Kite Line

For this week’s episode,Bella Bravo spoke with Johana Bhuiyan, a journalist and author of a powerful series of articles about immigrant surveillance. She covers the vast program called “intensive supervision appearance program” which purports to be “humane alternative” to immigration detention.

Managing the program on behalf of ICE is BI Inc, a subsidiary of the Geo Group, one of the US’s largest private prison corporations. They note the many similarities between this method of “monitoring” immigrants and what we know as e-carceration, or electronic monitoring systems used for probation, parole, and house arrest.

You can read Bhuiyan’s articles that explore this topic more in depth:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/23/us-immigration-isap-surveillance

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/07/us-immigration-surveillance-ice-bi-isap

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/08/us-immigrants-isap-ice-bi-ankle-monitor

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/14/us-immigration-surveillance-isap

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/14/immigration-advocates-alternative-to-detention-lawsuit-ice

Our monthly round-up of prisoner disturbances is compiled by Perilous Chronicle.

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 responds to politically-engaged prisoners. When prisoners become conscious and organized, the prison ramps the level of repression. As you’ll hear Baye and Jok discuss, prisoners who educate themselves are viewed as a threat to the system that confines them.

This conversation was part of the Prisoners Speak Out Series, hosted by IDOC Watch and Focus Initiatives.You can listen to their previous conversation here.

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.

First, we hear a statement from an Indigenous organizer about the impact such a facility would have. Afterwards, we share a press conference that was called earlier this week by the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in response to a violent police raid on the occupation earlier this week. Even before that, at a demonstration last Saturday, peaceful protestors were brutally arrested.  As you’ll hear one Atlanta resident say, they feel this is an attempt to demoralize a vibrant and diverse movement that is led by local community members against the replacement of the largest urban tree canopy in the United States, by the largest police training compound in the United States.

This week, we hear the first part of the recent webinar ‘USA vs. Jessica Reznicek: fighting the criminalization of Water Protectors’.  The webinar description reads:

“Since the No-DAPL movement, dozens of states have passed critical infrastructure laws that increase criminal penalties for anyone taking action against destructive fossil fuel projects. In 2017, 80 Republicans and 4 Democrats asked the Justice Department to prosecute Jessica Reznick and the valve turners as terrorists. Last year, the justice department answered the call and applied a terrorism enhancement to Jessica’s case, doubling her sentence.  In this webinar you will hear the voices of those standing up against the criminalization of climate action.”

The moderators of the April event were Charlotte and Leoyla Cowboy.  Speakers in this segment include Nizhóní Begay and Jaden Cowboy from the Water Protector Legal Collective, Cindy Spoon and Cherri Foytlin from the L’eau Est La Vie anti-pipeline campaign, and Monty Hollywood & Alex from the Campaign to Free Jessica Reznicek.

We’ll share the rest of this webinar in future episodes.  A full video recording is also available online here.  You can hear our previous episodes about Jessica’s case here.

To learn more about her case, you can watch the campaign’s latest video or visit supportjessicareznicek.com

In celebration of recently completing 300 consecutive episodes, we are airing some of our Kite Line crew’s favorite clips from our archive of hundreds of episodes. After we hear a round up of prison disturbances as compiled by Perilous Chronicle, we play a clip from episode 119, in which Talila Lewis (TL) describes some of the challenges to being Deaf in prison.

Afterwards, we return to Renford Farrier, a Canadian prisoner who we heard from last week. Last week, we heard the beginning of his story. This week, he finishes up by talking to us more about his struggles to get released. Farrier was given a life sentence for killing a man, and he believed he’d be out on parole after 10 years. Now, it’s been 30 years, and Farrier is still inside.

Something common between this conversation and the one we heard with TL is misconceptions about the experience of others. Farrier talks about the false perceptions of the Canadian prison system- namely that people think that Canadian prisons are somehow nicer and less racist than in the US. He walks us through how he initially understood his sentence to be ten years, but in practice, each time he comes up for parole he is denied. The life-10 sentence is misleading, since many prisoners do not get paroled after ten years, given that in order to do so you need to basically have a spotless record inside. To make matters worse, when they actually are paroled, it’s nearly impossible to stay out. The parole system is so controlling that parolees are often accused of parole breaches, landing them back inside while they await a parole board’s decision.

As a Black prisoner, Farrier feels like he’s been unfairly denied parole repeatedly, and talks to us about his feelings leading up to his next parole hearing- which is at the end of this year.

Thanks to Renford Farrier for sharing his story, to Perilous for their headlines, and to everyone who helped with the show. You can find out more about the recent prison disturbances at perilouschronicle.com

You can listen to our shows about being Deaf and disabled in prison here:

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/being-heard-prison-and-the-deaf-community/

You can find out more about Renford’s case, hear other interviews he has given, and learn how to support him at: https://www.freefarrier.ca/

Last week, marked our 300th episode!

Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing clips of our favorite moments from our archive of shows. The following story is from Mark Cook, one of our all-time favorite guests on Kite Line. In this gem, Cook, a founding member of the Walla Walla Black Panther Party, tells us the story of using stolen materials from prison work to construct a printing press for the distribution of radical materials across the prison. Made from simple kitchen and household items, they created a paper that informed prisoners of various actions and shared gossip about prison officials.

Afterward, we share a call from a Canadian prisoner named Renford Farrier. We will air more of this conversation next week, but for now, Farrier introduces us to himself and his case. You’ll hear some similarities with what Baye Sylvester talked about last week- the way that plea deals and faith in the system can confuse and intimidate prisoners and their families into accepting unfavorable charges.

Special thanks to both Farrier and Cook. We will hear more of Farrier’s story next week.

You can hear the full episode with Mark Cook here:

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/recalling-past-struggles/

More of Mark’s interviews with us are here:

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/out-again-everything-continues-more-stories-from-mark-cook/

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/mark-cook-reflects-on-solidarity-across-the-walls/

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/if-you-care-grow-your-hair-prison-rebellion-strategies-from-the-1960s/

https://www.kitelineradio.org/podcast/communication-is-a-human-right-more-reflections-from-mark-cook/

Welcome to the 300th episode of Kite Line.

Over the upcoming weeks, we will be sharing some of our favorite moments from our archive of shows, but we encourage you to go to our website, kitelineradio.org, to browse the other 299 episodes and find some favorites of your own. On our end, we will be sharing moments that the Kite Line team have found memorable, moving, and informative.

But this week, we still have some brand-new content. We share with you a conversation between Jok Huerta from Focus Initiatives and Baye Sylvester. They talk about Sylvester’s decades-long term in prison, and about the childhood that helped lead him there. They talk about how the prison system often bargains with people facing intimidating sentences, getting them to plead to serious charges, or to charges they didn’t commit.

We would like to thank our hometown radio station, WFHB, for all their support over these 300 episodes. Kite Line is entirely volunteer-based, and the folks at WFHB helped us expand into a show that’s aired across the U.S. We remain committed to helping amplify the voices of people affected by incarceration, and invite you to keep joining us.

Please check out IDOC Watch and Focus Initiatives to find out more about their programming.

Thanks to all our wonderful volunteers who have helped us get to 300 consecutive episodes!

Eric King is an anarchist prisoner who was arrested in September 2014 after he carried out a solidarity action to support the Ferguson Uprising.  We speak again today with his lawyer, Lauren Regan, about the harsh violence and repression he has faced in prison, culminating in trumped-up charges of assaulting a guard, charges which he just defeated in court.  In further retaliation for his court victory, he is now being moved to a maximum-security facility with only two years left on his sentence. This week, Regan describes the recent incident of abuse King suffered at the hands of guards. She tells the story of the trial itself, highlighting the pattern of guards closing ranks in moments like this. Regan points to the broader picture of what motivates guards to lie, and what makes people often want to believe authority figures instead of their peers.

His supporters are requesting that people call the Mid-Atlantic Bureau of Prisons Regional Office and request answers about why he is being punitively transferred. Check out his support page for more information.

Eric King is an anarchist prisoner who was arrested in September 2014 after he carried out a solidarity action in support of the Ferguson Uprising.  We speak today with his lawyer, Lauren Regan, about the harsh violence and repression he has faced in prison, culminating in trumped-up charges of assaulting a guard, charges which he just defeated in court.  In further retaliation for his court victory, he is now being moved to a maximum-security facility with only two years left on his sentence. Regan speaks about the impunity- the wall of silence- that guards enjoy while viciously attacking prisoners.

His supporters are requesting that people call the Mid-Atlantic Bureau of Prisons Regional Office and request answers about why he is being punitively transferred. Check out his support page for more information.

For our show this week, Micol Seigel talks to Abby Cuniff. Cuniff is a reporter who recently published an article about arsenic contamination in Kern Valley State Prison in California. In this conversation, they talk about the prevalence of arsenic in California’s Central Valley- including in its prisons.

She also describes the impact of the PLRA- The Prison Litigation Reform Act- a law Congress put in place in the 1990s, which was designed to decrease the incidence of litigation within the court system. This law was put into place to undermine the ability of jailhouse lawyers to file lawsuits addressing their cases and conditions.

Cuniff details some of their research, and highlights the neglect many prisoners faced when their health problems began to surface.

Special thanks to Abby and Micol. You can read Abby’s story on Truthout.

Thanks to Perilous Chronicle- check them out at perilouschronicle.com