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When All Things Changed (3:12) Mumia Abu-Jamal

I am Reginald S. Lewis. The watchful eyes of the prison officials behind the mass oppression discourages us from talking to each other, and so a free exchange of communication is severely obstructed.After one prisoner had Coronavirus, we have seen the presence of medical personnel on the blocks daily. For two weeks, nurses came around checking each of our temperatures. On my block, several prisoners were taken out in wheelchairs, and they have not yet returned. There's a pitiful paucity of factual information; listening pieces are spotty, anemic. We are trapped behind a dark veil of secrecy. In prison, the degrees of separation are minute. Contact tracing: it's impossible. Invisible line between life and death for the American prisoner, is he measurable? We need to demand that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections develop a safety protocol for their prison population, every prisoner, guard, volunteer, DOC employee should be tested daily, prisoner facilities should be stocked with personal protective equi

Greetings everyone. This is your brother Shakaboona. Thank you all for participating in this special event. To waste no time, let me get right into it. One of the things I've learned about the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is they are mostly drunk with power and only know their way of doing things, regardless of how impractical. They've been claiming to have taken many precautionary safety measures for COVID-19.  Yet, it's all smoke and mirrors to hide the truth of what's happening inside the prison, which is a flawed strategy to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic in prison. Contradictions and no supervision of prison staff, but to see the truth? You must break their mirrors.Please keep in mind that prisons are already isolated in quarantine by the nature of the institution itself. So actually, prisons could be another safe place from COVID-19 so long as prison staff aren't allowed to come inside and infect anyone. The DOC strategy and tactics to prevent COVID-9 from entering into prisons were flawed fr

Dennis McKeithan, SCI Phoenix. My block, which is E block and H block, we were considered the hot zone, and that's why we were primarily locked down for 24 hours a day for like 16 days. And after that, we went back to coming out once a day for 40 minutes so we can take a shower, make phone calls, and sending emails. And as of May the sixth, T block, which is the honor block, has been locked down and considered the new - another hot zone and that's the honor block. And 90% of the prisoners on there are elderly in their 60s, 70s, and 80s; most of them have 30, 40, 50 years in and have preexisting conditions.And it's a scary thing because we been sitting in the cells for the past three months. We don't have too much. We don't have contact with anybody. We don't have contact visits. We don't go to kitchen, don't go to gym, don't go to yard. So the question is, how is this coming in to affect the guys on the honor block or any other block when we're not going anywhere to bring it in? We're not in contact with nobo

Dennis: Dennis McKeithan, SCI Phoenix. What's the next step besides just locking us in our cells because nothing is actually being done if this virus is still coming in here and we've been locked in our cell, we haven't been going anywhere. So testing should be a priority at least for the staff. Everybody should be tested that come in here to work because the virus is spreading and, instead of dying out in here, it's spreading. So will we ever be opened back up again? Because every time there's a new positive test in, we get pushed back for even the prison to some kind of normalcy. It'll never be normal as it was. But some form of normalcy at least to come out for a couple of hours a day or anything. But I did not tell him there's nothing as far as testing, as far as, uh, what's the next step, what, you know, what's the next phase of this thing? What can, you know, they have, uh, a couple of their, uh, favorite prisoners come out to pick up the trash and stuff. And then everybody else, just standing there doi

Clips from A radio documentary and a book in progress, by Noelle Hanrahan, Susan Shaw, and Tanya Brannan.Jill Burella is the mother of three children, she was born and raised in North Philadelphia.  She married George Burella her high school sweetheart in 1985.  Shortly after the birth of their first daughter, George’s brutality and controlling behavior began to escalate.  Bloody fights, road rage, work place discipline, hostage situations, commitment at psychiatric institutions became common.  After each incident George was returned to work as a patrol officer in the Philadelphia Police department.   Jill tried to reach out: she called his Captain Bloom, and Captain Gramlich. She called 911,  Employee Assistance Program, the local women’s shelters, lawyers, friends, neighbors, anyone who would listen.  But no one could help.  Everyone was afraid of George.  And  George was “protected”. He was a cop.  Cops don’t arrest cops.    On January 12th just four days after being served with a final order of protection

"Know Your Rights" Award Winning PSAread by Peter CoyoteMP3 of "Know Your Rights" available for download (13.5 MB):click herePress Contacts (not for public release):Bruce Nestor President, National Lawyers Guild (319) 351-4567Riva Enteen NLG Bay Area Chapter Program Director (415) 285-1055Noelle Hanrahan Prison Radio Project, Producer (415) 648-4505(July 5, 2002) San Francisco, CA—The National Lawyers Guild’s, Golden Reelaward-winning “Know Your Rights” compact-disc, produced by the Prison Radio Project, is now being translated into other languages like Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and Spanish for broadcast on non-English community radio stations.“Know Your Rights”, written by the National Lawyers Guild, narrated by acclaimedactor Peter Coyote, and produced by Prison Radio, is a dramatic reading of the coreprinciples in the Bill of Rights and is aimed at immigrants, especially those from theMiddle East, Southern Asia, and other people of color, who may be unduly targetedby authorities as a result of the Sept

