Prison Radio Show

This episode focused on Palestinian prisoners and featured an interview with the Director of the International Committee of the Palestinian Prisoners' Society, Rahid Ahmer, who is based in Nablus in the West Bank.

As always the audio from the previous show bleeds into the start of this one! We are trying to catch up with a year of shows that have been absent in our podcast feed and so we have been downloading directly from the CKUT archives and posting here. The way the archives work, there is often a minute or two of the previous show at the start of the hour.

This show was our funding drive special! We talked to folks on parole and people in prison about why CKUT and the Prison Radio Show matters to them. Then the hosts share a bit about why they care about the show and their motivations for volunteering with the station.

This episode featured audio from a panel discussion that happened in March 2025 in Montreal. It was part of the Rafales Anarchist Learning Camp, organized by the Revolutionary Anarchist Organization. The panel was on police and prison abolition and featured Mélina from the Comité Autonome du Travail du Sexe, Marquis Bey who is a professor of Black Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and English at Northwestern University, Fallon who once faced terrorism charges and spent a year in jail in Mexico, and Cedar from the Hamilton, Ontario based Barton Prison Solidarity Project. The panel was facilitated by Ted Rutland, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal. Some speakers on the panel spoke in English and some spoke in French.

This episode features a special interview with Maryam Kashani, an associate professor at the University of Illinois and an organizer with Believers Bail Out, a "community led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition". Professor Kashani published the book Medina by the Bay in 2023, which was "an ethnocinematic examination of how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics."

https://www.maryamkashani.com

This episode featured audio from organizers with the International Coalition for Palestinian Hostages, including their spokesperson Dr. Mai Hussein. This exclusive Prison Radio Show interview was recorded in August 2024. The audio is taken straight from the CKUT archives and includes a small bit of the show that airs before PRS.

This episode featured archival and live footage from the New Years Eve Noise Demo in Montreal, an annual event where people gather outside prisons and send holiday greetings to people locked up inside. The event features fireworks, speeches, music, and banners all in support of prisoners.

This episode focused on migrant justice and prisoner justice. We shared audio from a demonstration that took place in November 2024 outside the immigration detention centre in Laval, Quebec. The demonstration was organized by Solidarity Across Borders in solidarity with a Colombian family who was facing deportation at the hands of the Canadian Border Services Agency.

We also shared some audio from the archives including an interview from 2014 with an organizer from the End Immigration Detention Network, an organization that was key in supporting migrants who went on hunger strike in the fall of 2013 in protest of their conditions inside the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario.

We then featured more audio from the archives, this time it was Helen Hudson, a Montreal based organizer, who spoke on a panel in 2018 about how prisons are colonial institutions like borders and how migrant justice goes hand in hand with prison abolition.

The episode ends with more audio from the 2024 demonstration outside the migrant prison in Laval. Speeches are in English, Spanish, and French.

This episode featured audio from a conference called Abolitionist Initimicies that happened from June 29-July 1, 2024 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Information on the conference can be found here: https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/events/view/abolitionist-intimacies-symposium

The panel we aired is the following:

Unionization can alter the power imbalance between prisoners and the administration. As part of a larger push to support captive and precarious worker organizing, the labour movement's involvement in prisoner struggles for labour rights and freedom is crucial. Any such organizing by prisoners can only be achieved with outside support, including from the labour movement. Prisoners' labour conditions are inseparable from their conditions of incarceration, so when prisoners organize as workers, they can address fundamental issues of liberty and decarceration as well. The workshop will discuss strategies for getting incarcerated workers on the labour movement's agenda and supporting ongoing efforts by prisoners to unionize.

This episode featured audio from the Prisoner Justice Day events of August 10, 2024.

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.