Nick Estes identifies the anti-Indian origins of the carceral state within the U.S. settler colonial project and argues that indigenous liberation offers critical frameworks for understanding how to abolish it. Estes is a co-founder of The Red Nation: an anti-profit coalition dedicated to the liberation of Native Nations, lands, and peoples. He holds a PhD…

Myaisha Hayes and James Kilgore have launched a new campaign with the Center for Media Justice to challenge the widening use of electronic ankle shackles amid the momentum of “prison reform”. #ChallengingEcarceration is informed by James’ experiences with electronic monitoring after he was released from prison for his activities with the Symbionese Liberation Army. Together, they argue that electronic incarceration is…

This episode features Sandro Mezzadra, who’s written extensively about borders and migration, as in a book he co-authored with Brett Neilson titled “Border as Method.” Sandro talks about struggles that surround the contemporary proliferation and mutations of borders, and the processes of bordering that extend beyond physical walls. Image credit: Still frame from Oliver Ressler’s “Emergency Turned Upside-Down”…

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. Image credit: Imp Kerr Subscribe via iTunes | Subscribe via RSS…

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. Image credit: Karmyn,…

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…