In this episode we turn to recent news of the deepening impacts of the biggest prison strike in U.S. History, as we look at Kinross Correctional Facility in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  We also speak with Professor Liat Ben-Moshé on our carceral society and the political imaginary of abolition. We wrap with a phone interview with Chaz, an imprisoned trans organizer in Michigan who is fighting for queer and trans prisoners’ liberation.

What do we Mean by Abolition?

In this special May Day segment of Rustbelt Abolition Radio, we speak with acclaimed scholar Robin D.G. Kelley to explore the critique of racial capitalism, the history of class struggle across the color line, and the abolitionist horizon.

We release this episode on May Day, or International Workers Day, celebrated annually by millions across the world in commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Square massacre and the ongoing global struggle for a world without capitalist exploitation and racial domination. 

Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. Kelley’s intellectual work spans the far reaching histories of the black freedom movement, African American history, culture, music, and aesthetics, and the politics of the black radical imagination. His books include Africa Speaks, America Answers!: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, among many others.

To Make Our World Anew: May Day special ft. Robin D.G. Kelley

In this episode we explore the relationship between the abolitionist horizon and the defense and reinvention of the commons. We speak with author and historian Peter Linebaugh about the ways the carceral state is founded upon enclosure and dispossession, and about hidden histories of collective resistance.

We also speak with Reverend Edward Pinkney, imprisoned activist and community leader, who discusses his experience of fighting racist enclosure and dispossession in Benton Harbor, and the possibilities for building collective power.

We wrap up the episode with an abolitionist poet who is currently imprisoned at the Women’s Huron Valley Prison in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her poetry traces a genealogy that moves from the emergence of capitalism as the enclosure of the commons, and passes through the rise of the penitentiary to our present day.

Abolition and the Commons

In this episode we examine the relationships between carcerality, gendered and sexual violence on the one hand, and on the other: queer and trans liberation and the abolitionist horizon.
Josue Saldivar and Karolina Lopez from the Arizona-based organization Mariposas Sin Fronteras discuss the ways that migrants fleeing heteropatriarchal and transphobic oppression in their home countries are re-subjected to this abuse through the gendered and sexual operations of the U.S. carceral state and its militarized borders. We also speak with abolitionist scholar and activist, Treva Ellison, who examines the ways in which racial capitalism has continuously reproduced queer criminality, and how queer abolition may fundamentally shift our understanding of the geographies of carcerality.

Queering Abolition

Abolitionists are committed to creating a world without police and prisons, but what alternative visions and practices of addressing intimate harm might point the way toward such a world? In this episode we explore efforts to re-imagine the politics of violence, harm, safety, and redress, spearheading practices of accountability and healing that move beyond the punitive logic of the carceral state.

Mia Mingus from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective discusses alternatives to carceral feminism, and how the movement to end child sexual abuse points the way toward radically re-imagining practices of justice. We also speak with Claudia Garcia-Rojas, co-director of The Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women, and Maya Schenwar, Editor-in-Chief of Truthout and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.

Beyond Punishment: The Movement for Transformative Justice

'Michigan's Kinross Prison Strike: Reflections from Inside' is an exclusive archive of audio interviews with people currently incarcerated in Michigan who witnessed and lived through the historic September 2016 prison strike. In this segment we hear the voice of Ahjamu Baruti.

Ahjamu Baruti is a political prisoner currently incarcerated at St. Louis Correctional Facility. He values study, analysis, and writing. His article “Psychological warfare in prison: Segregation is the soul breaker” was published in The San Francisco Bay View while he spent nine months in solitary confinement--including two months in an observation cell--in the wake of the events at Kinross Correctional Facility in September 2016. He was transferred out of Kinross after being hit with an “incite to riot or strike” ticket.

You can hear more voices from this report on our feed or by visiting www.michiganabolition.org. This collection of interviews was produced by Rustbelt Abolition Radio with the help of MAPS: Michigan Abolition & Prisoner Solidarity. Original music by Bad Infinity.

Michigan's Kinross Prison Strike: Reflections from Inside (w/ Ahjamu Baruti)

In Reports from the Prisoner Resistance Movement, released on the anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison rebellion, we reflect on the intensifying political struggles behind bars by examining two extraordinary flashpoints: Amerika’s nationwide September 9, 2016, prisoner strike, and the August 19, 2017, Millions for Prisoners march. 

Ben Turk of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World and Firehawk of Unstoppable discuss strategies developing within the contemporary prisoner resistance movement, while Krystal Rountree of the iamWe Prison Advocacy Network explains the organizing efforts inside and outside that made the August 19 Millions for Prisoners March possible. We close the episode with D, an incarcerated organizer with Jailhouse Lawyers Speak who tells us about what went down inside in the wake of August 19 -- and what’s next.

