Rustbelt Abolition Radio

As reports of the 2018 prison strike actions and state retaliation continue to come in, we speak with Amani Sawari, organizer and media contact with Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, about ways to support prison rebels. We also hear from J, a prison rebel who’s among the strikers inside a South Carolina Prison.

Preparing for the upcoming 2018 Prisoner Strike -- slated to take place between August 21st and September 9th -- we speak with members of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of the IWW about the lead-up to the strike and how you can get involved.

This year’s actions come in the wake of the extraordinary 2016 prison strike -- the largest and most widespread prisoner strike in U.S. history. It is estimated that 50,000 imprisoned workers in more than two dozen states refused to do the work that keeps prisons running. In August 2017, the Millions for Prisoners march led prison officials in Florida and South Carolina to preemptively lock-down their entire prison systems -- impacting over 121,000 imprisoned people.

Rustbelt Abolition Radio covered these historic events in our September 2017 episode titled “Reports from the Prisoner Resistance Movement” as well as in our Making Contact audio documentary titled “Specters of Attica: Reflections from Inside a Michigan Prison Strike.”

The prisoner resistance movement takes another step this August 21, 2018, as prison rebels in more than 17 states will refuse to labor and maintain the institutions that perpetuate their captivity.

Nick Estes identifies the anti-Indian origins of the carceral state within the U.S. settler colonial project and argues that indigenous liberation offers critical frameworks for understanding how to abolish it. Estes is a co-founder of The Red Nation: an anti-profit coalition dedicated to the liberation of Native Nations, lands, and peoples. He also holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico.

In this episode, “Abolishing Electronic Incarceration”, co-producer a Maria speaks with Myaisha Hayes and James Kilgore about the movement to challenge the widening use of “electronic monitoring devices,” or ankle shackles. Myaisha is the National Organizer of Criminal Justice & Technology at the Center for Media Justice. James works with the Urbana Champaign independent media center and is the director of a project called “challenging e-carceration” which grows out of his own experiences with electronic monitoring after he was released from prison for his activities with the Symbionese Liberation Army. Myaisha and James argue that “electronic incarceration,” or e-carceration, is not an alternative to imprisonment, rather, it is the further expansion of the police state into our lives.

On the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, hundreds imprisoned inside Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility refused to report to work or lock down in their barracks. Instead, they joined the largest prisoner labor strike in U.S. history.

Rustbelt Abolition Radio co-produced this April 25, 2018 episode of Making Contact, in which four men who were imprisoned at Kinross report on the unlivable conditions, the moments in which the strike took shape, and the retaliation that rained down on them in its wake. We also hear from outside organizers on why it’s important to learn from prison rebellions, and how a persistent force organizing in the spirit of Abolition is rattling walls and cages to make prisons obsolete.

Special thanks to Making Contact, Michigan Abolition and Prisoner Solidarity and the IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.

In this episode we speak with Sandro Mezzadra, who has written extensively about borders and migration, such as in a book he co-authored with Brett Neilson titled “Border as Method.” He talks about the processes of bordering that extend far beyond the walls we usually think about when we speak of borders.

This episode features Jackie Wang and her recently released collection of essays titled “Carceral Capitalism.” She provides a framework to understand how racial capitalism produces gratuitous violence against Black bodies as well as profit-generating technologies of extraction -- from Ferguson to Flint and beyond.

This episode features Karmyn, a writer and artist who was discharged from Michigan’s Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility after being locked up for 7 years. She speaks about the struggle to maintain a sense of self during and after imprisonment, and how the fear of state retaliation continues to saturate daily life.

In this episode, “Dispatches from Zapatista Territory,” we speak with two of our fellow co-producers about their recent trip to autonomous Zapatista communities in the highlands of the Mexican southeast. For more than 24 years, the Zapatistas have inspired countless struggles across the globe to build “a world in which many worlds fit.” While the Zapatistas are not explicitly penal abolitionists, we reflect on how the Zapatista construction of autonomy may help us re-imagine the challenges and possibilities we face as Abolitionists.

In this episode: Carceral Ableism and Disability Justice, we explore the ways in which the framework of “carceral ableism” redraws our map of racial capitalism’s archipelago of confinement, and how the liberatory praxis of disability justice works to extend and deepen the abolitionist horizon.

Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe, co-editor of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, explains how ableism - the violent material and discursive ordering of bodily and psychic difference through which normative and deviant bodyminds are produced - has been foundational to the development of the carceral state.

Leroy Moore, disability justice artist, activist, and co-founder of Krip Hop and Sins Invalid, explains how the disability justice movement emerged as both extension and critique of the disability rights movement. and that disability justice means a complete revolutionizing of our conceptions of embodiment and of our practices of interdependence.