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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

'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 Fred Williams. Fred Williams is a poet, emancipatory educator and abolitionist correspondent imprisoned at Michigan's Kinross Correctional Facility. His dispatch covers the poor systemic conditions that those inside face at the hands...

'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 Harold Gonzales. Abolitionist intellectual Harold Gonzales is currently imprisoned at Baraga Maximum Security Correctional Facility. Like several hundred others, he was hit with an “incite to riot or strike” ticket in the aftermath...

'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”...

'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 Jake Klemp. Jake Klemp is a vegan who went on hunger strike to bring public attention to the lack of nutritious food behind bars, particularly for those with spiritual and cultural practices outside the prerogatives of privatized...

'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 Baba X Guy. Baba X-Guy was formerly a leader of the Battle Creek Coalition Against Police Brutality, a liberatory community self-defense formation. A jail rebellion took place after he received conspicuous threats from the KKK in...

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...

In today’s episode, “Schools, prisons and Abolitionist futures”, we explore the parallels by which the institutions of prisons and schools work to reproduce our current society, and how they illuminate challenges in the rocky passageways toward abolition. We speak with imprisoned intellectual Harold “HH” Gonzales about the history of school segregation and the construction of the so-called school to prison pipeline. We also hear from Erica Meiners, who discusses how schools are embedded in...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this episode we focus on the ways women are organizing against gendered violence and mass criminalization -- and for a world free of domination. We speak with Mariame Kaba, long-time abolitionist organizer and writer, about her work with groups like Survived and Punished and Project NIA, and the criminalization of women under capitalist heteropatriarchy. We also talk to Adrienne Skye-Roberts from the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), on specific challenges faced by women...

In this special bonus segment of Rustbelt Abolition Radio, we speak with long-time prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba about the Free Bresha Campaign.

In this special bonus segment of Rustbelt Abolition Radio, we return to renowned historian Heather Ann Thompson as she elaborates on the multifaceted origins of the historic 1971 Attica Uprising, drawing out their resonances with other prison rebellions across history and geography, as well as their telling implications for our present historical moment.

In this episode we examine the expansion of the carceral state as a response to anti-racist movements and urban rebellions of the 1960s, the political economic underpinnings of these social transformations, and the ways in which historic instances of prisoner rebellion are continuous with present-day resistance behind bars and point toward upheavals yet to come. We speak with historian Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, and...