Rattling The Bars

Ahmad Manasra, a Palestinian boy from Jerusalem, was arrested by Israeli police at the age of 13. He has now been in prison for 7 years, and is currently in his seventh consecutive month of solitary confinement. Advocates say Manasra has been severely abused throughout his imprisonment, and has become suicidal and developed schizophrenia. International organizations and human rights experts are ca...

Closing prisons and reducing the incarcerated population should be a good thing, but when local economies become dependent on the prison industry it creates many perverse incentives for keeping our inhumane system of mass incarceration going. Residents of Susanville, California, are experiencing this firsthand after the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced the impendin...

The economic fortunes of rural communities across the United States are often deeply intertwined with the prison industrial complex. This poses a real challenge to the project of ending mass incarceration. How can organizers build political opposition to prisons in areas where prisons are the lifeblood of a community? And what should be done with former prisons once they are closed? The question o...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/virginia-revokes-early-release-for-inmates-with-good-behavior Lawmakers in Virginia have approved a draconian budget measure from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin that takes aim at inmates’ eligibility for early release. The new law prevents so-called “violent offenders” from applying credits earned for good behavior towards their earl...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/chris-hedges-on-trauma-and-teaching-writing-in-prison Since 2013, Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of The Chris Hedges Report, has taught college courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history at East Jersey State Prison (aka “Rahway”) and other New Jersey prisons. In one such course, after reading plays by...

The prison-industrial complex has many ways of turning the incarceration of human beings into a profitable business model. In New York state, new regulations targeting care packages for prisoners show this logic at work. Friends and families of incarcerated people can no longer send packages containing food to those inside, and are now limited to sending two “non-food packages” a year, purchased f...

UPDATE (7/1/2022): One day after this segment aired, prison authorities announced that they had “reconsidered” their earlier decision, clearing the way for Atiba to earn his degree. Education is one of the few rehabilitative options available to incarcerated people, yet all across America prisoners are prevented from pursuing their education. “Atiba” Demetrius Brown, for instance, has been dedicat...

"At least 40% of people incarcerated in American women’s prisons identify somewhere under the broad lesbian-bisexual-trans-queer umbrella—a shocking statistic that holds true when looking at detention centers for youths as well,” historian Hugh Ryan recently wrote in The Washington Post. “As women’s incarceration skyrockets in America—increasing 700% in just the past 40 years—naming and dealing wi...

As Wendy Sawyer and Wanda Bertram recently wrote for the Prison Policy Initiative, “Over half (58%) of all women in US prisons are mothers, as are 80% of women in jails, including many who are incarcerated awaiting trial simply because they can’t afford bail… And these numbers don’t cover the many women preparing to become mothers while locked up this year: An estimated 58,000 people every year ar...

“As a result of being on or near wastelands, prisons constantly expose those inside to serious environmental hazards, from tainted water to harmful air pollutants,” Leah Wang recently wrote for the Prison Policy Initiative. “These conditions manifest in health conditions and deaths that are unmistakably linked to those hazards.” In this edition of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Paul Wri...

Eric King is an antifascist, antiracist, anarchist activist who is currently serving a 10-year federal prison sentence for throwing Molotov cocktails into an empty government office in Kansas City, Missouri, in solidarity with the 2014 uprisings after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. From the beginning of his imprisonment, King and his advocates say he has been...

On March 10, the Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility in upstate New York closed its doors. Opponents to the closure said that the Moriah Shock facility provided essential jobs for the community and that the military bootcamp style of the program at so-called “shock" camps helps inmates recover from issues with alcohol and drug abuse. But is this true? What are “shock” camps? What goes...

According to The Sentencing Project, “Private prisons in the United States incarcerated 115,428 people in 2019, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.” However, while private prisons still make up a minority of carceral institutions in the US, the infiltration of privatization has spread throughout the prison-industrial complex. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mans...

Pre-release and minimum security facilities connect incarcerated individuals to essential resources for re-entering society and to opportunities for work release, special leave, compassionate leave, and family leave. In the state of Maryland, there are nine separate pre-release and minimum security facilities for men; for women, there are zero. “At the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (...

With 2.1 million incarcerated people, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. But America’s prison system is part of a larger social apparatus that predominantly targets, criminalizes, and polices poor people and people of color. As the monstrous reach of our carceral system extends further into our daily lives, so too have forms of resistance grown in communities around...

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal lawsuit against the Washington County Detention Center in Arkansas on behalf of inmates who say the jail’s medical staff, led by Dr. Robert Karas, prescribed and gave them ivermectin to treat COVID-19 without telling them what the drug actually was. (Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug that the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers...

Walter Lomax was wrongfully imprisoned in the state of Maryland for 39 years until he eventually had his conviction vacated by a judge in 2006. While he was incarcerated and fighting for his freedom, Lomax worked with other inmates on the long process of lobbying for a bill in the state legislature that would end Maryland’s designation as one of only three states—along with California and Oklahoma...

After spending the past year and a half socially distancing, millions around the country will be coming together to celebrate the holidays this year with a renewed appreciation for seeing and being with loved ones. For those who are locked away in prisons and jails, however, the dehumanizing separation from family, friends, and community will continue. Having spent 44 years as a political prisoner...

In 2014, at the age of 15, Prakash Churaman was arrested at his home at 6AM without a warrant. After driving him around for a few hours, police brought Churaman to the 113th Precinct and, as Churaman and his attorney maintain, coerced a confession out of him for a crime he did not commit. As reported in the Queens Daily Eagle, “Prosecutors say Churaman was one of the gunmen in a robbery gone wrong...

According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, even though they have doubts about its administration, fairness, and usefulness as a crime deterrent, most Americans today still support the death penalty. Moreover, while it may seem like a brutal relic of a bygone era, capital punishment is still legal in 24 states, for the federal government, and for the military. As John Gramlich writes, “...

After spending nearly half a century in prison, leftist revolutionaries and political prisoners David Gilbert and Russell Maroon Shoatz (who also spent 22 years in solitary confinement) were released earlier this year. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, about the historic occasion of Gilbert and Shoatz...

For years, prisoners, activists, and legal advocates have been drawing attention to the inhumane conditions at Rikers Island, New York’s most infamous jail complex. But the COVID-19 pandemic turned what was already a dire situation at Rikers into a full-blown humanitarian crisis. With cells grossly overcrowded, guards and medical staff largely absent, and an interior crumbling from disrepair, Rike...

Mansoor Adayfi, “Detainee No. 441,” was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. As detailed in the description for Adafyi’s new book Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, “Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp’s infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and...

President Joe Biden signed a major $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that provided funds to cities and states around the country to recover from devastating effects of the pandemic. Regardless of widespread condemnation and criticism, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey and the state legislature have pushed through plans to use a significant portion of those federal COVID-19 relief funds for th...

In the state of Louisiana, 786 inmates—none of whom were ever sentenced to death—died behind bars between 2015-2019 while serving out their prison sentences. Since Black people are already incarcerated at disproportionate rates, these deaths have been disproportionately among Black inmates. This information has not been publicly available until now, because no single authority in Louisiana is requ...