Prison Radio Show

This episode featured an interview with Lauren Aarons. She is one of the authors of a recently released report from Amnesty International entitled Aftermath: Injustice, Torture and Death in Detention in North-East Syria (available here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/MDE24/7752/2024/en/ ). The report talks about the conditions in the camps and prisons where Islamic State fighters, affiliates, and anyone still living in Baghouz when it fell to the Syrian Democratic Forces in 2019 are all held. The report talks about intense conditions of torture, death, and inhumane treatment of children and while we avoid talking about most of the horrific specific instances detailed in the report, we want to put a content warning on this interview. We talk about distressing situations facing children, and some of the specifics of torture that people in the camps and prisons told the Amnesty International researchers. We also talk about the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the regions where all the camps and detention facilities are based, as well as the United States led coalition and it's role in the camps and detention facilities. 

The episode features a panel discussion from the Asian Prisoner Support Committee and 18 Million Rising about their present campaign to demand a pardon for the APSC4. We hear from the APSC4: Kee, Bun, Maria and Peejay. They are four staff members with the Asian Prisoner Support Committee—and all are at risk of deportation. They talk about the work of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee as well as their personal stories of incarceration and release. As people with precarious immigration status, they face “double punishment.”

According to Solidarity Across Borders and No One is Illegal Montreal, Double Punishment is the unjust policy used against non-citizens after already being punished by the criminal justice system. The policies surrounding Double Punishment are racist and create a two-tier justice system in which immigrants face far more disastrous consequences for committing crimes than citizens.

In the cases of the APSC4, they are asking to be pardoned by the State of California Governor Gavin Newsom so they can stay with their families in community.

We also talk briefly at the end of the show about trauma, incarceration, and healing.

This is the first episode of Prison Radio Show’s new series on the mass incarceration of Palestinians by Israel into Israeli prisons. 

On today’s show we feature an interview with Raed Amer, the president of the Palestinian Prisoner Society, / sometimes translated as the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club Association is an independent, national, humanitarian, social, and popular association founded on September 27, 1993 that assists Palestinian prisoners inside and their families as well as assists with reintegration into society once those inside are released. The idea of establishing it was crystallized inside Israeli occupation prisons by Palestinian prisoners and is an extension and integral part of the Palestinian prisoner movement.

The end of the show featured audio from a prisoner currently incarcerated on the island of Montreal, sharing songs he wrote and a message from the inside. 

This show featured audio from a workshop given by the Termite Collective as part of the Concordia Student Union's teach-in during their three day strike in January 2024. The workshop was about prisoner justice organizing and featured a "True or False" questionnaire about the Canadian prison system. Show also features two Bob Marley song requests from a prisoner in Riviere des Prairies prison. 

This show featured two audio recordings from prisonradio.org that were aired at the top of the show. We then shared audio from the annual New Years Eve Noise Demo which happened in Laval, Quebec on the evening of December 31, 2023 outside of four different carceral institutions - two federal prison for men, one co-ed provincial prison, and one migrant prison. 

This show featured audio from a panel discussion that happened at UQAM in September. The panel was part of a symposium was called Penser les catégories pénales à l’aune des sciences sociales. The panel itself was called Perspective queer et luttes anti-carcérales.

We also opened the show commemorating the passing of Ed Mead.

This is our Prisoner Justice Day Special. It features audio from people who would have spoken at the Montreal PJD event, which was cancelled due to weather conditions. You will hear from Wendy Bariteau and Christophe Lewis, who were both scheduled to speak at the Montreal PJD event. Christophe shares audio from a prisoner who talks about a friend of his who was recently killed by guards in a provincial prison in Ontario. 

We also share audio from the Prisoner Justice Day TV Broadcast, which was livestreamed at https://www.facebook.com/CPEPgroup. 

Again, we are re-posting this directly from the CKUT archives (which are here: https://ckut.ca/playlists/PS) so you will hear a little bit of the show before us at the top of the show. 

This show features a long news section about a recent class-action lawsuit as well as an interview with Rasheed Stanley-Lockheart, the Reentry Director with the Ahimsa Collective. He is one of the authors of the recently released memo called "The Case for People First Reentry" and our interview focused on that memo. Heads up we downloaded the audio from CKUT's archives and so there are 2 minutes of audio from the previous show at the top of the hour. 

Our first ever Tuesday show! Our schedule has now changed to every other Tuesday night from 6-7pm! As we said on the last episode, we don't normally post shows where the majority of the content is a re-broadcast, but this show also included original audio from the inside. We have been getting calls from Joshua, who is currently incarcerated at Riviere des Prairies prison on the island of Montreal. He's having a rough time and wanted some of his story shared on air. If you want to support Joshua, you can write to him! Joshua Rashid, Établissement de détention de Rivière-des-Prairies, 11900, rue Armand-Chaput, Montréal (Québec) H1C 1S7. He would appreciate the support. 

This show also featured re-broadcasted audio from The Final Straw Radio's show from July 2, 2023. You can listen to the full episode here: https://thefinalstrawradio.libsyn.com/prisoner-support-dan-baker-mongoose-distro-pushing-down-the-walls We edited it for length on our show. 

Finally, we read this essay to share with our inside listeners. https://scalawagmagazine.org/2023/06/mourning-prison/ 

We don't normally post episodes where the majority of the content is re-broadcasts from other shows, but this one includes new audio from inside correspondent Muti Ajamu-Osagboro. It is a short piece from him about experiencing the wildfire smoke from Quebec while imprisoned in Pennsylvania. The rest of the episode is a re-air from CFRC Kingston's Prison Radio episode from September 2022 about Roger Caron - you can listen to their full episode here: https://cfrcprisonradio.wordpress.com/2022/09/07/970/ We edited their episode for length.