Rustbelt Abolition Radio

Charlie Bright speaks about the re-articulations of carceral narratives: from the era of Fordism through discourses on modernization and the desperate rehabilitation of the rehabilitative model. Bright discusses how a century’s worth of constant re-negotiations of the coherence of departments of correction has been informed by struggles within prisons and the populations they seek to control, and some of the reasons why industrial penology was overcome by riots and may be turning to technologies of e-carceration.

Lisa Guenther, currently a professor of philosophy at Queen’s University in so-called Ontario, Canada, deconstructs the state’s right to kill or let live within settler-colonial & racial capitalist social relations. We also discuss abolitionist forms of relationality that interrupt sovereignty’s hold on life and social death.

Saidiya Hartman speaks about her latest book, Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, and the beauty, autonomy, anarchy, fugitivity, queerness, and errancy in forms of Black sociality — what she calls waywardness. We also discuss how to interrupt the state’s apparatus of capture and the new social formations that emerge as people flee from predatory state forms.

Transcript available at www.rustbeltradio.org

On January 2019, more than two thousand women confined at Michigan’s only women’s prison were put in quarantine. The quarantine comes in the wake of a possible scabies outbreak at the facility -- which has a long history of abuse and multiple cases of medical neglect. While many of the women held captive there displayed no symptoms, and pointed out other health hazards, such as black mold and infested showers, all of those who refused the state’s systemic administration of medical treatment were put in solitary confinement. In this episode, we speak with Sara and Tracy -- two poets that were locked up at Huron Valley during the quarantine. We also speak with Victoria Law, abolitionist writer and activist, and author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women.

"Predictive" instruments are common currency within the carceral reform movement. In this episode we speak with three abolitionists --Rodrigo Ochigame, Chelsea Barabas, and Hamid Khan-- to contextualize the use of pre-trial assessments and algorithmic policing tools by technocratic stalker state.

In the thick of the 2018 prison strike, we published a notice in the San Francisco Bay View -- the extraordinary monthly Black newspaper which circulates through hundreds of prisons and other centers of detention in the United States -- asking those on the inside to write to us with their immediate reflections on the prison strike. Specifically: how recent prison strike actions advanced the politics of abolition. We received letters from folks imprisoned in a dozen different states, and in this episode we present these extraordinary report backs and analyses from inside -- some written in the infinitely long and lonely hours of solitary confinement.

Nos encontramos frente a la difícil tarea de entablar un diálogo más allá del rustbelt, más allá del “cinturón oxidado,” más allá de esos territorios y poblaciones como Detroit y Flint, zonas de abandono organizado y violencia organizada del Estado y el capitalismo racial. Es decir, nos encontramos frente a una cierta tarea de traducción, una tarea siempre fallida, siempre imposible, pero hoy, más que nunca, sumamente necesaria. En particular, en este programa, que titulamos "Ni Una Menos en las cárceles" nos propusimos pensar el Abolicionismo penal a la par de los tiempos álgidos de la revuelta feminista Latinoamericana. A finales de Octubre de este mismo año tuvimos la oportunidad extraordinaria de conversar con Verónica Gago, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar y con tres compañeras de la agrupación Yo No Fui, Liliana Cabrera, Eva, y Gabriela. En lo que sigue les compartimos las grabaciones de estas conversaciones que intentar pensar un feminismo más allá del imaginario carcelario y punitivista.

In this episode, we speak with Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings and professor of literature and critical theory at the University of California Davis, about the ongoing crisis of racial capitalism and its relation to riots and the carceral state.

In this special bonus episode, we present a conversation between True Leap Press and Lorenzo Ervin and JoNina Abron-Ervin, recorded in Chicago earlier last month. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin is an anarchist writer, organizer, and former political prisoner who came up through the Black Panther Party in the 1960’s. Among other works, he is the author of the pamphlet “Anarchism and the Black Revolution”, which introduces the principles of class struggle anarchism and discusses its relevance to the black liberation struggle. JoNina Abron-Ervin is a journalist, retired educator, and a former member of the Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party. As a writer, teacher and organizer, she has helped organize numerous efforts over the course of decades, including the anti-apartheid movement and campaigns against police terror. She is the author of the book “Driven by Movement: Activists of the Black Power Era”.

In this timely interview, Lorenzo and JoNina discuss the current anti-fascist movement, its limitations, and how it could evolve to challenge the carceral state, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation more explicitly.

In this episode, we speak with Michigan-based writer and activist Dennis Boatwright. Dennis was held captive by the state for 24 years of his life and has written about the strategies and politics of the prisoner resistance movement. We speak with him in the wake of the two most massive prison strikes in Amerikan history to grapple with the possibilities of political organizing on the inside as well as the challenges that lie ahead.