In this episode 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…

In this episode 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, Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo and co-editor of…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. Firehawk, of Unstoppable, and Ben Turk of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of the Industrial Workers…

Listen to voices from the largest coordinated prison strike in amerikkkan history.

In this episode we explore the parallel ways in which the institutions of prisons and schools work to reproduce our current society, racial capitalism, as well as the challenges and possibilities we face in its transformation. Imprisoned intellectual Harold “HH” Gonzales tells us about the history of school segregation and the construction of the so-called…

Channel Zero is a newly formed podcast network of several anti-authoritarian English language podcasts. Rustbelt Abolition Radio is excited to be co-conspirators in this horizontally run platform!

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…

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…