In Memory of May 13th (3:11) Mumia Abu-Jamal

Organizing against mass incarceration. I was reading the interview of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who I never heard of until now. She wrote a book entitled "Golden Gulag," which analyzes the buildup of the California prison system. She says one huge thing that happened in California is how the Department of Corrections experimented there with ways to keep prisoners from developing solidarity with each other.It's made me think a bit deeper about what's happening here at Great Meadow Correction  Facility with the yard phones. There are only 35 of them here, which are claimed by different gangs and cliques. This of course leads to conflict among us prisoners. And now if we get sent to solitary confinement, we get to use tablet phones for two to six hours a day. While in general population, we're lucky we get on the phone for 15 minutes a day. All of this is a recipe for disaster. It fosters disunity, division, and violence among its prisoners.The struggle against mass incarceration cannot succeed unless prisoners can d

How COVID-19 Affects Me (5:55) Mumia Abu-Jamal

Disaster After Disaster (1:30) Mumia Abu-Jamal

I was in the prison yard this morning, trying to get my young [] together to have a discussion about their future, when two of them were pulled away by guys from their town to politic about the phone. As I said before, the phones are claimed by gangs and cliques. UFD, however, doesn't claim a phone, so we usually get on the phones claimed by dudes from the same town, city, or borough we respectively come from. And there's always some kind of politics behind all of this nonsense. Even I am forced to deal with the politics over the phones claimed by my town. The difference is I don't let that interfere with UFD or my outreach and mentorship work with the young prisoners that I deal with. I got upset because two young [] spent the remaining yard time politicking over the phone when I needed to talk to them about more important matters.This is just one of many examples of how the prison environment corrupts and damages young prisoners. If the civilian administration had enough yard phones installed to accommodate

COVID-19 (2:28) Mumia Abu-Jamal

When Innocence Is Not Enough pt. 2 (5:42) Dennis McKeithan

 It's stressful because, uh, you know, trying to get in contact with family members and being worried about them is not the easiest thing in light of the phone situation, the fact that the superintendent Chris Familia here doesn't allow for us to use the phones or kiosk during the daytime. And currently they had me isolated on the reception gallery.I'm the only person in the back half, along with one other guy who was kept up maybe five cells away from me. But when I first got there, my nearest neighbor was 17 cells away. And when I asked acting Captain Vladiko, you know, are they trying to isolate me? He said, yeah, we're going to keep you isolated. We're going to move you somewhere else, bury you, if you can keep up, you know, your bullshit. And I'm like, you know, I'm not doing much of anything, but just bringing light to the situations that are going on and they seem not to like it. No, we're not getting any type of information. Um, as you know, I was an inmate liaison committee member, which is basically

This past Monday night, April 27th, I was sitting on the crowded bleachers in the prison yard here at Great Meadow, waiting in the cold rain to get on the phone line, when another prisoner not three feet away from me was causing things and a fight ensued.I've been telling the facility administration: the yard phone policy in place is causing a dangerous situation here. There aren't enough phones in the yard to accommodate the 200 to 300 prisoners who come out to the yard on any given day. Here it is: we're not allowed to stand in the yard nor sit at a yard table with more than two of us, but we're forced to sit crowded on the yard bleachers just to get on the phone line. If you blink too long, your spot in the phone line might get taken. Just to get on the phone line, we must put ourselves and our health in danger in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is absolutely insane, and nobody out there seems to be saying anything about this.I ask that all of you who hear this to join with me to campaign to end the p

My name is Dennis Solo McKeithan. I just found out - and I thought it was just the one or two guys that had passed, but it's been six. My buddy Sherman from down North Philadelphia, he died; Ears from South Philadelphia, he died; the guys just told me it was three more guys on their side of the jail that died. And, uh, we was told it was only one guy.I don't know, uh, what's going on because they won't even tell you how many staff had that stuff. So you can't really track it and know who had contact with who. That's the biggest problem is that this secrecy is making things more unsafe because transparency, people could realize that, oh, I had contact with that guy myself and then they could [00:01:00] go ahead and get some, you know, testing or treatment or whatever, you know. Just taking the temperature won't be enough because the guy that died in Delaware, federal joint, he kept passing negative on the fever. He was cool. And then he had respiratory problems and stuff and died just like that. Why is there s

My name is brother Khalfani Malik Khaldun. How am I weathering the pandemic?  Well, alright, you know, I've always- I've been in prison since I was 17- you know, it's like 33 years almost. So with, with the shock and the reality that this could have been something else worser, it had me uneasy. I did experience a little bit of depression. I've been experiencing a little bit of anxiety and a little bit of anxiousness because I would like to see and hear that it’s over. So, you know, what I do on a daily basis, I assure that my area is clean. I shower regularly and I encourage the brothers around me to do the same thing.And I work out. I exercise. I exercise every day when I can. And I try to give me a little cardio so that I can release any type of bacteria that's in my lungs. I drink water so I can filter out my kidneys. You know I'm dealing with an issue, a few issues like high blood pressure. Hypertension, a little bit of depression - I got chronic depression. And so there are days when I'm a little bit dow

Ivan: So this is what social distancing look like inside of prisons. As you can see in the day room of the facility I'm at, and as you can notice there's a number of inmates freely walking about in the day room. So all it takes is just one person in here to become infected with the Coronavirus, and it's a wreck. Everybody's going to be affected.All it takes is for one person to come into this environment that's infected and boom, you got a crisis on your hands. And my biggest concern is it's not so much getting it from the prisoners, it's getting it from the correctional staff. Well, I've been informed that they are being screened each day as they walk in. This is not one of those things where you can just simply ask if someone has symptoms and clear them to come into work into a dense-populated area.Interviewer: If you started feeling some of the COVID-19 symptoms, how long would it take you to see a doctor?Ivan: They have a nurse just visiting the building every day, and the problem with that is I think for

A Message To My Supporters (1:53) Mumia Abu-Jamal