“There are already a dozen cases piling up against me,” she said. “I’m a journalist. One murder case is enough to frame me.”

Rupa, a former chief correspondent at privately owned broadcaster Ekattor TV, now faces nine murder cases. Her husband, Shakil Ahmed, the channel’s former head of news, is named in eight.  

A year ago, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge of Bangladesh’s interim government after Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country following weeks of student-led protests, during which two journalists were killed.

Yunus promised media reform and repealed the Cyber Security Act, a law used to target journalists under Hasina. But in a November 2024 interview with newspaper The Daily Star, Yunus said that murder accusations against journalists were being made hastily. He said the government had since halted such actions and that a committee had been formed to review the cases.

Still, nearly a year later, Rupa, Ahmed, Shyamal Dutta and Mozammel Haque Babu, arrested on accusations of instigating murders in separate cases, remain behind bars. The repeated use of such charges against journalists who are widely seen as sympathetic to the former regime appear to be politically motivated censorship.

In addition to such legal charges, CPJ has documented physical attacks against journalists, threats from political activists, and exile. At least 25 journalists are under investigation for genocide by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal – a charge that has been used to target figures linked to the former Hasina government. 

“Keeping four journalists behind bars without credible evidence a year on undermines the interim government’s stated commitment to protect press freedom,” said CPJ Regional Director Beh Lih Yi. “Real reform means breaking from the past, not replicating its abuses. All political parties must respect journalists’ right to report as the country is set for polls in coming months.”

A CPJ review of legal documents and reports found that journalists are often added to First Information Reports (FIRs) – documents that open an investigation – long after they are filed. In May, UN experts raised concern that over 140 journalists had been charged with murder following last year’s protests.

Shyamal Dutta’s daughter, Shashi, told CPJ the family has lost track of how many cases he now faces. They are aware of at least six murder cases in which he is named, while Babu’s family is aware of 10. Rupa and Ahmed’s family told CPJ that they haven’t received FIRs for five cases in which one or the other journalist has been named, which means that neither can apply for bail.

Shafiqul Alam, Yunus’s press secretary, and police spokesperson Enamul Haque Sagor did not respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment. 

Violence and threats

In 2025, reporters across Bangladesh have faced violence and harassment while covering political events, with CPJ documenting at least 10 such incidents, most of which were carried out by members or affiliates of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its student wing, Chhatra Dal. In several instances, journalists sustained serious injuries or were prevented from reporting after footage was deleted or phones seized, including Bahar Raihan, Abdullah Al Mahmud, and Rocky Hossain.

Responding to the allegations, Mahdi Amin, adviser to Acting BNP Chair Tarique Rahman, told CPJ that while isolated misconduct may occur in a party of BNP’s size, the party does not protect wrongdoers. 

Others have faced threats from supporters of different political parties and the student groups that led the protests against Hasina. Reporters covering opposition groups like Jamaat-e-Islami or its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, have come under particular pressure. On June 9, Hasanat Kamal, editor of EyeNews.news, told CPJ he’d fled to the United Kingdom after being falsely accused by Islami Chhatra Shibir of participating in a violent student protest. Anwar Hossain, a journalist for the local daily Dabanol, told CPJ he’d been threatened by Jamaat supporters after publishing negative reports about a local party leader. 

CPJ reached out via messaging app to Abdus Sattar Sumon, a spokesperson for Jamaat-e-Islami, but received no response.

Since Hasina’s ouster, student protesters from the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement (ADSM) have increasinglytargeted journalists they accuse of supporting the former regime, which in one case led to the firing of five journalists. Student-led mobs have also besieged outlets like Prothom Alo and The Daily Star. 

CPJ reached out via messaging app to ADSM leader Rifat Rashid but received no response.

On July 14, exiled investigative journalist Zulkarnain Saer Khan, who fled Bangladesh after exposing alleged high-level corruption under Hasina and receiving threats from Awami League officials, posted on X about the repression of the media: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Kunal Majumder/CPJ India Representative.

“It is a grave injustice that Sandra Muhoza remains behind bars two months after an appeal court effectively invalidated her earlier trial and conviction,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo. “Authorities must do the right thing and release Muhoza without further delay.”

In December 2024, Mukaza High Court, in eastern Bujumbura province, convicted Muhoza of undermining the integrity of Burundi’s national territory and inciting ethnic hatred, in connection with comments she made in a journalists’ WhatsApp group, and sentenced her 21 months in prison.

The Bujumbura Mairie Court of Appeal, in a May 30, 2025judgment reviewed by CPJ, said that it and the lower court lacked the jurisdiction to hear Muhoza’s case. It cited a law on judicial procedures, which stipulates that a defendant should be tried by a court in the region where they were arrested, live, or where the crime was allegedly committed. 

Muhoza was arrested in the northern Ngozi region where she lived. The appeal court ordered that the case be referred to a competent court.

Burundian authorities have previously convicted other journalists for anti-state crimes, such as Floriane Irangabiye, who in 2023 was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of undermining the integrity of the national territory. She was released in August 2024, following a presidential pardon.

CPJ’s emails to the justice ministry, and text messages to justice minister Domine Banyankimbona, interior ministry spokesperson Pierre Nkurikiye, Prosecutor General’s Office spokesperson Agnès Bagiricenge, and government spokesperson Jérôme Niyonzima did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Mahi G’s song “Heatwave,” which was produced in collaboration with Greenpeace India, dropped in June, just as the country was reeling under soaring temperatures. Last year, more than 100 people died across India because of an extreme heatwave during the summer. Prolonged heat exposure can lead to heat strokes, a risk disproportionately borne by outdoor workers. 

In India, those workers typically occupy the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. The country’s caste system divides people into four main groups based on birth. Those who are placed outside the system — referred to as Dalits — are often relegated to the most hazardous jobs. Members of tribes or indigenous communities — referred to as Adivasis — also fall outside this structure and face systemic discrimination. Successive governments in India have evicted Adivasis from their ancestral lands to clear the way for exploiting mineral resources.

Mahi G’s music primarily speaks to the experiences of Dalits and Adivasis. She belongs to the Mahadev Koli tribe, a community found in the western state of Maharashtra, and lives in Mumbai. She has released 12 songs so far since she first began rapping in 2019.  Nearly half of them are about climate justice.

Growing up, the 28-year-old rapper witnessed her community struggle to access clean drinking water. “It always made me sad to see women walk long distances to fetch water,” she said. As an Adivasi woman, her drive to research and write about the environment comes from a deep, personal space, she said, and she chose to rap about sociopolitical issues because “you can talk about a big issue in a short, powerful, and aggressive way.”

India’s mainstream hip-hop scene has been mostly dominated by upper-caste male artists, primarily from Maharashtra and Punjab, a northwestern state. But in recent years, a handful of Dalit and Adivasi rappers have broken into the mainstream, using their music to challenge caste hierarchies, critique government policies, and spotlight social injustices.

Among them is Arivu, who shot to fame with his track “Anti-national,” a bold critique of the Indian government led by Narendra Modi, a right-wing Hindu nationalist, whose party and supporters routinely label dissenting voices as anti-national. In another song, Arivu lays bare feudalism and its contemporary manifestations while paying homage to his grandmother, a landless labourer in a tea plantation. The video has garnered more than half a billion views on YouTube.

Mahi G’s videos haven’t had that level of reach, but she draws support from activists and nongovernmental groups working on environmental and social justice causes. Her videos typically garner tens of thousands of views, and one song about Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a social reformer and architect of the Indian constitution, has more than 300,000 views. But the music hasn’t made much money so far. She hasn’t monetized her YouTube channel and is instead funding her music through her salary as an engineer at a private company. 

“Heatwave” is not the first time Mahi G has used her music to talk about climate justice. In her first rap song, “Jungle Cha Raja” — King of the Jungle — Mahi G explored the relationship between tribal communities and the natural environment, highlighting how they have long worked to protect it. In another song, “Vikasacha Khul,” she raps about the cost of development — how the building of roads, skyscrapers, and shopping malls has come at the expense of forests, lakes, and clean air.

Rappers like Mahi G and Arivu are often making music that challenges the political establishment at great risk to themselves. In 2023, Umesh Khade and Raj Mungase, two rappers from Maharashtra, were jailed after the right-wing political party ruling the state alleged they had made defamatory statements about their politicians. Despite these concerns and looming threats, Mahi G said the response to her songs keeps her going. Her music has compelled people to think about the environment and has helped them realize that they don’t want industrialization that destroys forests, she said. Even though her community members, who are often new to rap, do not understand her music, she said they have appreciated her work to spotlight climate change, which has directly affected their lives. Shifting rainfall patterns and depleting water resources have taken a toll on the Mahadev Koli tribe’s ability to sustain themselves.

Asim Siddiqui, who teaches at Azim Premji University in southern India’s Bengaluru city and works on the educational and cultural politics of youth, said that rappers from lower-caste and indigenous communities who have been historically marginalised grow up in contexts where they are intimately connected to their social and natural environment. Ecological destruction or social injustice has a personal impact on their emotions and identity. “It becomes obvious for them to bring out these themes in their musical expression,” he said.

Siddiqui said that singing was historically stigmatised in India as a degrading occupation and, therefore, confined to lower-caste communities. But once India gained independence from British rule and embarked on its nation-building project, “some of the music traditions got classicized and later commodified, which excluded singers and performers from Dalit and Adivasi communities,” Siddiqui said. Hip-hop provided access to marginalised communities across the world, he added,  as it enabled young rappers like Mahi G to tell their stories through music.

For Mahi G, music is a platform for activism. “My rap focuses on protecting natural resources,” she said. “If you can’t plant a tree, at least don’t cut one down.” These basic principles form the core of her message.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Indian rapper is spitting bars about climate justice, caste, and Indigenous rights on Jul 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Haziq Qadri.

Incarcerated people in the US are routinely forced to work for low pay or no pay, while state governments are saving billions of dollars—and private corporations are making billions of dollars—exploiting the slave labor of prisoners. And yet, incarcerated workers have been largely excluded from the ranks of workers the public in general, and organized labor specifically, cares about. What will it take for unions and union members to embrace incarcerated workers as part of the labor movement? In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa explores the history of labor exploitation and labor organizing in America’s prison system.

