Kite Line

Keith LaMar, also known as Bomani Shakur, is a prisoner on Ohio’s Death Row.  He is facing execution in autumn 2023 after being framed in prison due to his advocacy for other prisoners and his refusal to snitch on others in the aftermath of the 1993 Lucasville Uprising.  He has consistently expressed solidarity with other Lucasville prisoners and has engaged in struggles for his rights, especially his ability to communicate with the world outside the prison walls.  This week, LaMar went on hunger strike to protest the policies of GTL, a private prison phone provider we have covered before, and prison’s denial of phone access.  He won his demands on the third day and suspended his strike.  We are proud to share these reflections from while he was still on strike, regarding his current situation as well as an entire history of struggles for dignity, communication, and survival.

We close this episode with two other segments from our earlier episodes on LaMar. First, we have his thoughts from our 2016 episode, followed by a statement he wrote in 2019 in response to his execution date being set.

You can learn about his recent jazz album collaboration with Albert Marques, Freedom First, on their website. You can hear our episode on LaMar’s case here:

12 | The Bomani Episode

We launch into this episode with our monthly roundup of prison disturbances, as compiled by Perilous Chronicle.  Afterwards, we have audio from a prisoner, Paul Lee, reporting on a massive transfer of inmates back in February from Pontiac, Illinois correctional facility to Centralia Correctional Center due to an ongoing black mold problem, which had been accumulating at the facility for decades.

We  close with another highlight from our archive of over 300 shows. We’ve been sharing important segments from previous episodes to celebrate more than 300 consecutive, weekly episodes. This poem is from Phillip Roberts, who was on our show in 2019 for an episode about prison writing programs. Here he is, talking about the moment he saw his toddler daughter after getting out of prison. He follows by reading his poem “Daddy’s Little Princess”.

You can listen to our previous episode with Phillip here:

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/prisoners-write-prisoners-speak/

You can find out more detail about the prison disturbances we mentioned, along with other research about incarceration in North America at perilouschronicle.com

We are again sticking close to home this week. We share the second part of a panel on the effects of incarceration on families. Max E. Smith, Becky Harris, Stacy Flynn, and Ashley C. Ford speak on their experiences of having incarcerated loved ones or how their time inside affected their family members.

All Indiana residents, they tell us about the stigmas people face when they have family inside as well as the financial burden placed on families. As one panelist mentioned last week, sometimes the pain families endure is justified as an extension of the punishment for the incarcerated person, a cruel way to legitimate the burden placed on the shoulders of family members.

We are sticking close to home this week. We share the first part of a panel on the effects of incarceration on families. Max E. Smith, Becky Harris, Stacy Flynn, and Ashley C. Ford speak on their experiences of having incarcerated loved ones or how their time inside affected their family members.

All Indiana residents, they tell us about the stigmas people face when they have family inside as well as the financial burden placed on families. As one panelist mentions, sometimes the pain families endure is seen as an extension of the punishment for the incarcerated person, a cruel way to justify the burden placed on the shoulders of family members.

We recently marked our 300th consecutive episode, and in honor of that we have been airing our favorite selections from previous shows. As we approach the upcoming 4 year anniversary of the most recent National Prison Strike, we wanted to air these calls from two prisoners inside South Carolina, who risked their own safety to send us messages about the conditions people were facing in their facility. From that episode:

The National Prison Strike is on its second week. Shutdowns have been confirmed in five Florida prisons, with new strike activity in Georgia, California, and Maryland. Although information is slow to come in, we know of a hunger strike in Indiana, commissary boycotts in South Carolina, and solidarity demonstrations across the country.

This week, we hear statements from two prisoners who spoke to us from within the South Carolina prisons. They give us some insight into how the prisoners in their area are participating in the strike in the form of commissary boycotts, and give statements of solidarity with prisoners in other facilities on strike. They give us information about the aftermath of the incident at Lee Correctional Institution, and we hear more about the conditions they face while on lockdown.

In response to the riot at Lee Correctional Institution, a network of imprisoned organizers called Jailhouse Lawyers Speak called for the National Prison Strike, both to fight against the deplorable conditions that exacerbated the prisoner-on-prisoner violence, but also to productively redirect anger towards collective action against the prison system.

This week on Kite Line, we return to Atlanta’s proposed “Cop City”- a police training facility set to be built over a vast urban forest. People from across the city and the country have been organizing against its construction, which would make it the largest police training facility in the United States.  People have been organizing protests in the streets, call-in campaigns, and holding down an ongoing occupation in the forest itself.

