Rattling The Bars

The Alabama prison system functions like a modern-day plantation: overcrowded, understaffed prisons like Bullock Correctional Facility run on forced labor, violence, and deliberate neglect. In this episode of  Rattling the Bars , host Mansa Musa speaks with journalist Matthew Vernon Whalan about his book  Bullock: Chronicles of Deprivation and Despair in an American Prison , and about the systemat...

Rattling the Bars's Mansa Musa explores how a one-woman play, The Peculiar Patriot, reveals the human cost of mass incarceration and the enduring ties between slavery and the prison system. The artist behind the play, Liza Jessie Peterson, has worked with incarcerated youth for decades, bringing their stories to the stage and to national audiences. Performed in more than 35 US prisons and filmed a...

From chronic overcrowding and inmate deaths to systematic abuse and lawbreaking by corrections officers, prison conditions in the state of Alabama have reached a crisis point. And yet, state leaders continue to push an “Alabama solution” that involves building more mega-prisons and expanding qualified immunity for officers. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with Dakarai...

Calling from a prison phone in Nebraska, Nicholas Ely joined his wife, Julie Montpetit, for an episode of Montpetit’s podcast, “More Than an Inmate’s Girlfriend,” which aims to destigmatize relationships like theirs. Afterwards, Montpetit lost all contact with her husband. Now, Ely is suing several employees in the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services, alleging that he has faced unlawful r...

In the USA, so many Black parents have seen their children killed by police that, now, growing numbers of those same parents are building a grassroots movement for accountability and justice. On Oct. 14—the birthday of George Floyd, who was murdered by Minneapolis police in 2020—a coalition of parents, allies, and community organizations gathered in Washington, DC, for a rally to remember those wh...

President Trump repeatedly promised that his mass deportation efforts would target “the worst of the worst” criminals, yet the government’s own data reveals that immigrants with no criminal record are the largest group in US immigration detention today. How can the Trump administration justify its deployment of federal agents, and even the military, to US cities based on the factually disprovable...

Eric King is a father, poet, activist, and anarchist who was imprisoned in 2014 for acts of solidarity with the Ferguson, MO, uprising in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown. While locked up, King endured years of documented physical and psychological torture, spending the last 18 months of his sentence in the ADX supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. In this episode of Rattling the B...

There are two primary federal agencies tasked with immigration detention: ICE, which is well known, and the US Marshal Service. Under the Trump administration, the US Marshals have dramatically increased their role in detaining and incarcerating undocumented immigrants, using their federal power to override restrictions on immigrant detention in local jails around the country. In this episode of R...

After years of pressure from community members and a coalition of over 80 organizations, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has announced plans to close the infamous California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, CA, by the fall of 2026. But organizers say this is just the beginning—they are fighting to close more prisons in California and prevent the government from re-openin...

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has halted the imminent closure of the infamous "Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp in Florida; now, the future of the facility, and the people incarcerated within it, remains in limbo. “But no matter the future of Alligator Alcatraz, the Trump administration is turning it into a model for expanding detention capacity across the country,” Shannon Heffernan and Bet...

The “We are all DC” march on Saturday, Sept. 6, was one of the largest protests—if not the largest—to take place in the US capital since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Thousands of local residents, out-of-state supporters, union members, and others marched through the streets of Washington, DC, to demand an end to President Trump’s militarized federal occupation of DC. But the m...

On Saturday, Sept. 6, thousands of local residents, out-of-state supporters, union members, and concerned citizens of all stripes marched through the nation’s capital to protest President Trump’s militarized federal occupation of Washington, D.C. The “We are all D.C.” march was the largest protest to take place in the US capital since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Reporting fro...

Established by the Black Guerrilla Family in San Quentin Prison in 1979, Black August is an annual commemoration of the struggle for Black liberation and a time to remember the freedom fighters who have passed or who remain locked up in prison. In 2025, as fascism rises in the US and around the globe, what can the radical tradition of Black August teach us about keeping the fight for freedom alive...

“Incarcerated workers are a part of the working class,” award-winning journalist Kim Kelly says. And we are “not telling the real history of labor in this country if [we’re] not focusing on the organizing efforts and the labor of people who are in prison.” Kelly recently joined Mansa Musa on an episode of  Rattling the Bars   exploring the history of labor exploitation and labor organizing in Amer...

“What Kilmar Abrego Garcia's family is going through is just unimaginable,” says Baltimore-based journalist Baynard Woods, “but it is also what we've all allowed to happen over generations of letting the drug war and our deference to police departments erode the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which should protect us all from illegal search and seizure, such as these seizures that ICE is com...

President Trump’s Executive Order calling for incarcerated transgender women to be housed in men’s prisons and halting gender-affirming medical care for prisoners has put one of the most vulnerable segments of the prison population in even greater danger. In this episode of Rattling the Bars , host Mansa Musa investigates the violent realities trans inmates face in the US prison system, and the im...

Private companies and state governments have long exploited the 13th Amendment to create a profitable agribusiness system that runs on prison slave labor. “If you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement,” says  Joshua Sbicca , director of the  Prison Agriculture Lab , and the legacy of that violence lives on in the big busines...

Mansa Musa, host of  Rattling the Bars , spent 48 years in prison before his release in 2019. At the invitation of the UMD College Park Young Democratic Socialists of America, Mansa delivered a lecture on his life behind bars and the political struggles of prisoners. Produced and edited by Cameron Granadino. Help us continue producing Rattling the Bars by following us and becoming a monthly sustai...

Maryland's  Second Look Act  has passed the State House, and now awaits a vote in the Senate. The bill would allow prisoners to request judicial review of their sentences after serving 20 years of prison time. Advocates say Maryland's prison system is in desperate need of reform; parole is  nearly impossible  for longterm inmates, and clear racial disparities in arrest and incarceration are immedi...

The fingerprints of antebellum slavery can be found all over the modern prison system, from who is incarcerated to the methods used behind bars to repress prisoners. Like its antecedent system, mass incarceration also fulfills the function of boosting corporate profits to the tune of $80 billion a year.  Bianca Tylek , Executive Director of  Worth Rises , joins  Rattling the Bars  to discuss her o...

Across Maryland’s prison system, incarcerated workers assemble furniture, sew clothing, and even manufacture cleaning chemicals. In spite of making the state more than $50 million annually in revenue, these workers are compensated below the minimum wage in a system akin to slavery. But how does the system of forced prison labor really work, and how do state laws keep this industry running? Rattlin...

Popular representations of the Black Panthers often focus on their armed self-defense activities, but medical services and health justice were a tremendous part of the party's work. This legacy continues today as Black activists work to transform the medical industrial complex and its relationship to the prison system. Erica Woodland (he/him), co-author of  Healing Justice Lineages , joins Rattlin...

President Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Among these critics are opponents of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, which President Biden played a personal role in architecting throughout his political career. Jason Ortiz, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Last Prisoner Project , joins Rattling the Bars to discuss...

Five incarcerated people in Alabama are fighting to push forward a lawsuit, Stanley v. Ivey, challenging the state's power to punish prisoners who resist forced labor. Despite a state constitutional provision abolishing slavery that was passed in 2022 by referendum, Montgomery County Circuit Court dismissed the plaintiffs' lawsuit, arguing Governor Kay Ivey and Alabama Department of Corrections Co...

"Who would want to lock somebody in a room the size of your bathroom and leave them in there for three years...and expect them to come out in the same condition that they went in? That's insanity." A new bill in Washington, DC seeks to end the district’s use of solitary confinement in jails.  Rattling the Bars' Mansa Musa speaks with two formerly incarcerated organizers: Herbert Robinson and Cinqu...