Guests:

• Katherine Passley is Co-Executive Director of Beyond the Bars, a worker center in South Florida building the social and economic power of workers with criminal records and their families. Passley was named the 2025 Labor Organizer of the Year by In These Times magazine.
• JoeBill Muñoz is an independent Mexican-American documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, video editor, and journalist. Muñoz is the director and producer of The Strike (Hot Docs 2024).
• Bobby Dellelo spent 40 years of his life in prison.  While in prison he earned a BA in sociology, founded the AIDS Education Program, ran the library, and was the president of the National Prisoners Rights Association, the subject of a recently released book, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story In the Movement for Prison Abolition.
• Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia, PA. She is a labor writer for In These Times, a labor columnist at Teen Vogue and Fast Company, and regularly contributes to many other publications. Her first book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, is now available from One Signal/​Simon & Schuster.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

ICE is reportedly racing to build more detention tent camps nationwide after Congress allocated an unprecedented $45 billion in new funding over the next four years to lock up immigrants, as part of Trump’s massive tax and spending package. The Department of Homeland Security is also preparing to start detaining immigrants at more military bases, including in New Jersey and Indiana, as well as to transfer more immigrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to NPR. This comes as the Trump administration is moving to revoke access to bond hearings for people who entered the U.S. through “non-approved channels.” The new policy could potentially impact millions of undocumented people and orders officers to detain immigrants for the length of their removal proceedings — a process which can take months or even years. “This administration is using every tool that it has to target the immigrant community, to scare the immigrant community,” says Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. Orozco notes that most immigrants will likely never get the chance to fight their case before a judge under Trump’s aggressive deportation policies.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ICE is reportedly racing to build more detention tent camps nationwide after Congress allocated an unprecedented $45 billion in new funding over the next four years to lock up immigrants, as part of Trump’s massive tax and spending package. The Department of Homeland Security is also preparing to start detaining immigrants at more military bases, including in New Jersey and Indiana, as well as to transfer more immigrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to NPR. This comes as the Trump administration is moving to revoke access to bond hearings for people who entered the U.S. through “non-approved channels.” The new policy could potentially impact millions of undocumented people and orders officers to detain immigrants for the length of their removal proceedings — a process which can take months or even years. “This administration is using every tool that it has to target the immigrant community, to scare the immigrant community,” says Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. Orozco notes that most immigrants will likely never get the chance to fight their case before a judge under Trump’s aggressive deportation policies.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 15, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

In yet another controversial move from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons recently told officers that immigrants who arrived in the United States illegally are no longer eligible for a bond hearing as they fight against deportation and should be detained “for the duration of their removal proceedings.”

The Washington Post first revealed Lyons’ July 8 memo late Monday. He wrote that after the Trump administration “revisited its legal position on detention and release authorities,” and determined that such immigrants “may not be released from ICE custody.” He also said that rare exceptions should be made by officers, not judges.

The reporting drew swift and intense condemnation online. One social media user said: “Unconstitutional. Unethical. Authoritarian.”

In a statement shared with several news outlets, a spokesperson for ICE confirmed the new policy and said that “the recent guidance closes a loophole to our nation’s security based on an inaccurate interpretation of the statute.”

“It is aligned with the nation’s long-standing immigration law,” the spokesperson said. “All aliens seeking to enter our country in an unlawful manner or for illicit purposes shall be treated equally under the law, while still receiving due process.”

The move comes as President Donald Trump and leaders in his administration, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, attempt to deliver on his promised mass deportations—with federal agents targeting peaceful student activists, spraying children with tear gas, and detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions at the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz.”

In a statement about the ICE memo, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that “President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep Americans safe.”

“Politicians and activists can cry wolf all they want, but it won’t deter this administration from keeping these criminals and lawbreakers off American streets—and now, thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, we will have plenty of bed space to do so,” she added, referring to $45 billion for ICE detention in Republicans’ recently signed package.

According to the Post:

Since the memos were issued last week, the American Immigration Lawyers Association said members had reported that immigrants were being denied bond hearings in more than a dozen immigration courts across the United States, including in New York, Virginia, Oregon, North Carolina, Ohio, and Georgia. The Department of Justice oversees the immigration courts.

“This is their way of putting in place nationwide a method of detaining even more people,” said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It’s requiring the detention of far more people without any real review of their individual circumstances.”

Rebekah Wolf of the American Immigration Council told NBC News that her group has also received reports of some immigration judges “accepting the argument” from ICE, “and because the memo isn’t public, we don’t even know what law the government is relying on to make the claim that everyone who has ever entered without inspection is subject to mandatory detention.”

The Post reported that “the provision is based on a section of immigration law that says unauthorized immigrants ‘shall be detained’ after their arrest, but that has historically applied to those who recently crossed the border and not longtime residents.”

The newspaper also noted that Lyons wrote the new guidance is expected to face legal challenges. Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda—like various other policies—has been forcefully challenged in court, and there has been an exodus from the Justice Department unit responsible for defending presidential actions.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

“What Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s family is going through is just unimaginable,” says Baltimore-based journalist Baynard Woods, “but it is also what we’ve all allowed to happen over generations of letting the drug war and our deference to police departments erode the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which should protect us all from illegal search and seizure, such as these seizures that ICE is committing all around the country right now.” In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa and Woods discuss the US government’s case against Abrego Garcia—whom the Trump administration finally returned to US soil from El Salvador in June—and what the government can do to citizens and non-citizens alike when our right to due process is taken away.

Guest:

• Baynard Woods is a writer and journalist based in Baltimore. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Oxford American Magazine, and many other publications. He is the author of Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness and coauthor, with Brandon Soderberg, of I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad.

Additional resources:

• Baynard Woods, Baltimore Beat, “Government’s case against Abrego Garcia is based on PG County Cop who was on the SA’s do not call list”
• Baynard Woods, Baltimore Beat, “A Maryland man’s life is at stake. Trump and Salvadoran president Bukele could not care less”

Credits:

• Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary (commonly known as Angola), which sits on the site of a former slave plantation, has long forced incarcerated people, primarily Black men, to work on its prison farm under “inhumane” and dangerous conditions, including extreme heat. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with Samantha Pourciau, senior staff attorney at The Promise of Justice Initiative, about the slave-like conditions of prison agricultural labor and a groundbreaking lawsuit that could bring an end to Angola’s notorious “Farm Line.”
Guest:

• Samantha Pourciau is a senior staff attorney at The Promise of Justice Initiative, which serves incarcerated individuals and families in Louisiana and represents more than 7,000 clients in 57 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes.

Additional resources:

• The Prison Justice Initiative, “Press Release: In class action filing, incarcerated men report racism on Angola Prison’s ‘Farm Line’”
• Nick Chrastil, The Lens, “As summer nears, Angola Farm Line workers again demand more protections against heat”

Credits:

• Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

President Trump’s Executive Order calling for incarcerated transgender women to be housed in men’s prisons and halting gender-affirming medical care for prisoners has put one of the most vulnerable segments of the prison population in even greater danger. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa investigates the violent realities trans inmates face in the US prison system, and the impact that Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ rights is having inside prisons.

Guest(s):

• Dee Deidre Farmer, Executive Director of Fight4Justice. In 1994, Farmer’s landmark Supreme Court case, the unanimous Farmer v. Brennan decision, established that prisoners have a right to be protected from harm and that prisons are responsible for their safety.
• Ronnie L. Taylor, Advocacy, Policy, & Partnerships Director of FreeState Justice in Maryland.

Additional resources:

• Amy Harman, The New York Times, “Judge blocks Trump effort to end treatment for transgender inmates”
• Kaley Johnson & Sam Levin, The Guardian, “Trans women transferred to men’s prisons despite rulings against Trump’s order”

Credits:

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

According to The Guardian, transgender women are being sent back to male prisons under an executive order issued by President Donald Trump. A recent report from Democracy Now, stated that 17 transgender women have coverage under a lawsuit they filed, but the remaining transgender population have been sent back. They are suffering horrible abuses in the form of rape by the male population and from the prison guards.

The impact of this decision can be seen in the segment of this transgender population that don’t have coverage. More importantly, we can see the impact that this decision is having on the prison population in general. What do you think? Should an executive order supersede a court order where multiple court decisions said transgender women should remain in the population where they’re at? Or should an executive order supersede that, regardless of the court?

To learn more about trans women and the LBGT community’s resistance, I spoke with Deidre Farmer, who in the mid ’90s, filed a historical lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons because of their complicity in allowing rape to exist in all prisons they govern. Out of this lawsuit came PREA: Prison Rape Elimination Act. It became policy and it became law, throughout the prisons and throughout America.

Deidre Farmer:

I’m Deidre Farmer, I’m the executive director of Fight for Justice. I was incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons for a total of about 25-30 years. I brought the first transgender case accepted and decided by the US Supreme Court; In that case, Farmer V. Brennan, the US Supreme Court said that prison officials can be held liable for the sexual assault of other inmates when they knowingly place inmates at risk of danger. I am currently working with several organizations on cases that challenge the executive orders bought by Donald Trump regarding transgender people in prison as well as in the military.

Mansa Musa:

Talk about how this suit came into existence and more importantly, why?

Deidre Farmer:

I entered the Bureau of Prisons as a teenager and when I was 19-20 years old I was transferred to the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute. I had never been in a penitentiary environment before and did not know what to expect. I was in the prison system at Terre Haute for about a week when an inmate came into my cell with a knife and demanded that I have sex with him, and when I refused, he beat me up and raped me. Then a number of his homeboys or guys that he associated with, held me hostage in the cell for a day or two.

I ended up in protective custody and I had already started studying law and spending time in the library. When you’re in the segregation unit, you find other people who have had the same experience– They weren’t necessarily transgender people, some of them may have been LGBTQ or young guys that were vulnerable or other people viewed them as weak. When I was transferred from Terre Haute, this is something that continued to play on my mind because I knew people, like me, went into protective custody and therefore the prison officials knew what was happening in the population, but weren’t doing anything about it.

So I brought a suit claiming that when prison officials know that you are at risk of danger, assault, or rape, they can be sued for it. The district court and the Court of Appeals did not agree with me, but the US Supreme Court accepted the case. I wrote the petition on my own and filed it on my own and they accepted it. Then a friend of mine, who was an attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, represented me in the Supreme Court. Of course, the court held if you can prove they knew — Because of the environment or previous incidents — Then you can sue them.

