Earlier this fall, the grassroots organization Care Not Cages won a decisive victory against the large new jail proposed for Monroe County.  Ignoring financial warnings and public outcry, county officials were moving forward with selecting a greenfield site northwest of Bloomington for jail construction, until mobilization at a council meeting finally stopped them in their tracks.  In this episode, we share two pieces on the struggle, with an eye towards next steps as well.  As their name suggests, Care Not Cages means not only blocking carceral expansion but creating alternative approaches to preventing harm that don’t rely on police and prisons.  What is required is a process of “substruction,” in which one future, based on racist violence and profit-seeking, is subverted, and another future, based in care and mutual aid, is constructed consciously, on at least the scale of Monroe County, if not the whole continent.

After decades of neglect, Martin Sostre is finally receiving his due as a pioneer of prisoner organizing and Black anarchism.  Garrett Felber’s powerful biography, A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre, excavates his many contributions as well as the work of his support committee in the successful Free Martin Sostre movement. This week, Kite Line  spoke with Garrett about his work on Sostre and its connections to the struggles continuing to our present day.

This episode focuses on the ICE raids still accelerating across the country, and the resistance spreading in response. We speak with K, an organizer in Los Angeles, who reflects on the ICE invasion and the movement against it, which has become a beacon for struggles across the US. Since Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has grown into the largest police force in the country and it’s clear that future movements against policing will have to place organizing against ICE, borders, and citizenship at their core.

This week, we interview Orisanmi Burton on his book Tip of the Spear- Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. The Attica prison uprising was a monumental rupture emerging out of the movements for black liberation of the 60s. Burton reflects on his conversations with people who took part in the revolt, new prison repression strategies post- Attica, and his diagnosis of prison as a form of war. To learn more about the Attica prison revolt, and hear our previous interview with Orisanmi Burton, visit kitelineradio.org.

This week we return to the Pittsburgh Anti-Repression Convergence. From this unprecedented cop city RICO indictment to the nation-wide retaliation against students and others protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the repression of social movements has become a shared experience for activists across North America. In this context, the Pittsburgh Anti-Repression Convergence (or, PARC) was organized this past summer. Over the course of three days, the Convergence committed to “studying the evolving tools of repression and what we have learned in our work to destroy them.” Panels, workshops, and group conversations drew from existing examples of jail and prison support, movement defense, and the various uses of technology as strategies to counter the state violence, surveillance, and trumped-up charged inflicted on movements.

We return to Sheila, who was featured in episode 366 with the episode “Shoving From All Sides”: https://wfhb.org/news-public-affairs/august-9-2024-shoving-from-all-sides/

From this unprecedented cop city RICO indictment to the nation-wide retaliation against students and others protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the repression of social movements has become a shared experience for activists across North America. In this context, the Pittsburgh Anti-Repression Convergence (or, PARC) was organized this past summer. Over the course of three days, the Convergence committed to “studying the evolving tools of repression and what we have learned in our work to destroy them.” Panels, workshops, and group conversations drew from existing examples of jail and prison support, movement defense, and the various uses of technology as strategies to counter the state violence, surveillance, and trumped-up charged inflicted on movements.
Many of the presentations during PARC focused on the ways that movements suffer repression from within their own ranks. This week, we hear a reading of “Addicted to Losing,” presented during PARC, which offers a powerful account of the ways that white supremacy and anti-blackness within social movements undermine their own power to effect social transformation. The author, Athena, points to the implicit ways that radical milieus contribute to the unfreedom of people of color by reinforcing a sense of powerlessness. Instead, Athena calls for a joyful militancy that “turns to our fugitivity, an irreducibly black mode of sociality which affirms blackness as a force that escapes control.”

