Rattling The Bars

The death of Khader Adnan in Israeli detention during a hunger strike on May 2 of this year sparked mourning worldwide and a general strike in occupied Palestine. The 45-year-old Adnan was on his 87th day of hunger strike while serving a sentence for his 12th arrest by the Israeli state at the time of his death. A baker by trade and a father to nine children, Adnan was the first Palestinian to die...

The call for prison abolition has been popularized over the last decade of popular movements against police violence, many of which have operated under the banner of Black Lives Matter. But what does abolition mean, and who gets to define it? Thus far, much of the conversation has been steered and curated by mainstream media. A new initiative from Scalawag Magazine tentatively titled 'Project Abol...

May Day, also known as International Workers' Day, is celebrated around the world by labor unions, socialist parties, and anarchists. May Day's origins go back to the 1886 Haymarket Affair, when hundreds of thousands of US workers walked off the job, and 40,000 went on strike in Chicago for an eight-hour workday. Despite its origins, May Day is largely unknown in the US today. TRNN Editor-in-Chief...

Click here to read the transcript Marshall "Eddie" Conway was framed for the murder of a police officer and incarcerated for 44 years—but even behind bars, he continued to organize. In the early 1970s, Maryland's state prisons were overcrowded and lacked education opportunities for incarcerated people. As a form of intervention, Eddie organized a university-level education program with fellow pris...

Click here to read the transcript. Even though he was framed for the killing of a local police officer, sentenced without a fair trial, and imprisoned for 44 years, former Black Panther and dearly departed TRNN Executive Producer Marshall “Eddie” Conway never stopped organizing. In 1980, while incarcerated himself as a political prisoner, Eddie helped organize a prisoners’ educational outreach pro...

Click here to read the transcript: https://therealnews.com/jalil-muntaqim-the-time-to-end-prison-slavery-is-now In 2021, the International Tribunal On US Human Rights Abuses Against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples found the United States government guilty of genocide. The tribunal drew upon the legacy of the 1951 petition submitted to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress: "We Charg...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/the-pendleton-2-saved-a-mans-life-a-judge-sentenced-them-to-200-years-for-it On Feb. 1, 1985, prison guards at the Indiana State Reformatory (now Pendleton Correctional Facility) affiliated with a KKK-splinter group known as the Sons of Light chained prisoner Lincoln Love in their office and began to mercilessly beat him. John "Balagoon"...

Marshall "Eddie" Conway joined the ancestors on Feb. 13, 2023 after a yearlong battle with illness. Born in Baltimore in 1946, Eddie joined the the Black Panther Party in 1968. The Baltimore BPP chapter, with Eddie’s support and leadership, built strong community ties through efforts like a free breakfast program, a system of robust internal political education, and an increasingly widespread loca...

The new one-woman play 'The Road to Damascus' reinterprets the biblical story of Saul and the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as an allegory for white complicity in the US prison system and the possibility of redemption through anti-racism. Creator and performer Kathy Randels joins Rattling the Bars to discuss her new work. Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino Read the transcript here: https:/...

Incarcerated people across the US could find their commissary funds depleted by a new proposed policy from the Bureau of Prisons to automatically deduct three quarters of all funds prisoners receive from loved ones on the outside. If you'd like to help stop this new proposal from the BOP, click here for instructions on how to submit a public comment—Monday, March 13 is the last day to act. Tim Cur...

The growth of the US prison population under a system of mass incarceration has now gone on for 50 years, according to The Sentencing Project . While awareness and political discourse about US prison expansion has grown in the last decade, we are still far from dismantling this violent and inhumane system of captivity. Nicole Porter from The Sentencing Project joins Rattling the Bars to explain he...

Feb. 21, 2023, marks the 58th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. We honor his life and legacy by recalling his revolutionary message to the downtrodden peoples of the world and committing to carrying on his fight for liberation. In this special commemorative episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with freedom fighters Paulette Dauteuil and Ashanti Alston about how Malcolm X sh...