Mansa Musa:

Out of this litigation came what is now commonly known as PREA: Prison Rape Elimination Act. Based on this advocacy in the prison system right now, it’s policy that they had autonomous system set up where prisoners can complain about being sexually mistreated. We know this is a fact that PREA exists throughout the system– Federal Bureau, federal, state, and county jail, city jail, it exists.

The president issued this order and according to it, all transgender people are to be sent back to the institutions that they’ve been identified by their original sexual origin; If it’s a male that’s transgender and he’s in a female prison, according to Donald Trump, he going to be sent back to a male prison and vice versa. Talk about the impact that’s going to have on the transgender population in general and with the prison population overall.

Deidre Farmer:

What you’re doing is sanctioning the death of transgender people, whether they are transgendered or otherwise, they are still human beings and we should not be subjecting them to death because they do not conform to what our ideology of human beings should be. In my case, the Supreme Court recognized that people with certain vulnerabilities — Including gender dysphoria or transgender — Are vulnerable in certain populations.

After my case, there were many studies done. Consequently the US Congress took the issue up and enacted the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which is supposed to have zero tolerance for rape in prisons. As the Supreme Court said, rape is not part of the sentence. Congress, because they recognized from many, many hearings and testimonies from women, young people, disabled people, mentally challenged people, gender-conflicted people who were sexually assaulted in prison or in jail, and consequently implemented PREA, which is nationwide standards. It does not create legal rights, but if you violate it, you can lose federal funding.

The executive orders that Trump has issued totally ignores what the Supreme Court has said, totally ignores what the US Congress has said, and what Trump is saying, despite the vulnerabilities that you have, you’re going back into that environment. Despite the knowledge that you will be raped, despite the knowledge that the person who raped you might kill you so that you cannot tell. This is not an ideology, this is not a presumption; This is something that happens and has happened.

Now for transgender people who remain in facilities consistent with their biological gender, it is happening. To say that you will take an incarcerated transgender woman who has had vaginoplasty and has a vagina and place her into a male institution, it’s the same as placing a woman in there and to place a person at that risk, it’s inhumane.

Mansa Musa:

In Baltimore, I spoke to Ronnie Taylor, a policy advocate with Free State Justice about the adversities facing the LGBTQ community in its current political climate. Also, we talked about the historical activism of the LGBTQ community.

Ronnie Taylor:

Thank you for having me. Ronnie Taylor, as you said. Pronouns are she/her. I serve as the advocacy policy and partnerships director here at Free State. We are the oldest LGBT organization providing legal services, resources, advocacy, and education in the state of Maryland. And we’re the only– We call ourselves Maryland’s LGBTQ+ advocates.

Mansa Musa:

I was looking at some of y’alls accomplishments. Y’all have been given numerous awards, but more importantly, y’all had a bill passed to deal with marriage. Talk about that.

Ronnie Taylor:

Absolutely. We were birthed out of the merger of Equality Maryland, for those that are familiar with that. We became Free State Legal Project and then Free State Maryland. Equality Maryland passed the Same-Sex Marriage Act numerous years ago, and it was such an accomplishment for Maryland so we wanted to figure out how we can continue to position ourselves as advocates.

Unfortunately, when the doors closed at Equality Maryland, Free State Legal Project continued to work when it comes to our advocacy portions and we’ve been continuing to do that. We have some amazing legislative wins such as the Trans Health Equity Act. This recent year we passed the Carlton R. Smith Jr. HIV Modernization Act. The awards are great and it’s great to be recognized, but we’re going to continue to do the work for Marylanders.

Mansa Musa:

In the 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris was being denigrated for providing or signing off on the legislation to allow transgender people to have a sex change according to what their orientation was. The President of the US and the Republican Party had a campaign ad; In the campaign ad they were promoting this as something that was inhuman and immoral with the way they was representing the person that was getting their sex changed, they had them looking almost monstrous. Talk about the impact that is having on the transgender community right now.

Ronnie Taylor:

Those acts that have come into place and how it is crucial to our current standing Marylanders, I pride myself in saying that on a local level, we have a great partner in our Governor Wes Moore. However, federally we are under attack, and that attack has looked a variance of ways. Military personnel folks and particularly trans folks who have been serving in the military for numerous of years.

Mansa Musa:

And honorably mention.

Ronnie Taylor:

And honorably mention. To have their careers taken away for an oath that they took to protect this country is inhumane in regards to our prison systems. The Prison Rape Elimination Act is a thing, and to say we’re going to put folks in cells and disregarding medical procedures and stating that you are trans, it’s simply an attack. Furthermore, there’s been numerous things this party has done; There’s been over 886 pieces of legislation introduced by the Federal Administration for the attack of transgender individuals.

Mansa Musa:

This is outstanding because you put all that time and energy into trying to have a moral agenda over people’s lives, but at the same token you are a convicted felon, you paid off Stormy Daniels for lewd lascivious behavior towards her, but you turned around and now you want to become the moral cop of people’s lives. Talk about the impact this is having on the transgender community and y’alls ability to raise funds.

Ronnie Taylor:

It’s hard. Funding is at a ultimate halt right now for a lot of organizations, including mine. If you put terms in such as “DEI” or “community” which our federal government are trying to eliminate, it puts us in a tricky situation. Thankfully we’ve been able to diversify our funding tools, as I’m in charge of that portfolio, and be able to still do the work. But it’s challenging because we don’t want to get rid of our moral compass and we refuse to.

We’re going to continue to do the work, but we find ourselves in a position in which the federal administration has proven they do not want to be a partner in this work. Thankfully, we have a great federal delegation in Maryland that’s going to continue to do the work and put forth legislation to combat that hate and that anti stuff, but it’s still there and it’s impacting everyday lives. It’s affecting people’s housing, their mental health, their ability to work, and so forth and so on.

Mansa Musa:

And we interviewed a transgender female that was responsible for PREA, Prison Rape and Enforcement Act, and she was saying that right now it look like it’s all out assault on transgender men or women in prison based on the fact that the president has put an executive order out saying that you going to be transferred to the prison of your assigned gender as opposed to your current gender. Talk about that if you can.

Ronnie Taylor:

I couldn’t agree with her more. It’s definitely an overall attack. It’s an agenda, it’s an attack. And one of the things that I often remind people in my advocacy work here is our current president, and I use that term loosely, these are just executive orders. This person has done nothing but signed executive orders throughout his time throughout this term. There has not been any laws. The reality is there’s still a chance to work and get things done on a local level. Now is the time more than ever. Primary general elections are coming up. We need folks to get in the race for the 2026, there are local elections, and do the work because it can be done.

And overall you need to hold your elected officials to the responsibility. When they took that oath to serve in Annapolis or serve in whatever state house you elected them to be in to do the work of all Marylanders. It’s inhumane. Trans people are a part of the political, social economic living sphere that we all consist and exist in. And so this attack on said sub community, it’s horrendous and there absolutely needs to be something done about it.

Mansa Musa:

This government is taking a conservative act. Like I said, we went back through the military, don’t ask, don’t tell, but now they just did an executive order around that. Secretary of Defense issued a memorandum about that, their prison, and they taking federal funds from anyone under [inaudible 00:17:48] species of DEI. But they primarily saying that if you’re transgender then you don’t have an arm and leg to stand on. Why do you think they’re having such a conservative act towards this particular community, sub-community?

Ronnie Taylor:

Great question, is we have to highlight folks from both sides of the aisle are trans.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, yeah.

Ronnie Taylor:

President Musk’s daughter is a woman of trans experience, but she’s not often talked about. She’s been pushed underneath of a carpet and it’s again, rooted in ignorance.

Mansa Musa:

As we go forward, what do you want our viewers to know about the transgender community? And more importantly, speak to them about what transgender means to you and what it should mean to society, because we live in a society supposed to be equal. We say we hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are treated equal and have [inaudible 00:18:42] rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If your life is at jeopardy, your liberty is at jeopardy, and then therefore you ain’t going to have no pursuit of happiness. Talk about why we should be looking at this issue and be real critical about this administration as it relates to their attitude towards people.

Ronnie Taylor:

Yeah. One of the things I often say is trans people since the beginning of time have done an amazing body of work, and our portfolio show that. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera stood on the front lines of the Stonewall movement and they threw the first brick.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Ronnie Taylor:

That’s not often something that we talk about. Trans people are elected officials. We have precious Brandi Davis down in the south, we have Andrea Jenkins in the Midwest, we have Sarah McBride, our first congresswoman.

Mansa Musa:

Come on, come on.

Ronnie Taylor:

And so folks are capable and willing to do the work, but we refuse to be ostracized. And so what it means to me, and thank you for asking me that question, I have prided myself and it’s often a label that I wear with pride and I introduce myself and my pronouns and say, “I’m a woman of trans experience,” because I refuse to dim that light in the work that I’m doing.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Ronnie Taylor:

And so we’re in advocacy spaces, we’re in policy spaces. We are in all of the spaces. And so it’s ultimately the education that gets into it. And so the willingness to learn, there are some of us that are willing to do our trans one-on-one conversations with you, but you have to come to the table with a willingness to learn.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Ronnie Taylor:

And so, oftentimes our political landscape has shown that it’s okay to be disrespectful and neglectful of said communities, but there is some work to be done.

Mansa Musa:

There you have it. The real news, Rallying the Boss. Transgender community is here, it’s here to stay. We not trying to make no excuse for it, but they’re human beings like us. The only problem that we have with this whole entire issue is that someone thinks that they have the moral compass to determine who should have a quality life versus whose life should be treated differently. This country is prided on equality and we are saying that equality is paramount when it comes to recognizing the transgender community and all their accomplishments they have made.

These stories about the LBGT community and transgender and their rights to be treated as human beings is something that Rallying the Boss believe should be brought front and center as it relates to humanity. This is about humanity. This is not about a person’s preference, sexual orientation. This is about people being treated as human. And we at Rallying the Boss believe that these stories, when you look at them and evaluate them, will give you a sense of understanding about humanity. We ask that you continue to look at Rallying the Boss and we ask that you give your views. Tell us what you think about these stories because it’s your views that give us content and context to our next story.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

“The authorities in the DRC should reverse the prohibition of coverage related to former President Joseph Kabila and his political party and cease threatening legal action for reporting on matters of public interest,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa regional director. “Escalation of fighting in eastern DRC has brought heightened dangers for journalists, which the government should be seeking to mitigate, not enhance. The Congolese people need unfettered access to information, not censorship.”