“Organizing Everywhere” was a panel discussion at Redbud Books organized by the Monroe County anti-jail activist group, Care Not Cages. It convened four organizers involved in related struggles: two organizing against new county jails in Indiana, one in Fort Wayne and one in Bloomington; one Kentucky-based activist fighting prison expansion in Appalachia, and a filmmaker currently documenting union organizing at the multinational e-commerce magnate, Amazon.com. The conversation allowed the four abolitionist community organizers to share experiences, project a larger horizon than local organizing can sometimes allow and encourage each other in fighting the systems that can feel overwhelmingly large. The filmmaker, Brett Story, who was in town to show her oeuvre of films at the IU Cinema, makes a number of stunning connections between the contours of mass incarceration and the conditions of work and of organizing at Amazon. The reverse also emerges: the ways working conditions contribute to mass incarceration both for members of criminalized communities and laborers forced to work within the system.

You can find out ways to get involved at: https://www.studyandstruggle.com/ms5

In this episode we air a recording from the final talk of the Pittsburgh Anti-Repression Convergence, which served as a space for activists, political prisoner supporters, and former political prisoners to strategize against repression in the context of social movements, with an eye towards total liberation for the earth and all of it’s inhabitants. We’ll hear from Sheila, who defines and discusses anti-repression, counter-repression, and movement defense.

They began their presentation with Diane’ Di Prima’s REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #8:

Everytime you pick the spot for a be-in

a demonstration, a march, a rally, you are choosing the ground

for a potential battle.

You are still calling these shots.

Pick your terrain with that in mind.

Remember the old gang rules:

stick to your neighborhood,

don’t let them lure you

to Central Park everytime, I would hate

to stumble bloody out of that park to find help:

Central Park West, or Fifth Avenue, which would you choose?

go to love-ins

with incense, flowers, food, and a plastic bag

with a damp cloth in it, for tear gas, wear no jewelry

wear clothes you can move in easily, wear no glasses

contact lenses

earrings for pierced ears are especially hazardous

try to be clear

in front, what you will do if it comes

to trouble

if you’re going to try to split stay out of the center

don’t stampede or panic others

don’t waver between active and passive resistance

know your limitations, bear contempt

neither for yourself, nor any of your brothers

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us

shoving at the thing from all sides

to bring it down.

This week, we are sharing a piece created for Montreal community radio station CKUT, on the show Other Worlds on Earth. The piece provides an excellent analysis of the case against Krystal and Peppy, two organizers in Pittsburgh targeted by the FBI and who are alleged to have acted in solidarity with trans people. After their analysis and introduction, Other Worlds on Earth interview one of Krystal and Peppy’s supporters. This support work has been both vital and difficult, since Peppy has now been held in jail for more than a year, due entirely to alleged conduct at a demonstration.

The escalated repression aimed at Krystal and Peppy is part of a society-wide crackdown that affects far more than just political activists. The shredding of environmental regulation due to the Supreme Court’s Chevron reversal goes hand-in-hand with the brutal shutdown of refugee claims at the US-Mexico border, throwing the balance of state action decisively away from any claim that it is protecting us, by reducing toxicity or slowing the climate crisis, and orienting it towards police violence. The massive police funding increase since 2020 leads not only towards the construction of big, useless megaprojects like Cop City, but also to the escalation of racial violence as emboldened police attack Black children. On the 4th of July, Pittsburgh police attacked a 14-year old child. Tanisha Long described the incident this way:

“Tonight the Pittsburgh police handcuffed and detained a 14 year old child claiming that he was a missing child. They picked a Black child off the street, decided he was the missing child, handcuffed him, and ignored the fact that his mom was on the phone telling them it wasn’t him. They put their hands on advocates, an attorney, and other minors.They pulled a taser on me for asking questions and recording. They told the crowd they weren’t allowed to be near.”

This experience presents disturbing echoes of the police attack on three Black children in Bloomington earlier this week. Police are emboldened but also understand that significant portions of the population have grown to distrust and hate them, leading them to take aggressive measures to stop bystanders from filming them and to prevent crowds from gathering in response to their violence. Before the feature on Krystal and Peppy, we will share a press release from Bloomington abolitionist group Care Not Cages regarding the police violence here earlier this week.

After our news, we are sharing the final installment of our conversation with Leon Benson, who was recently exonerated and released after decades in the Indiana prison system.  Leon is an inspiring organizer who fought for freedom for other prisoners, organized self-education circles inside, and has, since release, jumped into important community empowerment projects.  We were grateful for the opportunity to speak with him.