Welcome back to the Perilous Podcast, a news and oral history project featuring original interviews with prisoners and detainees who have participated in or witnessed protests, uprisings and other forms of unrest behind bars. We also gather analysis and insight from researchers and advocates in an effort to build a better understanding of systems of incarceration and collective action and strategy.

In this episode we hear an audio version of Over a Decade of Resistance to the Northwest Detention Center written by Ridley Seawood and Alexa Villatoro. 

Visit our website to view the show notes for this episode. 

Welcome to another episode of the Perilous Podcast. This week we bring you an audio version of our recently published article on police surveillance of activists in Tucson, Arizona, during the 2020 wave of protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. The original article can be found here.

Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Perilous Podcast. Recently our capacity for producing podcasts has fallen off a bit. We send our apologies to our listeners for the gap in episodes. This month, we bring you an audio version of our article on the death of anarchist prisoner Brian McCarvill, who tragically died from COVID while still inside, on his 68th birthday. Our sincere condolences to those who knew Brian.

We would also like to take this time to let you all know about a new website for indigenous Yaqui land defender, Fidencio Aldama Perez, from the northern Mexican state of Sonora. He is currently sentenced to 15 years and six months on trumped up charges. More info can be found in both Spanish and English at fidencioaldama.org.

Before we get in to the content for today's podcast, we have a few headlines from some of the current struggles ongoing inside prisons and detention centers.

Near Montgomery, Alabama at the Kilby  Correctional Facility, 11 imprisoned people have been on hunger strike since January 1st in response to the conditions of their captivity. The strike was launched to coincide with the Alabama prison strike/30 Day Economic Blackout called for by the Free Alabama Movement and is  planned to conclude on January 31st. The hunger strikers are refusing food and medicine until they see steps taken to curb the rampant prisoner on prisoner and guard on prisoner violence, the smuggling of drugs by guards into the prison, and the deadly impact of the Arizona Department of Correction's negligence in preventing the spread of COVID19. On January 4th, prisoner Ronnie Miller, was beaten by a guard in retaliation for his participation in the strike he is now out of the infirmary and recovering in his cell. See our show notes for more details  and for information on how to write these 11 individuals.

On January 4th, 60 ICE detainees held in the Hudson County Jail in New Jersey launched a hunger strike in response to the inhumane conditions and injustice of their captivity. The strikers call on those outside to join the fight against racist immigration policy, family separation, medical neglect, and incarceration. According to immigrant support group Abolish Ice NY-NJ, as many as 146 people have participated in hunger strike. 40 detainees transferred to Orange County Correctional Facility and 3 strikers placed in solitary in retaliation for their participation in the strike.

More info:

As of January 8th, Victor Fonseca reached 50 days of hunger striking in North West Detention Center. Victor is now joined by four women hunger striking. These detainees strike to demand that everyone in solitary be released, that everyone who is sick be released, that all detainees be freed. Follow La Resistencia North West for updates.

On this episode, we wanted to try something a little different. This past November, the Perilous Chronicle released a data analysis and article about the first 90 days of prisoner revolt after COVID-19. This was exciting for us as a project and as people concerned with prisoners and their resistance. So we wanted to talk directly with our data editor, to give folks an inside look into thePerilous Chronicle project and why we think this type of analysis is unique and important for the movement against prisons both inside and outside the prison walls.

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Special music interlude from NoName

This episode was first featured on "This is America", a project of It's Going Down.

In order to get a closer look at the situation, Perilous correspondent Ryan Fatica spoke with a prisoner named Bryan MacDonand who was evacuated to the Oregon State Penitentiary. Bryan described the conditions he is living through as the constant threat of COVID-19 collides with the dangers of smoke inhalation, lack of adequate food and medication and the violence of the prison environment.

Welcome back to the Perilous Podcast, a news and oral history project featuring original interviews with prisoners and detainees who have participated in or witnessed protests, uprisings and other forms of unrest behind bars. We also gather analysis and insight from researchers and advocates in an effort to build a better understanding of systems of incarceration and collective action and strategy.

This week, we cover the hunger strike that occurred at the Pine Prairie ICE Detention Center in Louisiana. In order to better understand what happened at Pine Prairie and the context in which the protest occurred, Perilous correspondent Ryan Fatica spoke with Sylvie Bello, founder and CEO of the Cameroonian American Council. Sylvie, who is in touch with the strikers and their families, was able to paint a vivid picture of the conditions that have led the detainees at Pine Prairie to put their bodies on the line.

Perilous Chronicle is run by a small group of dedicated volunteers and very little funding. If you value our work, please support us by visiting our website and donating via PayPal or Patreon and rate and follow us on iTunes. With your help, we can expand our efforts to track, document and archive the stories of prisoners and detainees who are standing up for themselves in the midst of overwhelming odds. Perilous relies on crowdsourced information for our grassroots tracking and archival efforts. If you have information or are in touch with a prisoner or detainee who has witnessed or been involved in a protest or other form of unrest, please get in touch with us at [email protected].

For show notes, please visit our website at perilouschronicle.com.