On June 2, the Higher Council for Audiovisual and Communication (CSAC), the DRC’s media regulator, ordered the media to cease coverage on the party’s activities for 90 days. The order, which CPJ reviewed, also forbids communication channels from “offering space” to PPRD members or Kabila “under penalty of very heavy sanction in accordance with the law,” with the prosecutor general in charge of enforcement.

As justification, the order claimed that Kabila and the party financially and ideologically support the M23 and AFC rebel groups in the eastern part of the country. It follows other government efforts to curb the influence of Kabila and his party, including the suspension of its activities in April. On May 22, the DRC’s Senate lifted immunities that were previously granted to Kabila, who became a life-long senator when his presidency ended in 2019. The government has accused the former president of treason, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and participation in an insurrectionist movement for his alleged support of the M23 rebellion.

On May 23, Kabila broadcast a nationwide speech on his YouTube channel, which has since been taken down, in which he criticized current DRC President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi and proposed his own solutions for restoring peace in the east. Since late May, Kabila has been engaging in discussions with various actors in the eastern city of Goma, which is under M23 control.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Oscar Kabamba, a spokesperson for the CSAC, went unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

President Trump has signed a new travel ban barring citizens of 12 countries from entering the United States. The ban applies to Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and the Republic of Congo. The Trump administration is calling some of the countries “terrorist safe havens” and citing high visa overstay rates for others. Compared to the first Trump administration’s sweeping travel bans, which targeted travelers from Muslim-majority countries, this latest iteration is more likely to withstand legal challenges, says Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which challenged the previous bans. However, the new order will be just as “devastating,” says Azmy.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

During the raid Tuesday morning, the TV station temporarily suspended operations, and employees were barred from entering their offices. According to IvanovoNews, a sister outlet in the same media group, authorities seized a computer case and documents from Kustov´s work office. Kustov returned to work after the raid on his home.

“This latest raid and criminal case against Russian broadcaster Bars and its editor-in-chief, Sergey Kustov, is a blatant act of intimidation and censorship,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Russian authorities must stop using defamation laws and other criminal charges to silence journalists who report on matters of public interest and should immediately return all confiscated materials and stop harassing Kustov.”

The raid was part of a criminal investigation into alleged defamation, which IvanovoNews reported is linked to a February report by Bars on missing Russian soldiers in Ukraine. The case may also relate to the use of the slang term “менты,” a derogatory word for police, in the report, the outlet said.

“This case is directly related to our journalistic work,” Bars’ editorial staff told CPJ.

Kustov, who said he had received threats in the days leading up to the raid, wrote on his Telegram channel Wednesday that he had been “very wrong to take it as just psychological pressure.” He added that “there was no slander in the publication.”

On February 12, Kustov was fined 100,000 rubles (US$1,114) for discrediting the armed forces. In March 2024, he was beaten while covering a plane crash and sent to jail for 10 days on charges of disobeying police orders.

CPJ filled out an online form requesting comment Russia’s Ministry of Interior, but did not immediately receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Private companies and state governments have long exploited the 13th Amendment to create a profitable agribusiness system that runs on prison slave labor. “If you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement,” says Joshua Sbicca, director of the Prison Agriculture Lab, and the legacy of that violence lives on in the big business of “agricarceral” farming today. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host and former political prisoner Mansa Musa speaks with Sbicca about the prisoners farming our food, the parties profiting from their exploitation, and the ongoing fight to uphold the basic rights and dignity of incarcerated workers.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to Rattling Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.

We oftentimes, when we look at agriculture in society, we see fields and fields of crops, irrigation system, birds flying and chirping. This is the agribusiness as it relates to a fantasy. But when you look at the agribusiness in prison, you see an entirely different story. You see men in the same kind of uniforms providing the labor to produce plants and crops. You see officers, guards on horseback with shotguns, overseeing them, making sure they do not run or escape.

Prisoners are left out in the field, as Malcolm said, one time from, can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night, but they’re left out there at ungodly hours. Recently I spoke with Professor Joshua Sabika, who is an educator, community builder and associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University, author of Food Justice Now: Deepening the Root of Social Struggle and co-author of A Recipe for Gentrification, Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. Thank you for joining me, professor Joshua Sabika.

Joshua Sabika:

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.

Mansa Musa:

And introduce yourself to our audience and tell them how you got into the space that we’re now talking about today.

Joshua Sabika:

Sure. Yeah. I’m the director of the Prison Agriculture Lab out of Colorado State University. And the Prison Agriculture Lab is a space for inquiry and action related to understanding agricultural operations inside the criminal punishment system.

And we do a lot of research to understand what’s happening and provide translations of that research for a public audience, for a media audience, so that people can see behind the curtain of the prison and understand specifically what it’s like to be on a prison farm and to understand the scope of that work.

So I come at this work originally actually through doing food justice work and in particular working with an organization called Planting Justice, who is an organization that works with formerly incarcerated people. It’s also worked inside prisons like San Quentin State Prison in California. And through that work was exposed to the perspectives of a lot of formerly incarcerated people who’ve had to work in prisons, but also who were working in a more positive way with plants and in gardens.

But it stoked this question in me, though, what’s happening more broadly in the US prison system when it comes to agricultural operations. And so that sort of curiosity was really the impetus behind the launch of the prison agriculture lab.

Mansa Musa:

And I did 48 years in prison, and I was in the Maryland system and one of the prisons, they called it the penal farm. And the reason why they called it the penal farm is because that was when it was first built. That’s what the design was. It was designed for producing food for the prison population, as well as the general society in that region, which was western Maryland. Professor, can you give our audience an overview of the history of the agribusiness and practice in prisons in the US?

Joshua Sabika:

Yeah, absolutely. And maybe I’ll start first with just laying out what are some of the trends right now that we know? So through our research, we found there are around 660 adult state-run prisons that have agricultural operations of some kind.

And we found these fall into four categories, horticulture and landscaping crops, food processing and production, and animal agriculture. And within each of those, kind of broad categories, are a whole bunch of specific practices.

And so you have everything from essentially plantation-style, large cropping kinds of operations, to more diversified gardens. And so it really runs the gamut, but we do see a concentration of agricultural operations in the South. We also know that in the South there’s a greater number of prisons in that region compared to other parts of the US.

And we’ve also asked kind of why are these things taking place? And so currently, according to the prison system, there’s four main reasons why these operations take place. One is idleness reduction. So essentially, kind of because prisons force people to work in the name of, they don’t want “idle hands doing the devil’s work.”

Another is financial reasons, so feeding the prison population or producing profits for the prison system. There’s also more or more, I should say training purposes. So educational and vocational programs are tied to ag operations.

And then lastly, a very small subset are reparative. So we understand this is for community service purposes, donating the food that’s grown, or greening the prison or something like that. But I’ll say that that’s a huge exception, that there are those sorts of reasons for these operations.

As far as the more historical kind of connections, you know, one of the pieces that I think is really clear is that if you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement. And a lot of those violent kinds of logics in agriculture find their way into the prison system, as the US prison system begins to develop in the 1800s.

And the same groups who were bracketed out of this sort of agrarian utopia that was being built for white immigrants to the US, as those people were bracketed out, they were then incarcerated again as the prison system began to develop. And yet agriculture was somehow imagined as a tool to discipline incarcerated people and compel them into being an orderly subject, basically.

And so in many ways, agriculture helped build the prison system. As prisons begin to develop, they needed to find a way to afford what they were creating. And so if you had a captive free labor force, you could force that labor force to grow a bunch of food to feed all the people that were then in that system. And so, farms were really central actually to the building of the US prison system and have continued to play a role over time.

Mansa Musa:

And you listed four things, talk about the relationship between how they work out as far as the agri, and as it relates to the support of the institution and the profit margin that come out in support of the prison industrial complex profiting off of it.

Joshua Sabika:

So maybe I’ll kind of start with breaking down a little bit, these two differences. So when it comes to agricultural operations in prisons and the financial benefits of those operations, it comes in two forms. One is essentially a subsidy to the prison system in the form of food that goes to feed the prison population. And this acts as a cost savings.

So instead of a prison having to go into the open market and buy that food from a corporation, they have their prison force do that work, anything from $0 to cents on the hour. There’s a large number of prisons that subsidize the cost of feeding people in this kind of way. And food is one of the few pieces within a budget in the prison that is controllable in many ways.

And so prisons have sought to make that expenditure less and less and less over time, and it’s at a great cost to the health of people within prisons. And I’ll note that, even in cases where food is going into the prison system, it usually isn’t enough to completely feed everybody. And so food has to be bought anyway.

And then there’s the food that’s being sold on the open market. So if we were to think about it, I think about it like an agricultural/industrial complex, where have prisoners that are selling or that are working to produce crops that then get sold. And also raise animals and livestock.

So in Texas for example, there’s a huge livestock operation. A bunch of this livestock is going into livestock auctions throughout the state of Texas. And then that beef is making its way into food supply chains that go into the consumer market, where you know may be having a hamburger at McDonald’s where some portion of that was produced in a prison in say, Texas.

And so, in terms of how much money is being made, like an exact dollar figure, this is something that actually the prison agriculture lab is trying to get information on. And so we’re in the middle of a project where we’re compiling a bunch of these numbers and we’re compiling the companies that are buying from the prison system. But just to name a few know there’s big companies like Smithfield or Cargill, these large multinational corporations that are purchasing some part of their food supply from prisons. And so tracing that is much more complicated, but it’s nevertheless happening.

Mansa Musa:

Are you familiar with the farm line litigation involving the Louisiana State Penitentiary? And can you talk about your research as it relates to that and any other views you might have on that?

Joshua Sabika:

Sure. I guess the first thing that I’ll actually say here is, I was retained by the plaintiffs as an expert witness in the farm line litigation. So I can speak about some things and not other things.

But I guess what I’ll say first is a little bit about the research that the prison agriculture lab has done. So as it pertains to Louisiana know, our research has found that there’s a lot of different agricultural operations in prisons in Louisiana, at Angola specifically. So Louisiana State Penitentiary, we know that there are large cropping operations, and that’s sort of the majority of the kind of agricultural work that takes place there.

And there’s work that’s run by the prison industry itself in LSP. And then there are fields that are run by LSP itself. And so those operations run parallel to each other but serve different kinds of purposes.