For our coverage this week, we hear from Sasha Tycko, an anthropologist living in Atlanta. Sasha tells us about the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, a defunct facility whose ruins exist on the proposed site of Cop City. Sasha has been researching and exploring the forest where the prison farm was, and tells us about its history and what the site represents on a broader level.

Our previous episode about Atlanta’s Cop City can be heard here:

304 | Atlanta’s “Cop City”

This week, we share the final part of a conversation about Rikers Island between Bella Bravo and Jarrod Shanahan. Shanahan is a writer, activist, and professor of Criminal Justice based in Chicago. He has previously appeared on Kite Line to discuss mass incarceration and the George Floyd rebellion. We are speaking again today about his new book Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage.

Captives recounts the last seventy years of New York politics from the perspective of the city’s jails. Shanahan’s research began when he himself was awaiting a sentence he knew would land him on the island. His observations and experiences of Rikers’ violence during his short-stint there became the foundation for this history of mass incarceration and the accompanying triumph of neoliberalism. Shanahan shows that historical controversies are always about the present too. So while Captives tells the story of how Rikers Island—and the social order it represents—came to be, it bears many lessons for those struggling against prisons and jails today.

We encourage you to listen to last week’s episode with Jarrod as he gives some of the history of Rikers as a prelude to this week’s reflections on systemic challenging facing abolitionists.

Our previous episodes with Jarrod are here:

309 | Captives with Jarrod Shanahan, Part One

282 | Carceral Nonprofits

281 | Twice-stolen Wealth

212 | The Crisis Behind a Hot American Summer

213 | George Jackson and the Legacy of Revolt

Thanks to Jarrod and Bella. Jarrod’s book is available through Verso Books.

This week, Bella Bravo speaks with Jarrod Shanahan, a writer, activist, and professor of Criminal Justice based in Chicago. Shanahan has been on previous episodes, discussing mass incarceration and the George Floyd rebellion. We are speaking today about his new book Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage.

Captives recounts the last seventy years of New York politics from the perspective of the city’s jails. Shanahan’s research began when he himself was awaiting a sentence he knew would land him on the island. His observations and experiences of Rikers’ violence during his short-stint there became the foundation for this history of mass incarceration and the triumph of neoliberalism. Drawing upon C.L.R. James, Shanahan sees that historical controversies are always about the present. So while Captives tells the story of how Rikers Island—and the social order it represents—came to be, it bears many lessons for those struggling against prisons and jails today.

About Shanahan:

Jarrod Shanahan is a writer, activist, and educator based in Chicago. He works as an assistant professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University and is the author of the Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage. Shanahan and his frequent collaborator Zhandarka Kurti have previously appeared on Kite Line discussing mass incarceration and the 2020 George Floyd uprising. They are the authors of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and the Future of America’s Punishment System. Along with Geert Dhondt, they are editors of Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life and Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity, a forthcoming collection of Noel Ignatiev’s essays.

Previous Kite Line episodes with Shanahan:

212 | The Crisis Behind a Hot American Summer

213 | George Jackson and the Legacy of Revolt

281 | Twice-stolen Wealth

282 | Carceral Nonprofits

Interview with Maru Moro Villalpando of La Resistencia, a project that organizes against the Northwest Detention Center. In this conversation, Maru passes a kite along on behalf of immigrants housed in the facility. As they point out, facilities like this are “black boxes” where extra effort must be taken to shed light on conditions inside.

Maru discusses some of the previous actions, including multiple hunger strikes, that detainees have carried out to protest issues such as poor food quality, lack of medical care, and poor sleeping conditions. More recently, a lack of clean facilities led them to protest their conditions, as workers were unable to clean the detention center due to Covid. One of the recent demands of the hunger strike is that more measures be taken to stop GEO guards and ICE officers from bringing Covid into the facility, which already became an ongoing hotspot during the pandemic.

They also discuss the rapidly expanding digital prison system, predatory companies trapping immigrants into unintentional prison. This digital prison system now monitors not only those in ICE proceedings, but their family and household members as well.

This week we return to our conversation between Baye Sylvester and Focus Initiatives’ Jok Huerta. Both formerly incarcerated in Indiana, they described the circumstances that brought them to prison in a previous episode. In this segment, they talk about the way the prison system strips people of their humanity- and the struggle to retain one’s sense of self.

You can hear our previous episodes with Jok and Baye:

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/300-bargaining-in-bad-faith/

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/305-the-problem-of-politicization/