corrections banned all correspondence to it’s 25,000 prisoners, except that which is handwritten on lined white paper. The official explanation is that this is an attempt to block trafficking of synthetic marijuana which can be applied to paper. But many prisoners and advocates have pointed to a long series of earlier measures targeting correspondence and the mailing of political and religious materials and argue that this is just the latest and most sweeping attempt to isolate prisoners from outside supporters. In particular, prisoners have pointed to the exclusion of Afrocentric and anti-racist materials by mail room censors.

The mail ban policy pushes families, friends, and supporters to use J-Pay, a proprietary pay-only online communications system. Sending emails through J-Pay requires the purchase of expensive digital “stamps,” channeling money to IDOC and its contractors rather than the post office. It is also easier to surveil.

On today’s episode, we share statements from prisoners who’ve been hurt by the mail ban. They reflect on ways that the ban has secluded them from their families, limited their access to reading materials, and pushed them into isolation.

Our news this week focuses on the prisoners who are fighting California’s wildfires for as little as a dollar an hour while actually fighting fires. In total, about thirty-eight hundred male and female inmates are fighting fires in California. They constitute around thirteen percent of the state’s firefighters. Their low salaries save taxpayers a hundred twenty-four million dollars a year. But does this say more about the program or about the prison system itself? This is one of the questions we asked Mohammed Scheck of Critical Resistance, a California based Prison abolition organization. Mohammed gave us some insight into how the program is viewed by inmates, politicians, and the media.

We then finish the 2nd part of Elizabeth Hinton’s lecture on the rise of mass incarceration. In her talk, she traces the creation and rise of mass incarceration as a strategy of America’s ruling class. Her historical research, which culminated in a book last year called “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” demonstrates that the explosion of prison construction predated any rise in crime, but was instead a response to the spread of social unrest and black protest. You can hear the first half of her lecture in last week’s episode of Kite Line.