And part of what the farm line litigation is about, and this has been all kind of publicly recorded and reported on, I should say, is focusing on the heat conditions that men incarcerated at LSP are subject to, particularly in the summertime. And then the harms that are associated with working in a plantation-style agricultural system that’s reminiscent of chattel slavery. And so the pending class action lawsuit is seeking to address those two concerns.

Mansa Musa:

And to your knowledge and your research, how much money do they make versus how much profit comes out of that space? I know you say y’all was trying to pin down how much profit, but if you can give a general view of the profit margin relative to how much the wage margin.

Joshua Sabika:

Yeah, I mean it really varies a lot by prison and state across the US, but if we’re talking about a state like Louisiana and a prison like Angola, prisoners are paid anywhere from zero to 4 cents an hour, so basically nothing. And in terms of the farm line itself, what’s come out in kind of public declarations, is that food actually goes back into feeding the prison population. So it’s different than some of the other agricultural operations that are producing food for the open market.

In terms of the exact dollar figures, I don’t have those exact figures, but if you were to look like in the aggregate, the Associated Press released a report about a year or so ago, and they essentially found that there’s likely hundreds of millions of dollars that are being made by this agricultural system within prisons. And so you could do some ballpark math to realize essentially that you have incarcerated people paid basically nothing while companies and/or the state are profiting off of this labor.

Mansa Musa:

And it is known that when you’re dealing with any type of large agricultural situation that you have to have some type of pesticide, or some type of way to preserve the plants that you’re growing, or create an environment for the plants to grow. In your research, have y’all found any relationship between the pesticides being used and the health, or health related issues, from men or women that’s working in these environments?

Joshua Sabika:

Our research hasn’t looked specifically at that relationship between, kind of the environmental exposures and then the health of incarcerated people working in these systems. But one thing that I can say, is that based on various cases that I’m aware of around the country, that the use of pesticides and herbicides is part of some of these agricultural operations. So I’m particularly familiar with the case of Florida where I’ve done extensive research and I know that pesticides and herbicides are used in various farming operations. Now whether or not they’re being safely applied and whether or not people are getting sick as a result of those exposures, I think is another question.

There have been reports, again, this is in sort of publicly available documents that at places like Angola, that crop dusters are used. Again, the question is how safely is that practice happening and are people around when those practices are happening? The prison system is notoriously opaque and it can be incredibly hard to verify what’s happening in any systematic way, but there appear to be reports and information to suggest that these chemicals are being used. And then it’s whether or not it’s harmful to people is the bigger question.

Mansa Musa:

The real news recently reached out to Louisiana State Penitentiary for comment on how frequently they use crop dusters, and has not yet been provided with any official response. I come out of prison myself. When I look at the farm line and I look at the whole agribusiness as it relates to the prison industrial complex.

Unless a person is coming out of the system and buying acres of land and planting and feeding them on their own self, even with a marketable skill is virtually impossible. If you are in an environment where agriculture is the primary industry that exists in the Maryland system, in the federal system, they have industry and it is exploitative in and of itself, but they provide you with a marketable skill where a person might come out with upholstery, a person might come out with plumbing, a person might come out with cabin making, even though they’ve been exploited all them years.

I find the connection between when a person doing long-term in the Angola, or long-term on any prison where it’s agri is concerned, that they don’t have the necessary job skills to be competitive back in society. Do you have a view on that?

Joshua Sabika:

Yeah, I do. And I think that’s a really important point that you’re making. And one of the claims of many state prison systems is that there is some sort of educational or vocational benefit to the agricultural work that people are performing.

Unfortunately, there’s very little evidence to suggest that that’s actually happening. And I think that there are several reasons for that. I think one is part of it’s like a tracking problem. It’s very difficult to track people once they leave prison. But I think more fundamentally is the point that you made, which is that you can’t buy land coming out of prison. It’s very, very unlikely that you’re going to be able to do that. And moreover, the skills that you actually developed are probably for a more frontline position.

Mansa Musa:

Exactly.

Joshua Sabika:

So working as a field hand or milking a cow or something of that sort, and if you look at the pay that’s associated with that work, it’s very low pay, and agricultural work is some of the most dangerous work that exists in the economy. And so the thing that I’ve thought a bit about is what is it actually signaling to incarcerated people when you say, this is the kind of work you’re going to do? It signals that they don’t deserve better work.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Exactly.

Joshua Sabika:

It signals that they deserve some of the most backbreaking, brutal work that we know exists. And to suggest that people are going to come out with a skill then, in that same sector that continues to abuse people, is ultimately this sort of disciplinary and brutal logic that has no intention of actually taking care of people.

Mansa Musa:

And under the law, you have crime, you have punishment, and the punishment is the sentence that you receive. I commit a crime, I get punished for it. The punishment is the sentence I receive. The punishment is not where I go at, and then in turn be brutally punished or physically punished.

And according to the concept of penology is that once I get into the system, then I’m supposed to be provided with the opportunity to change my behavior, to develop a work ethic, to develop social skills, because ultimately I’m going to be returned. Within in the agri system, and much like in the industrial system as well, but in the agri system in and of itself, you’re going to find very few people that come out of the system that is equipped to re-socialize themselves back into society, primarily because everything is done in a plantation style. If I don’t work, if I refuse to work, I’m going in solitary confinement. Or the threat of solitary confinement exists that if I don’t get on the farm line that exists, and more importantly, I’m doing long-term, the average person is doing 15 to 20 years in that environment and come out that environment, have very little skills to adjust back in society.

So it’s inevitable that they’re going to revert back to some kind of criminal behavior which opens that cycle, repeat that cycle. And this has been my experience that I’ve seen over and over again when people leave out, we’re not prepared, we’re not equipped and we’re confronted with a society that we have to live in. We don’t have the ability to get housing, our medical benefits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But in closing, professor, tell our audience where you see this farm line litigation going. If you can give an overview on that or based on your research and your knowledge of these types of litigation, where do you think this might end up at?

Joshua Sabika:

Yeah, it is a great question. And when we look at how some agricultural operations are run in this plantation style, like you were talking about, where the point of the system is to heap punishment on top of a sentence, as you put it.

When we see that these kinds of systems exist, it breathes life into the argument that we need to get rid of, for example, exception clauses from state constitutions that say, you can be subject to slavery or involuntary servitude if you’ve been convicted of a crime.

So these kinds of systems, they breathe life into this analysis that prisons are akin to chattel slavery, and they traumatize people in ways that are akin to chattel slavery. And so, even though plantation style agricultural operations are the exception in the American prison system, they’re demonstrative of the larger logics in the prison system that abuse people that use incarceration and capturing the time of people in order to prop up, essentially a giant public works program.

And then on top of that, the entanglements of that system with private industry, which profits off of the captured time of people. And so when thinking about something like the farm line litigation or kind of more broadly what it represents, I think that’s why it’s significant, and that’s why we should be paying close attention, and thinking about how that logic is maybe happening in many other places as well. And so there’s an opportunity to crack that open and engage in efforts that actually uplift the human rights of people who are incarcerated, and that sees the human dignity of people who are behind bars no matter what they’ve done.

Mansa Musa:

Based on your research and your study and your knowledge of the history, what would be a good solution for the type of problem that we just outlined?

Joshua Sabika:

Yeah, I mean, I guess the one thing that I would point to is that it’s always important to take direction from people who are on the front lines, and that’s incarcerated people, and look at the analysis and demands of people who are subject to abusive systems.

So if you look at efforts like the Free Alabama movement or efforts in the State of Florida, for example, to engage in various prisoner rights organizing, I think it’s really important to find those organizations and those individuals that are already doing the work and to find a way to plug into it wherever you’re located.

There are prisons in every single one of these states that we live in here in the United States, and there are many people that are locked up in that system. So making connections with people on the inside I think is really important.

I think on a more outside level, knowing those companies that are profiting off of the labor of incarcerated people and refusing to spend your money to support those companies is also something that we can all take ownership of ourselves and be aware of how we’re entangled with the prison industrial complex. And so I think that’s another set of actions that consumers can be taking.

And I think the last piece is, in those cases where there is a litigation or other kinds of efforts to hold prisons accountable, that people find ways to support those efforts. So those are the things that I would offer here today.

Mansa Musa:

And will say, tell our audience how they can follow you or keep track of some of the works that you’re doing in terms of your advocacy.

Joshua Sabika:

Sure, you can find the work of the Prison Agriculture Lab at prisonagriculture.com. And personally, I’m on Blue Sky and you can find me on Blue Sky if you want to follow me on social media.

Mansa Musa:

Professor Joshua Sabika, you rattled the bars today, and we want to always be mindful of this to say that we’re talking about human beings. We had the United Farm Workers that was working in the fields for pennies a day and inhumane conditions that was able to unionize and ultimately get treated like a human being, get a livable wage.

We had people that, when we look at this country that was working in sweatshops, that unionized and was able to get treated like a human being. The thing with the prison population as the professor outlined, is the 13th Amendment. The 13th amendment is the one thing that’s preventing prisoners from being treated like human beings, because it says that except for those who’ve been duly convicted of a crime, they can be treated as a slave. Anybody else cannot. If you’ve been duly convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. And as we see from the Louisiana farm system or any other system where it’s agriculture involved, we see this 13th amendment being carried out.

The only difference between the 1800s and now is everybody’s not on the plantation. They don’t have free reigns to round people up to go kidnap people. But once you’re in that system, it’s like you’ve been kidnapped, and that’s the end of your life as it exists during that time.

We want to ask our audience to continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bar. We ask that you give us your feedback on these conversations because it’s important that we hear what you got to say. If you agree with it or don’t agree with it, we still want to hear it because it’s only through discourse that we can get a better understanding of the direction that we want to take and treating each other like human beings. Thank you, professor.

Joshua Sabika:

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

The post Behind Bars and Binaries: Music, Identity, and the Fight for Liberation appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

A notorious federal prison in Dublin, CA, was closed in 2024 after years of complaints of rampant and systematic sexual abuse, medical neglect, and human rights violations. Now, the Trump administration is pushing to reopen the facility as an ICE detention center, but an interfaith coalition of community members and human rights advocates are fighting to keep the facility closed.

