Prison Radio Show

This show featured audio recorded at Montreal's Prisoner Justice Day event. Speakers included Johanne Wendy Bariteau, the event MC, Sherri Pranteau, Fallon, Guadalupe, and Donald. The speakers shared their personal stories and struggles with the prison industrial complex, including the ways it overlaps with colonialism and the border regime. There is strong language, mention of sexual violence and suicide. Learn more about Prisoner Justice Day at prisonjustice.ca or listen to the podcast archived on our site "What Happened to Prisoner Justice Day?".

This is our special live show from August 10, 2021. It featured two live interviews with Fallon and Johanne Wendy Bariteau who were both about to give speeches at Montreal's Prisoner Justice Day event. It also featured audio from the inside from Rain and Sheldon talking about Prisoner Justice Day. The audio quality is all over the place, including a serious echo on the microphone towards the end of the broadcast. Our apologies, live broadcasting from remote locations is not our specialty.

This is audio from prisoners gathered for Montreal's Prisoner Justice Day Vigil 2021. This audio is being posted for the purposes of allowing people who attend the vigil to listen to this audio. If you would like to listen to this audio in the context of our special live PJD broadcast, you are welcome to wait and listen once we post that broadcast on Thursday August 12.

This show features an interview with Safiyah Husein. She is a lawyer and senior policy analyst with the John Howard Society of Ontario. We discuss the work she is doing to change Canada's record suspension system to remove obstacles to finding and securing steady employment. We also have a new piece from Muti Ajamu-Osagboro who is currently incarcerated in Pennsylvania. Muti was sentenced to life in prison as a teenager and has been advocating for what he calls child deathers ever since. His newest piece talks about UN Declarations that pertain to his situation. CW: Heads up our news section is about residential schools and unmarked graves. If you would like to skip this news section, start the show at the 12:05 mark.

Show features a long news section, including audio from a commemoration for Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black and Indigenous woman who was killed by police in Toronto in May 2020. The feature interview was with Alessandro Stella talking about recent arrests of Italian political refugees in France, including ex-members of the armed struggle group the Red Brigades. The arrestees are facing extradition to Italy where they would likely spend the rest of their lives in prison. The interview is in French.

This episode showcases some events from the life of Dacajeweiah, also known as Splitting the Sky, who was a Kanienʼkehá꞉ka man who spent time in prison and was in Attica during the uprising in 1971. He was subsequently released and participated in a number of land defense struggles, including the struggle for Ganienkeh and prisoner support for those arrested in the Gustafsen Lake standoff. His stories intertwining prisoner struggles and Indigenous land defense struggles offer a particularly clear way to understand the connections between colonialism and the carceral system. Audio for this episode came from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVl1ww3VkTc – Burning Books Buffalo audio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMmG4Vuj04g – Seattle Breaking the Chains conference audio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI4ouPbT6UE – Canadian TV show Niteline footage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PynWtpqgyJ8 – Submedia video about Gustafsen Lake

http://www.ganienkeh.net/33years/ - more information about Ganienkeh

Musical interludes came from the song Suite pour l'invisible by Ana Roxanne.

This show featured lots of news and music as well as audio from Cory Cardinal, who was still incarcerated at the time but has since been released. Cardinal talked to us about the hunger strikes he participated in over the winter as well as the situation more broadly facing Indigenous prisoners like himself. We also aired audio from a prisoner who Cory introduced us to -- Pablo talked to us about the situation facing Indigenous prisoners in the Prairies and about his experience of Prairie prisons from the perspective of someone from South America who had done time in prisons all over Canada.

This show features a long interview with Margrit Shiller, author of the recently translated book "Remembering the Armed Struggle" about her time in the Red Army Faction, an armed struggle group in Germany that was active between 1970 and 1998. Shiller was involved in the group between 1971 and 1977 and spent most of those years in prison in Germany. In the interview, she talks to us about the politics of the RAF, hunger strikes in prison, and much more.

This was our annual funding drive show! If you want to donate to the station that keeps us on air, all the info is in the episode! The show also featured activists from Anti-Carceral Group, Black Lives Matter, and Solidarity Across Borders speaking outside the Laval Migrant Prison on March 20th for the Free Them All National Day of Action. Last, but not least, a prisoner named Christophe shares his insightful and reflective piece entitled "How I Feel" that it explores his experiences as a Black prisoner during the pandemic and for the past 11 years.