This week, Bella Bravo speaks to Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan. Kurti is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tennesee in Knoxville, and also works with Face to Face Knox, a campaign to restore in-person visitation to Knox County detention centers. Shanahan is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Governors State…
Read MoreThis week, we share a phone conversation between Kijana Tashiri Askari and C, one of their outside supporters. Askari is incarcerated in the California Medical Facility- a male-only state carceral medical institution.The recorded this conversation earlier this week, about the conditions Kijana and others are facing, including improper COVID-19 protocol on the part of the…
Read MoreThis week starts our series of conversations with Valrice “Whop” Cooper, the legendary cornerman who learned his craft training prisoners in the Louisiana DOC’s boxing program. For this episode, we discuss his thirty-five-year prison term that began in 1976 at the age of 17, and how coming into contact with the Black Power movement- one…
Read MoreOver the past year, the political prisoner support movement has won an exciting number of releases, with long-term political prisoners from MOVE and the Black Panthers finally gaining their freedom. But many other political prisoners remain behind bars, and their supporters are not slowing down. Leonard Peltier is a member of the American Indian Movement…
Read MoreThis week, Kite Line welcomes the continued contributions of Mark Cook, who we recorded in conversation with Alejo Stark. Mark is a former prison rebel, dating back to ambitious organizing on the inside in the 1960s. Following his release from prison, he co-founded the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party and later went underground…
Read MoreLast week, we heard the first part of a lecture by Max Felker-Kantor on policing in Los Angeles, from the Watts Rebellion in the 60s to the brutal police beating of Rodney King in the 90s. This week, he continues to talk about the police murder of Eula Love, and how her death affected the…
Read MoreThis week, we air the first of two episodes tracking the rise of police racism and militarization in Los Angeles, from the Watts Uprising of 1965 to the 1992 L.A. Riots after Rodney King’s beating. Max Felker-Kantor, author of the book, Policing Los Angeles, walks us through the changes in policing, as well as the…
Read MoreIn this interview, Elizabeth Hinton sketches the relationship between the civil rights movement, urban uprisings and the beginning of the “War on Crime,” with a focus on the Harlem Riot of 1964, and the 1965 Watts Rebellion, which was triggered by police brutality and became a key law-and-order talking point. She then moves through a…
Read MoreThis week, we hear from Curtis Ray Davis II, who talks about the racist history of Angola Prison- the Louisiana State Penitentiary. After we read a statement from hunger striking prisoners in Orange County, we then hear a moving account from Davis. He talks about Louisiana’s non-unanimous verdict, which essentially nullifies the votes of non-white…
Read MoreThis week, Johdy Polk, from Gainesville, Florida, describes her time inside a women’s prison, while sharing cutting observations on growing up as a black woman in a white supremacist society. She also makes an urgent call to tear down our inner prisons, a call that we think resonates with the torrent of news we are…
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