Summary

Welcome back to the Perilous Podcast, a news and oral history project featuring original interviews with prisoners and detainees who have participated in or witnessed protests, uprisings and other forms of unrest behind bars. We also gather analysis and insight from researchers and advocates in an effort to build a better understanding of systems of incarceration and collective action and strategy.

In this episode, we cover a protest that began this month, August of 2020, at Winn Correctional in Louisiana. We were able to interview several detainees in the facility to talk about the protest and the conditions that sparked it, as well as an interview with Shane Bauer, the author and investigative journalist who worked undercover at the Winn Correctional in 2015 and released a book about his experience titled, “American Prison”. A full article version of the story can be found on our website, as well as the unedited audio from every detainee interview we conducted. 

Perilous Chronicle is run by a small group of dedicated volunteers and very little funding. If you value our work, please support us by visiting our website and donating via PayPal or Patreon and rate and follow us on iTunes. With your help, we can expand our efforts to track, document and archive the stories of prisoners and detainees who are standing up for themselves in the midst of overwhelming odds. Perilous relies on crowdsourced information for our grassroots tracking and archival efforts. If you have information or are in touch with a prisoner or detainee who has witnessed or been involved in a protest or other form of unrest, please get in touch with us at [email protected].

Welcome back to the Perilous Podcast, a news and oral history project featuring original interviews with prisoners and detainees who have participated in or witnessed protests, uprisings and other forms of unrest behind bars. We also gather analysis and insight from researchers and advocates in an effort to build a better understanding of systems of incarceration and collective action and strategy.

This week, we cover the hunger strike that occurred in early June at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center. The hunger strike, which began on June 4 and lasted about 5 days, involved at least 70 detainees, although the exact number is unknown. The strikers released a statement expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement. They wrote,

Mr. Asif Qazi, a detainee at Mesa Verde, went on to explain what he and his fellow strikers were attempting to do:

The detainees later released a video statement, further expressing their solidarity with the uprising against the murder of George Floyd and linking their efforts to the one in streets.

In order to better understand what happened at Mesa Verde, we interviewed Jack Herrera about his coverage of the strike. Jack Herrera is an independent journalist focusing on immigration, refugee issues, and human rights. His work has appeared in The Nation, Politico Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Popular Science, TruthOut, Pacific Standard and more. He is currently based in San Francisco and frequently travels to Mexico. His article about the hunger strike at Mesa Verde was published in PRISM. In addition to agreeing to do an interview with us, Mr. Herrera also shared with us audio from his interview with Mr. Qazi, which we’ll play for you throughout the show. Special thanks to Mr. Herrera for his help in telling this story.

Perilous Chronicle is run by a small group of dedicated volunteers and very little funding. If you value our work, please support us by visiting our website and donating via PayPal or Patreon and rate and follow us on iTunes. With your help, we can expand our efforts to track, document and archive the stories of prisoners and detainees who are standing up for themselves in the midst of overwhelming odds. Perilous relies on crowdsourced information for our grassroots tracking and archival efforts. If you have information or are in touch with a prisoner or detainee who has witnessed or been involved in a protest or other form of unrest, please get in touch with us at [email protected].

This week, we have a very special interview with Dr. Heather Ann Thompson, historian at the University of Michigan, and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy and Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City.

Perilous Researchers Ryan Fatica and Duncan Tarr spoke with Dr. Thompson about the wave of unrest sweeping the country in jails, prisons and detention centers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In late April, Dr. Thompson made this prescient statement in an interview with Jacobin: “I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but these are unstable times. You cannot shut down the US economy for this long, with income inequality at the highest rate it has been since the Gilded Age, without expecting some social unrest. I don’t doubt that people will protest, and they will have every right to do so. But I worry about the repression.” Just one month later, multiple American cities were on fire as people reacted to the murder of George Floyd and the systematic racism and out of control police violence it represented.

The interview was recorded days before the murder of George Floyd so Dr. Thompson, a scholar of popular uprisings, does not reflect directly upon the movement that has since emerged and which is currently reshaping the world, but much of our conversation about the wave of prison rebellion that immediately preceded the George Floyd Uprisings is applicable to our current task of analyzing our present moment.

This week, we spoke with Diego Alcala, a criminal defense and human rights attorney based in Puerto Rico about a hunger strike that occurred on March 20 at a prison in Guayama, Puerto Rico and we also read a letter from the hunger strikers that was recently translated to English by friends of Perilous Chronicle. The hunger strike at Guayama has not been covered by English language news, evidence of the lack of attention given on the mainland US to both the suffering and the brave resistance of those living in this US territory.

For links to our article about the hunger strike at Guayama, the original Spanish-language article from Primera Hora and to see Diego’s report, which has been recently translated to English, please check out our show notes.

Perilous Chronicle is run by a small group of dedicated volunteers and very little funding. If you value our work, please support us by visiting our website and donating via PayPal or Patreon. With your help, we can expand our efforts to track, document and archive the stories of prisoners and detainees who are standing up for themselves in the midst of overwhelming odds. Perilous relies on crowdsourced information for our grassroots tracking and archival efforts. If you have information or are in touch with a prisoner or detainee who has witnessed or been involved in a protest or other form of unrest, please get in touch with us at [email protected]