Edited by: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Speaker 1:

The Dublin City Council and Representative DeSaulnier, as well as Representative Zoe Loughran, we would like everyone to join them in opposing the opening of FCI Dublin as an ICE detention center.

Speaker 2:

On April 16th, faith leaders and activists gathered outside of a federal correctional institute, Dublin, a site of horrific abuse, neglect, and state-sanctioned violence, calling for the facility’s permanent closure and to reject a plan to use it as an immigration detention center. That’s from a statement released by Interfaith Movement and Human Integrity and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. The statement further details that countless people incarcerated at FCI Dublin survived being sexually abused by the Bureau of Prison staff and faced inhumane conditions, retaliation and medical neglect, and that now ICE appears to be moving forward with converting FCI Dublin from a BOP facility to an ICE facility, despite congressional opposition, its abusive history and dangerously dilapidated infrastructure.

Speaker 3:

Led an amazing campaign to organize to shut that prison down. We want to honor their dreams that this harm not be continued and perpetuated on other people and other communities. So this is why we’re preventing, here to prevent ICE from reopening Dublin as a detention facility.

Speaker 2:

Immigrants incarcerated at Dublin who are not citizens were specifically targeted by BOP staff who threatened to turn them over to immigration and customs enforcement, or made false promises that in exchange for sex, they could help them stay in the United States. In 2023, the Real News spoke with organizer Erin Neff of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners about the lawsuit filed on behalf of incarcerated women who were experiencing abuse at the prison.

Erin Neff:

In the case of Dublin, just to give it an historical context, 30 years ago there was a horrific incident of abuse upon many people, and there was a big case and a big settlement, and it is heartbreaking to see that 30 years later, the same thing is happening. And what it exposes is a culture of turning a blind eye to this abuse. There’s cooperation, there’s cover-up. It’s very difficult to report, let alone confidentially report. So in recent times, what you’re seeing are people being abused who are undocumented. So first of all, they’re being targeted because the staff knows that they are people who are going to be deported. So there’s an exposure there. They are threatened that if they say anything, they’ll be deported. So these people are people who’ve been here maybe their entire lives, all of their families here, they’re being retaliated against by putting in isolation. They are getting strip searched. It goes on and on. They’re being deprived of medical care, of mental health care.

Speaker 2:

At the recent vigil, outside the gates of FCI Dublin, Reverend Victoria Rue read a statement by Anna, a survivor of FCI Dublin.

Rev. Victoria Rue:

Like so many other immigrant women, I was sexually abused by an officer at FCI Dublin. After I was finally free from the hell of FCI Dublin, I was taken to another hell, an ICE detention center. The conditions at the detention center were terrible. I saw so much suffering. After months and months, I finally won my freedom. I am finally home with my children and trying to heal from the U.S. Government, from what the U.S. Government did to me. When I saw on the news that they wanted to reopen FCI Dublin for immigration detention, my heart fell. That prison is toxic and full of the pain of so many people. I pray that it is demolished, given back to the birds that live on the land there.

Speaker 2:

There was also testimony from Ulises Pena-Lopez, who is currently incarcerated in ICE detention. According to the Santa Clara rapid response team, early on February 21st, as Ulises was getting ready to leave his home, ICE agents showed up and forcibly arrested him, disregarding his rights and his health. Despite Ulises invoking his right to remain silent, to speak with a lawyer and to not exit his vehicle with without seeing a warrant, ICE officers responded with violence, smashing his car window with a baton and dragging him out of his vehicle. Without receiving proper medical care, Ulises was released into ICE custody and is currently being held at the Golden State Annex Detention Center in McFarland, California.

Ulises Pena-Lopez:

It fills me with strength, encouragement, joy, knowing that we are not alone. That you are standing in front of us, that you are our voice and I know and I feel that you’ll never leave us. God bless all of you. Physically, I feel like half of my body is numb, my foot, my right hand. I’m losing vision in my right eye and my face without mobility. Psychologically, I feel like I’m having pauses. They detected my medical and psychological condition as serious and they’re giving me treatment. I can’t sleep. When I call someone or whatever I need, I’m scared. I tremble. I start to sweat. My heart races because of everything they did to me; because of the way we’re not supposed to possess medication in here. If you want two painkillers, you have to submit a request. If you have to put in the request, it usually takes two or three days to be approved.

Speaker 2:

This comes from the statement of Ulises’s campaign and his supporters. They are calling and sending emails to Congress members Ro Khanna and Alex Padilla to demand ICE to release Ulises from the Golden State Annex ICE Detention Center in McFarland and provide access to medical care, treatment and medications.

Ulises Pena-Lopez:

I want to tell you that despite what ICE did to me, when they beat me in front of my wife, in front of my daughter, and they took me to an alley, they continued to beat me. They performed CPR on me to revive me. After they called the ambulance, they still had the audacity to send the ambulance bills to my wife, not once but twice, saying that she is responsible and has to pay for these bills for what they did to me.

Speaker 2:

The list of demands issued by the organizations Interfaith Movement and Human Integrity and California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice includes: honor and uplift survivors of FCI Dublin; demolish and permanently close the FCI Dublin; reject all forms of ICE detention in Dublin and the ongoing terror and criminalization of immigrant communities; return and transform the land to meet community needs and reaffirm that places of worship and religious observance should remain sensitive locations free from the reach of immigration enforcement.

Speaker 7:

Just to close, we know that if Dublin is reopened as an ICE detention center, if people are once again caged in those empty buildings across the street, abuse and neglect will continue. As Dublin survivors have said so many times, the horrors that happened at Dublin are not unique. Abuse is baked into our prison system. Everywhere there are cages, there is violence. In BOP, in ICE in the Santa Rita jail across the street. What is unique about FCI Dublin is that survivors of this violence came together and they organized and they spoke out and they made themselves heard. Dublin survivors shut for years to shut that prison down and they won and it must stay closed forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

Mansa Musa, host of Rattling the Bars, spent 48 years in prison before his release in 2019. At the invitation of the UMD College Park Young Democratic Socialists of America, Mansa delivered a lecture on his life behind bars and the political struggles of prisoners.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

I hope that at the end of this conversation that we have, that y’all will be more enlightened about what direction y’all want to go in in terms of changing social conditions as they exist now. As she said, my government name is Charles Hopkins. I go by the name of Mansa Musa. Prior to getting out in December the 5th, 2019, I did 48 years in prison. Prior to going to prison, I was a heroin addict, a petty criminal, and that’s what got me in prison.

I went in early, I went in ’72, and during the seventies was a tumultuous time in this country. You had Kent State, you had Attica, you had Puerto Rican nationalists taking over the hospital in Bronx, you had the rise of the Black Panther Party in terms of becoming one of the most formidable fighting formations in this country. So you had a lot going on in society, but more important, the number one thing you had going on in society during that time that cost every sector in society was the war in Vietnam. Everywhere you looked, you had protests about the war in Vietnam. And you’re talking about every day somewhere in this country, 75,000, 10,000, 15,000.

People was coming out protesting the war in Vietnam and the establishment’s response was to suppress the movement, to suppress the war in Vietnam. Anybody who was anti-war, their attitude was suppressive. And what got people in an uproar about it was when the media started showing them bringing back United States citizens bodies, and the coffins they was bringing back, they was bringing them back in numbers. So society started looking and said, “Well, this is not a good thing because a lot of people dying.”

And in my neighborhood, I lived in projects in Southeast, my brother in ’68, back then they had, the way they had the draft was, it was like the lottery. Literally that’s what it was. They had balls that rolled up and your number came up, A1, A1. In my neighborhood in the projects in Southeast, my brother graduated in ’68, and in 68, the whole entire, everybody that graduated from high school, the men, was gone to Vietnam. So this shaped the attitude of the country. But more importantly, a lot of people that were coming back from the war in Vietnam was radicalized. And because they experienced a lot of segregation, a lot of classes in the military, a lot of them came back and joined the Black Panther Party.

During that period, the Black Panther Party was, according to Hoover, the number one threat in the country. So the response to them being the number one threat in the country was to eradicate them. Assassination. They killed Fred Hampton, assassinated Fred Hampton, little Bobby Hutton, they assassinated him. And they locked up a lot of Panthers. That’s how I became a Panther because they locked up a Panther named Eddie Conway, Marshal Eddie Conway. And they set him up and locked him up. And I got some information over there, y’all can pick it up when y’all leave.

When he came, so when you got the encouragement of Panthers coming into the prison system, prisoners are becoming politicized. Petty criminals like myself are becoming politicized because now we’re looking at the conditions that we’re living under and we’re looking at them from a political perspective, like why the medical was bad, why the food is garbage, why are we in overcrowded cells? Why is this cell designed for a dog? You got two people in it.

So these things started like resonating with people, but the Panthers started educating people about understanding, raising their consciousness about this is why these things are going on and this is what your response would be. So that got me into a space where I started reading more, because that was one of the things that we did. We did a lot of reading. You had to read one hour a day and exercise. But more importantly, you organized the population around changing their attitude about the conditions. Because up until that point, everything in prison was a kind of predatory.

Then when you had the Attica Rebellion, that created a chain reaction through the country, with the most celebrity political prisoner in prison that got politicized in prison was George Jackson. George Jackson was a prisoner in San Quentin. He spent most of his time in what now they call solitary confinement. They call it the Adjustment Center. Back then in San Quentin. Him and three or two other political prisoners was locked up in [inaudible 00:05:06] killing a correctional officer. After the San Quentin police had killed… [inaudible 00:05:14] police had killed some prisoners in the courtyard who were wrecking. And it was a dispute between white prisoners and Black prisoners. The only prisoners that got killed was Black prisoners. So that created a chain reaction in the prison system.

Fast forward, so this became my incursion into the political apparatus in prison. While in prison, and some of the things I did in prison, my whole thinking back then when I was in prison was I didn’t want to die in prison. I had life and I didn’t want to die in prison. So I would probably go down in the World Book of Guinness for the most failed attempted escapes ever. And if I would sit back here and go back over some of the things I did, it would be kind of comical. But in my mind, I did not want to die. I could have died, I could walk, literally come out on the other side of the fence and fall out and be dead, as long as I didn’t die in prison. It was just a thing about being [inaudible 00:06:19].