Across the US, some 50,000 incarcerated people are kept under conditions of solitary confinement. Advocates and prisoners have pushed to define the practice as a form of torture, pointing to the devastating psychological and physical effects it has on victims. In Texas, dozens of prisoners are now hunger striking against the use of solitary confinement in the state's prisons, which they say dispro...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/exclusive-interview-from-prison-carla-j-simmons-on-what-an-inhumane-carceral-system-does-to-human-psyches In this urgent, exclusive interview for Rattling the Bars , Mansa Musa speaks with Carla J. Simmons from inside the Georgia prison system, as well as Page Dukes of the Southern Center for Human Rights . Simmons, who has been incarcer...

Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/these-women-are-fighting-nevadas-prison-system-and-winning The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 exacerbated the existing crisis of incarceration in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. During this time, a group of women with loved ones incarcerated in Nevada’s prison system founded the org...

Editor's note: This interview was filmed on Dec. 1, 2022. A 19th person, Edgardo Mejia, died at Rikers on Sunday, Dec. 11. 19 people have perished at Rikers Island in 2022, making this the deadliest year in the jail's history. Rikers Island's previous deadliest year was just last year, when 16 people died at the notorious pretrial detention center. NYC Mayor Eric Adams has rejected calls to close...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/how-private-developers-profited-from-tax-subsidies-in-baltimore-intended-to-revitalize-poor-neighborhoods For 50 years, Baltimore city officials have trumpeted the use of tax subsidies for private developers as a way to catalyze economic development. As more and more public funds have gone into the pockets of the rich, the city’s prospec...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/after-26-years-in-prison-cambodian-refugee-phoeun-you-was-supposed-to-be-paroled-ice-deported-him-instead When Phoeun You's family left Cambodia as refugees, he was only one year old. After spending a number of years in a refugee camp in Thailand, You's family was resettled in the US. At the age of 20, You was convicted of murder and inc...

In his new memoir and first book, Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, journalist Roberto Lovato traces the long history of colonial violence in El Salvador through the story of his family. Lovato joins Rattling the Bars to discuss his book and the lessons El Salvador's revolutionary history can offer the world. Roberto Lovato is an educator, journali...

On Oct 6, President Biden announced an official pardon of anyone incarcerated on federal charges of simple possession of marijuana. Biden framed his pardon in terms of correcting the historic injustices meted out against people of color by the War on Drugs, but is it enough? The pardon itself affects about 6500 people, but does not necessarily guarantee that every one will have their records expun...

In 2020, San Quentin State Prison in California had some of the worst rates of COVID infection in the nation. At least 23 people died from COVID after contracting it at the prison. Prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US proved similarly vulnerable to the pandemic, which easily spread among incarcerated populations and into surrounding communities due to the already abhorrent health, s...

Cases of cholera have been confirmed at Haiti’s National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince. Cholera, which spreads through unsanitary water, has become endemic in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, and is believed to have been inadvertently introduced by UN peacekeepers. According to advocates, the Haitian prison system has been a ticking time bomb for cholera for years. Migrant justice organizations i...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/judge-rules-california-prison-must-close Visiting Lassen County Judge Robert F. Moody ruled against the town of Susanville on Sept. 8 in a lawsuit which aimed to stop California Correctional Center (CCC) from closing. Judge Moody’s ruling lifts the preliminary injunction and allows the state to move forward with plans for closure effecti...

In September 2020, Lacino Hamilton was exonerated for the murder of his foster mother, Willa B. Bias, and released after 26 years in prison. Convicted at the age of 19, the only evidence linking Hamilton to the Bias's death were a confession police forced from Hamilton, and the statement of a jailhouse informant. Through his decades in prison, Hamilton educated himself on the nature of the prison...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/black-august-and-the-fight-to-free-political-prisoners Jericho Movement activists fighting for the release of freedom fighters from US prisons speak on the meaning and purpose of Black August. Jihad Abdulmumit is the Chairperson of the National Jericho Movement Paulette Dauteuil is the former Co-chair and National Secretary of the Nati...