For more reporting on the prisoner resistance movement, check out Michigan's Kinross Prison Strike: Reflections from Inside, an exclusive audio archive we’ve created with the help of correspondents behind bars and MAPS: Michigan Abolition and Prisoner Solidarity. You can find links to the archive on our website.

Reports from the Prisoner Resistance Movement

In this episode we take a critical look at the liberal discourse of police reform, which has increasingly gained prominence amidst the ever-recurring specter of racist police violence, and especially in the wake of black rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore, and the intensification of North American Black liberation struggles these rebellions galvanized. 

Alex Vitale, Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing, speaks about the ways liberalism works to shore up the violence of policing through cosmetic, technocratic reforms, while ultimately failing to interrogate the origins and nature of police as a coercive instrument of state power, wielded to reproduce the social inequalities inherent to racial capitalism. We also speak with Charlene Carruthers, national director of Black Youth Project 100 and board member for the women of color reproductive justice collective SisterSong, on organizing through a Black queer feminist lens and pushing towards a society that’s organized around community, rather than punishment.

Beyond Policing

In this bonus episode, we speak with Dr. George Ciccariello-Maher, Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University. Placed on forced leave by Drexel, he is among a growing number of academics subjected to retaliation for their critiques of white supremacy and openly fascist organizing. Ciccariello-Maher shows us how this university-centered backlash must be situated within the broader resurgence of fascism and white nationalism, which, in turn, cannot be understood apart from the deep structures of white supremacy, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy from which fascism emerges. He also sheds light on the false hope of educational reform within prisons, and how we ought to look instead to the forms of insurgent intellectuality abolitionists are creating both inside and outside prison walls. Our conversation gestures to the possibility for a renewed anti-racist, anti-fascist resistance, both on university campuses and beyond them.

Bonus: Education, Fascism, and Abolition: A conversation with George Ciccariello Maher

This episode turns to questions of political repression, movement defense, and solidarity with political prisoners - questions which have been accentuated in the wake of the massive legal attacks visited upon protesters who participated in the #J20 demonstration in Washington D.C. on the day of Donald Trump's presidential inauguration.

Ashanti Alston, a former Black Panther and member of the Black Liberation Army who spent 14 years incarcerated due to his activity in the revolutionary movement, discusses the uses and pitfalls of distinguishing between political and social prisoners, and argues that defending political prisoners is essential to the struggle for abolition.

Jude Ortiz of The Tilted Scales Collective speaks on the importance of situating legal defense campaigns within a movement-centered strategy for liberation, and the ongoing campaign to defend the #J20 resistance. Payton, a current #J20 co-defendant, closes with his experience of the #J20 repression and this Fall’s courtroom struggles.

State Repression and Movement Defense

This episode grapples with the relation between incarceration and settler colonialism. Kelly Lytle Hernández, abolitionist writer and professor of History and African American studies at the University of California-Los Angeles, discusses her latest book, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles.
 
Hernández reveals the underlying logic of elimination and conquest that is foundational to our settler colonial society by interrogating the construction of the settler-carceral state over two centuries. In this historical analysis, Hernández draws from what she calls “The Rebel Archive,” a constellation of historical materials that emerged from struggles against conquest and elimination.

Settler-colonialism and the Struggle for Abolition

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.

Carceral Ableism and Disability Justice

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.

Out but not free: Surviving after Women’s Prison

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.

Border as Method

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.

Native Resistance and the Carceral State

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.

Prelude to the 2018 Prisoner Strike

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.

Political Organizing Behind the Walls

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.

Anti-Fascism and Carceral State feat. Lorenzo Ervin and JoNina Abron-Ervin

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.

Letters from inside: The 2018 Prison Strike

"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.

Abolish Risk Assessment

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.

Pill or Punishment: Involuntary Medication at a Michigan's Women's Prison

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

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Feat. Saidiyah Hartman

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.

Prison Labor and Industrial Penology

Hablamos con Patricio Azócar Donoso sobre los aparatos carcelarios que se despliegan dentro de los territorios que hoy se conocen como Chile -- desde la dictadura hasta la llamada transición democrática. Patricio traza tanto la emergencia del punitivismo corporativo que capitaliza la miseria de las poblaciones por medio de sus varios aparatos de control social como también las resistencias que le hacen frente a estos aparatos de administración de la miseria.