And in 2001, a case came out in the Maryland system called Merle Unger, Unger v. State. They said anyone locked up between 1970 and 1980 was entitled to a new trial. So I was entitled to a new trial because of the way they was giving the jury instructions. So at that time, everybody was getting ready to come out. Eddie Conway was on his way out. So everybody’s coming out. Now we’re able, we did a lot of organizing in prison. We had organized political education classes, we had organized forums where we had a thing where they say, “Just say your own words.” We brought political leaders in, radicals in to talk about, had books that they had a political discussion in a forum much like this. And it changed the whole prison population thinking about the way they thought about themselves and the way they thought about themselves in relation to society. So all of us coming out now.

And when I got out, I got out December the 5th of 2019. I got out, I had, they gave me $50 and let me out in Baltimore City. I’m from Washington D.C. They let me out in Baltimore City and I’m standing there with $50. I don’t know nothing. I don’t know how to use a cellphone, I don’t know how to get on the bus, I don’t know how to get from one corner to… I know the area because the area is the prison where the prison was at, where I lived at all my life. So I know the street name. I know this is Green Mount, I know this is Madison, I know the street, I know these streets, but I never seen, that’s like me knowing somewhere I read something about something in Paris. I know the name of the street, but put me there and I wouldn’t know what to do.

So this is the situation I found myself in and I didn’t know what, my family knew I was coming out, but I didn’t know whether they knew this particular time. And so I got $50. I see somebody coming with a cellphone and I’m like, “Look, I got, can I use?” He said, “No, I’m going to get on the bus.” So it was an elderly woman coming off. I said, “Look, miss, I was locked up 48 years. I got $50. You can get 25 of them. I just need you to call this number and tell my people.” And I heard somebody calling from the side, was my family.

Now I’m out. While I’m out, I’m out December the 5th of 2019. It was a major event that came right in that period, COVID. So now I’m like, I’m out in society, but really I’m back in prison because the whole country was locked down. So for most people it was a discomfort. For me, I was like, “Oh, this is all right. I can walk.” You know, I’m like basically walking, like I’m walking in, I’m coming back in. I’m not, you know, there’s not a whole lot going on, so you know. And I’m working out and people dealing with each other from afar. You see the same people, everybody like, “I see you, you have a group.” And we started having like a distant social relationship like, “Hey, how y’all doing? How you doing?” And keep it moving right?

After I got out and when COVID peaked out, I was doing some organizing in Gilmor projects in Baltimore, and backstory on that, we had took a house in Gilmor Projects, which is exactly what it is, Gilmor and their projects. Real notorious. So we took a house, we found out it was city property, we took it, renovated it and made it community property, and we started doing stuff for the kids. Because Eddie, Eddie Conway’s attitude, he’s like, “Kids don’t have no light in their face. It’s real dark.” So we started doing Easter egg hunts, showing movies on the wall, you know, doing all kinds of activities, gardening to get the kids to be kids.

And we took it and when we took it, we say, “We taking this house.” We put the city on and we had a press conference, “Yeah, we took this house, we doing this for the community. Y’all got a problem with that, y’all come down here and tell the community that they can’t have this house.” So the city pretty much like, “Ah, whatever, we ain’t going down there and messing with them people.” So we did, we gave out coats. So this is our organizing.

See, our organizing method was you meet people with their needs, you meet people’s needs. So it’s not only about giving out food and giving clothing, it’s about having a political education environment where you can teach people how to, you know, you got the analogy of Jesus saying like teach people how to fish. Right? Okay, I already know how to fish, now tell me how to survive. Tell me how to store, tell me how to build, tell me how to build out. So this is the things that we was doing and we would put ourselves in a position, we would network with legal organizations. The people had issues with their rent and we know it was a slum lord environment. And we would educate people about this is how you get your rights recognized.

So Eddie, and I’m going to talk about Eddie often, right? Because that was my mentor. Ultimately, he got lung cancer and passed away December, February the 13th a couple of years ago. He passed away the day before my birthday. My birthday was February the 14th. And I was like, when his wife called me and said, “Eddie is getting ready, you know, transition. They in Vegas, can you come out here?” And I’m like, I can’t come out there. But the only thing I’m saying is like, man, whatever you do, don’t die on my birthday. I’m like, because I ain’t going to be able to take it. I ain’t going to have no birthday no more. It’s already sad for me to have to deal with it the day before, but I just didn’t want that memory of him.

But long story short, this individual was responsible for changing the mindset of a lot of prisoners and getting us to think outside the box more or less, right? Our political education, this was one of the things that the Black Panther Party emphasized. So you see, we call it Panther porn. This is Panther porn for us. Panther porn for us is when you see the guns and you know the Berettas and the mugging, that’s Panther porn. What we identified with is the free breakfast program where we fed our kids. We tried to promote the hospital, we tried to promote where we was taking and giving sickle cell anemia tests to our people because we knew they wasn’t doing that. You know, we used to give them free breakfast program. We was getting our food, we had clothes, we was transporting prisoners, families to prisons in California. All out of the way prisons. We was holding political education classes in community and networking with people around their needs and making sure they understood exactly what was going on with them.

One of the questions I seen that was on the question is the difference between abolition as it relates to prison and the police. And we know we had this call for divest, and I’m going be perfectly honest with you. I don’t want to live in a society that there ain’t no law and order. That’s just not me. I don’t want to live in a society where we don’t feel safe. So it’s not an issue of whether or not police should be in the community. It’s an issue of what’s their relationship? They got on their car serve and protect. Okay, if you’re responsible for serving and protecting me, then my interest should be first and foremost and I shouldn’t be targeted. I shouldn’t be like back in the sixties, everybody that had long hair that was white, they was hippies and you was treated a certain way because in their mind you was anti-sociable or anti-establishment. That’s what made you a hippie. It didn’t make you a hippie because you didn’t… Your identity was based on, I don’t really have a lot of interest in the establishment.

But they looked at it as a threat. People had afros, they looked at it as a threat. So when we look at it’s not about abolishing the police, it’s about the police respecting the community and the community having more control over. So if you represent me in my community, then you need to be in my community, understand what’s going on in my community and serving my community according to serve and protect.

Abolition on the other hand is we’re about completely abolishing the prison system. What would that look like? And we was having this conversation, what do that look like? You going to open the doors up and let everybody out? I’ve been in prison 48 years. There’s some people that I’ve been around in prison, if I see him on the street the day after tomorrow, I might go call the police on them because I know that’s how their thinking is. But at the same token, if a civil society, we have an obligation to help people. And that’s what we should be doing.

You know, people have been traumatized and trauma becoming vogue now. You know everybody like oh, trauma experience. So trauma becoming vogue, but people have been traumatized and have not been treated for their trauma. So they dial down on it and that become the norm. So we need to be in a society where we’re healing people. And that’s what I would say when it comes to the abolition. Yeah, we should abolish prison as they exist now, they’re cruel, they’re inhumane. We’ve got the guards in Rikers Island talking about protesting and walkout, wildcat strike because they saying that the elimination of solitary confinement is a threat to them. How is it a threat to you that you put me in a cell for three years on end, bringing my mail to me and say that if you eliminate this right here, me as a worker, it’s going to be threatened by that non-existence. How’s that? That don’t even make sense.

But this is the attitude that you have when it comes to the prison industrial complex. The prison industrial complex is very profitable. The prison industrial complex became like an industry in and of itself. Every aspect of it has been privatized. The telephone’s been privatized, the medical’s been privatized, the clothing been privatized. So you’ve got a private entity saying, “I’ll make all the clothes for the prisons.” You got another private entity saying, “I’ll take, I want the telephone contract for all the prisons.” You got another company saying, “I want to be responsible for making the beds, the metal and all that.”

Which leads me to Maryland Correction Enterprise. Maryland Correction Enterprise is one of the entities that does this. There’s a private corporation that has preferential bidding rights on anything that’s being done in Maryland. I’m not going to say these chairs, but I’m going to say any of them tags that’s on your car, that’s Maryland Enterprise. I press tags. So I know that to be a fact. A lot of the desks in your classroom come from Maryland Correction Enterprise.

So what they’re giving us, they gave us 90 cent a day and you get a bonus. Now, you get the bonus based on how much you produce. So everybody like, so now you’re trying to get… Okay, I’m trying to get like $90 a month. I’m just starting. So somebody that’s been there for a while might be getting $2 a day and some. We pressing tags like till your elbows was on fire because you’re trying to make as much money as you possibly can. You’re trying to produce as many tags as you possibly can to make money.

Well, they’re getting billions, they’re getting millions of dollars from the labor. So I just recently did an interview with a state senator about that because he had put a bill in and I was asking him about it. And then I asked him, I said, “Okay, prisoners going to want to work.” The incentive for prisoners to work is in the Maryland prison system, you get five days off your sentence when you come through the door. Then if you get a job, then some jobs give you 10 days off, so that’s 10 days less that you do in a month. Everybody trying to get in them kind of jobs where you getting less days. So it’s not a matter I don’t want to work and it’s not a matter I like the work that I’m doing. I’m just, the incentive for me to work is really the reduction in my time in prison.

So I asked the state senator, I said, “Listen,” I said, “Would it be better if, okay, everybody going to want to work, wouldn’t it be better if you pass and try to get a bill passed that say that everybody get minimum wage, that they’d be able to pay their social security, they’d be able to pay taxes and they’d be able to acquire some money. Wouldn’t that be the better approach? Because prisoners going to work.” So I realized when I was having this conversation with them. In Kansas, that’s exactly what they’re doing in Kansas prison. They got guys that’s in Kansas prison saved up to $75,000. They got long-term, they’re not going anywhere, but they’ve been able to have an impact on their family and have a sense of responsibility.

So another question that came up was, that I was thinking about is what would be y’all response? What would I say to y’all in terms of what I think that y’all should be looking at? And I’m not here to lecture you, but this is for when we look at colleges and as they relate to the struggle, the majority of people that resisted in the seventies, sixties, they came out of school, they came out of college. You had Angela Davis, you had Huey Newton, Bobby Seales, they came out, they was in college, the Kent State, this was a college., they got rid of Angela Davis because she was teaching on campus, because of her politics.

So college has always been a place where you have a propensity to like being organized or start questioning things and start developing ideas about looking at what’s going on in society today in the country and around the world. We’re in a time right now where, I don’t know how many of y’all read George Orwell 1984, but we’re in like a George Orwellian type of society. And free speech, yeah, it’s only if you talk about a subject matter that is not contrary to capitalism. And then you got the right to free speech, but then you don’t have the right to be heard. So then you got who got control of the media.

