This week, we are trying something new so that we can cover the full range of increased prisoner struggles. We will be teaming up with Perilous Chronicle at the beginning of each month to give you headlines tracking disturbances in prisons, jails, and detention centers. Perilous is a project seeking to gather and track information on prison uprisings, riots, protests, strikes, and other disturbances within public and private jails, prisons, and detention centers in the US and Canada. In this process, they rely on crowdsourced information in addition to local news outlets and our own reporting. In this segment, we share the events that Perilous tracked for January and February 2021.

After that, we hear from a prisoner being held while awaiting trial in FDC SeaTac. He spoke to us awhile back about a lack of COVID-19 protocols in the facility. As you’ll hear, he had his phone privileges revoked for shining a light on their conditions. He talks to us this week about how the COVID protocols have changed since he spoke out, and with a new administration coming into office. He also talks about the First Step Act, signed into law by Trump in 2018- which allegedly intends to reorient prisons around rehabilitation rather than punishment. As he tells us, it’s not going that way in his facility- where the two classes they are offering have no real world application.

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