Democracia y Dictadura: el estado carcelario Chileno y resistencias abolicionistas

In this special bonus episode, released on the anniversary of the 2018 nationwide prison strike, we speak with two Ohio prisoners-- David Easley and Mark Houston (aka Mustafa) -- who called us from inside Toledo Correctional Institution. Both Easley and Mustafa were involved in the 2018 prison strike and experienced brutal retaliation as a result of their activities. They both reflect on the prison strike, state repression, what sort of steps need to be taken in order for immediate needs to be met inside, as well as on broader abolitionist non-reformist reforms.

Ohio Prisoners Speak! A Year After the 2018 Nationwide Prison Strike

Three years after the nationwide September 2016 prison strikes, abolitionist intellectual "HH" re-joins us on the show. "HH" speaks about what the few months before the prison strikes looked like from inside Michigan’s Kinross prison and we discuss the tactical advantages of the strike within an abolitionist strategy of disruption.

A strategy of disruption: Thinking through the prison strike as an abolitionist tactic

Black and queer abolitionist writer Stevie Wilson, held captive by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, was recently released from solitary confinement. He speaks about the importance of abolitionist study as a space of common encounter that undermines the hold that the carceral state has on our lives, both inside and outside prison walls.

Abolitionist Study with Steve Wilson

Thousands of prisoners in Argentina are on hunger strike. We speak with militant intellectual Liliana Cabrera about her experience inside Argentinean jails, her involvement with the organization Yo no fui, and also about this extraordinary event of the global prisoner resistance movement.

Prisons on Hunger Strike in Argentina

In this episode the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, an internationalist abolitionist organization, speaks about their fight against criminalization. They discuss how a rejection of “good immigrant” versus “bad immigrant” narratives takes form in their work, how the committee strategically intervenes at the intersection of criminal and immigration law to stop deportations of all those caught up in the crimmigration system -- and what it takes to bring back those that have been deported.

Crimmigration and Internationalist Abolition

Prisoners in several Michigan prisons are currently on quarantine — being subjected to the absolute and arbitrary sovereign will of the MDOC with little to no possibility of redress. We hear from Bruce X — a comrade quarantined at Macomb correctional facility, located just north of Detroit — who tells us about the desperation of the situation inside.

Why are so many Michigan prisoners on quarantine?

As of today (3/27/2020), there are 24 confirmed cases of Cov-19 inside Michigan prisons. Two weeks ago, we spoke with Bruce “X” Parker about the situation inside Macomb prison and he warned us about what would happen if no action was taken. The Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC)- even though they had placed multiple facilities on quarantine- seemed to play down the threat of the pandemic. Today, we hear once again from Bruce X Parker, a 35 year old ashmatic, who is facing an increasingly desperate situation inside Macomb prison. Just north of Detroit, Macomb prison is located in the midst of the epicenter of the rapidly growing pandemic in Michigan. Bruce X tells us that he has been having headaches, and is experiencing both shortness of breath and cold sweats. He tells us that the situation is so dire that “I would rather go to segregation than have my life put in danger by this deadly disease.” Inside Macomb's “5 block,” he's sharing a tiny cell with someone that was just on quarantine. Needless to say, he is not able to follow Governor Whitmer’s order to “social distance.” Citing the MDOC’s own policies (in particular MDOC policy directive 03.04.110), he tells us that the MDOC is not even following their own rules and is putting the health of both staff and prisoners at risk. Bruce X directs two demands by prisoners inside Macomb to Governor Whitmer and Director Heidi Washington; they are as follows: (1) Release prisoners who have preexisting conditions over the age of 50 and (2) commute sentences. It is only by taking these extraordinary measures that we might interrupt the tragic ending of what we are seeing unfold right before our eyes.

Updates about the dire situation inside Macomb prison in Michigan

This past weekend we spoke again with our friend-comrade Bruce X at Macomb correctional facility in Michigan. Bruce X has been warning us of this tragedy for weeks now. Last time we spoke with him, he refused to go back to his cell because his bunkmate was sick. He’s asthmatic. As a result, he was put in solitary confinement. A correctional officer at Macomb told him, ”I don’t give a damn if you live or die.” His unit is now the epicenter of the outbreak inside Macomb prison. After much insistence, he was finally tested last week and was put in quarantine. He has tested positive for Covid-19. Bruce X — along with almost 60 others inside Macomb prison alone —  is fighting for his life.

“I’m fighting for my life right now”

Longtime abolitionists, thinkers, writers, activists, militants: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Kim Wilson, and Amanda Alexander discuss revolutionary survival amidst pandemia and how abolitionist struggle is making the 'impossible' become possible.

Survival Pending Abolition

Rustbelt Abolition Radio (RAR) is an abolitionist movement-building media project. Full episode transcripts are available on our website.

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