So right now getting our voice out or taking a position and you take a position, oh you being anti, so therefore I’m going to take your grant or I’m going to take your scholarship. I only got like one more semester to graduate. Hey so what? And I’m going to blackball you or better still, I’m going to snowball you and put you in an environment where you ain’t going to be able to get a job at McDonald’s. Why? Because I’m trying to control your thinking and make sure that you don’t be organizing in a manner that’s going to be against anything that we’re doing.

We’re getting a lot of information coming out and a lot of people is like hysterical. “Oh my god, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” No, this is what you do, you organize. We don’t have the luxury of saying what somebody else is doing going to dictate me not doing nothing. We should be in the mindset that regardless of what you’re doing, I have a right. This is what they say to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have a right if I want to be transgender, I have a right. I have a right to that. Your morality is not going to determine what I do with myself.

We were just getting ready to do a thing on transgender prisoners. They didn’t have their biology changed. Your biology changed. According to law. You went to court and got an operation. They took you out of a female prison and put you in a male prison because they say that biology aside, you was born a male, not what you are now. And rounded them up and took them to a male prison. Who does this? Who had the right to tell you that you come from another country to come here for a better life? Oh by the way, everybody in Congress, ancestors came here for a better life. So I know they should have no issue with that because they wouldn’t be where they are right now if the Statue of Liberty would say hell no. So we passed that.

But everybody, I ain’t talking about the people that they brought here, the people that was here before them, the indigenous people who said, “Hey, everybody get the hell out. Because this is our…” No. What you want to say that you create this false narrative that people of color from another country is creating all the crime in this country, therefore we’re going to round you all up. Kind of sound like something they did with the Japanese when they put them in internment camps, right? When they say like, these are people that was fighting for this country. These are United States citizens that were fighting in this country. They rounded them up, put them in internment camps because you’re Japanese and we fighting Japan. So your loyalty can’t be with us. Your loyalty got to be with them, or we just don’t care one way or the other.

It sounds like kind of like that. But the point I’m making is we don’t have the luxury to sit back and allow the hysteria that’s going on in this country around some fools to make us say, I’m not going to do nothing, or get into a position where I’m just, I don’t know what to do, I’m giving up. No. Resistance is possible. It starts with education, it starts with political education. It starts with understanding the history. Lenin said that imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. We’ve seen imperialism, we’ve seen that imperialism taking shape. So a lot of this is based on the capitalist drive for greed. It’s about greed. A lot of this.

When you talk about taking a country and say, “Oh, we’re going to take the Gaza and turn it into Disneyland.” And what you going to do with the people? “Hey we already bombed them into oblivion so they’d be glad to work, they’d be glad to put on Donald Duck suits and Mickey Mouse hats and get some money.” That’s your reality. Their reality is, “I just want to live a human life.” That’s my reality. My reality, I just want to live human. I don’t have no problem with nobody. I just want to be human and treated like a human.

But when you say something like that, “Oh, you anti.” You ain’t got the right to say nothing like that. And if you say it on campus and you try to get them to take a position on campus, their masters who they invest with, corporate America going to tell them, say no. And Congress going to say, “Oh any money we gave you, we’re taking it back.” So the money, monetary is more important than people’s lives. That’s our reality.

So as we move forward, my message to y’all is don’t settle for mediocrity, don’t settle for nothing less. Whatever you’re thinking that you think should be done, do it. If you think that, but more importantly in doing it, make sure that it’s having impact. When you’re dealing with, like I said, we took that place. We knew that neighborhood, the drug dealers in the neighborhood, this is what they used to say to us when we come through there and say, “Hey, it ain’t a good time to be down here today.” And they give us a warning like, “Y’all can’t come down here today.”

And we was good with that because they knew that it was their children that we was creating a safe environment about. They couldn’t get out of the grips of their insanity and we weren’t trying to get them out of it. Our focus was on the community and people. And we feel that if we educate the people enough, if we educate the mothers, the girlfriends, the wives enough to say like, “Y’all deserve to be safe.” The people that’s not making y’all safe is your boyfriend, your father and them. Y’all need to talk to them and tell them that y’all are making our lives unsafe. All we’re doing is educating you that you have a right.

All we’re doing is coming down there and telling you that we’re doing something with your children. We’re taking your children out of the neighborhood on trips that they’ve never been before. We’re making them feel like they have some value. We’re making them feel like, “Yeah you can get a hug today and there won’t be nothing unusual about it.” This is what we was doing and it had an impact. What they wind up doing with that neighborhood is they did with all of Baltimore, that’s a major, they started tearing down places, boarding up places. So you might be on the block or you might be in the projects and you might live in this house. The next four houses is boarded up, another house, the next two houses boarded up. How can you have a sense of community with all that blight?

Then the trash bins that’s for the area become public trash, and then people just ride by, see a trash bin, throw trash in the area. How can you live in that kind of blight? So when somebody come and say, “I’m going to give you a voucher to move somewhere that you ain’t going to be able to afford in a year,” you’re going to take it on the strength that like you ain’t factored in, I ain’t going to be able to afford it. You say, “I just want to get out of here.” And when they get you out of there, next thing you know they come in and demolish it and they got condominiums and townhouses and it’s affordable housing for somebody that’s making 90, 100,000 dollars a year. But it’s definitely ain’t affordable housing for somebody that’s making less than minimum wage. So that’s my point. And I’m opening the floor for any comments or questions.

Student:

I was going to ask what can everyday citizens, meaning not politicians do to help prisoners?

Mansa Musa:

Okay, and that’s a good question because one of the things that we had, we had a lot of people from the community come into the institution. But what you can do is educate yourself on some of the issues that’s affecting them. Like right now in Maryland they got what they call the Second Chance Act and they trying to get this bill passed to say that after you did 20 years then you can petition the court for a reduction in sentence. It’s not guaranteed you’re going to get it, but it opens the door for a person to have hope, because after you… when you get first locked up, they give you a designated amount of time to file a petition for modification. After that, it’s over with,. The only thing available to you then is parole. If you don’t make parole then you in there forever and ever and ever.

So this is a bill that’s being sponsored by people whose family members are locked up and been locked up for a long time. And it’s a good bill because what it do, it create hope. And when you have hope in an environment, it changes the way people think. So when you have a hopeless environment, and case in point the then Governor Glenn Denning came in front of the Jessup Correction Institution in Jessup because a guy was out on work release, had killed his girlfriend and he had life. So he sent all the lifers back, took them all out of camp and put them all back in prison and then stood out in front of the institution to say, “From now on life mean life, let me tell you that ain’t nobody, any of you got a life sentence, you going to die in prison.”

When he left that prison, the violence went up like that. I mean stabbings, murders and everything because there was no hope. Because now people saying, “I’m going to be here for the rest of my life so I got to dominate this environment.” When the Unger case came out, bills was passed about juvenile life, they got bills passed. They’re saying if you have drug problem you can get drug treatment and the [inaudible 00:33:05] and people started going. It was whole. So to your question, monitor some of these things and look at some of the websites of the institutions, see what kind of programs they offer. They might need some volunteers to come in help with teaching classes. They might need some volunteers to come in to help with some of the activities they doing that’s helping support prisoners. Thank you.

Student:

First of all, thank you for coming out and really appreciate it. It’s great to hear you speak. I had a question, you kind of briefly alluded to it already, but how would you compare the political conditions, especially like during Black Power in the sixties and seventies and eighties, and like the repression that everyone faced, like especially from COINTELPRO and FBI and the police to today, and like what students and people on the street are facing right now?

Mansa Musa:

I think that back then the difference was technology, the internet, where we get our information from and the AI, that’s becoming vastly like the thing now. I think the difference is like back then, and Huey Newton made this analysis, what he called intercommunalism. He talked about that at some point in time technology will become so advanced that we ain’t going to have no more borders, and which we don’t when it comes to information, right?

So the difference is that the fascists are more advanced and pluralism is more insidious. Back then, because you had a lot of repression around class, so Black people was being subjected. So you had the war in Vietnam, we had so much going on that it was easy for people to come and find a commonality. Said, “Hey, we live in this squalor here in Little Puerto Rico and New York. We live in this squalor down here in Brooklyn and so and so. We’re living in…” What’s our common thread? Our common thread is that we’re being treated inhuman. So it was easy to come together around organizing around social conditions.

Now because of so much misinformation and so much control, that it’s hard to really get a read on what is real and what’s not real. You had the president say that when they gave everybody an ultimatum to give their report by the end, like a report card or something at the end of the week and they didn’t do it. He said, so when they put the mic in front of his mouth he said, “Oh, the reason why they didn’t do it is because the people that didn’t submit it don’t work there anyway.” So somebody getting a check in their name, in other words fraud was the reason why you got a 100 workers and only 10 people work there so the other 90 don’t exist anyway, so where that money going? That money going to somebody else’s pocket.

But that was the narrative he painted. But when he painted the narrative, the media is so dim with it that they like, it’s almost like you asking them a question and it’s like, no you’re dumb, no you’re dumb, no you’re dumb, no you’re dumb. And I got a Pulitzer and I’m going back and forth a whole stop. I’m not even going to ask you no more questions. So that’s what we’ve been relegated to. So that’s the difference, but in terms of our response, I’m going to give you an example. When they killed, when them little kids got killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, the children said they going to do something about it. They asked their parents, they went on social media, they started finding everybody had the same attitude. Next thing you know they had 40,000 kids that say they going to Washington.

So now I’m telling my mother, “I’m going to Washington, whether you going with me or not.” So the parents say, “Oh we’re going to chaperone you.” That’s how quick they organize. So that’s the difference. Our ability to organize is a lot fast, it’s a lot quicker now. So we can organize a lot quicker if we come to a consensus on what we’re trying to get done. And our response can be a response of like hysteria. We got to be focused. You know, we got to really sit back and say, they’re going to do what they’re doing. You know? They’re going to do what they’re doing. So if I’m doing around workers, I got every federal worker, I’m getting with every federal worker, I’m organized. I’m not going to sit back and say, “Oh well look…” No. Organized.

You know you got a right, organize, get together, organize, bump Congress, bump, bump, filing lawsuits, bump them doing whatever they’re doing. They the problem. Get organized and say, “Okay we’re going to organize, we’re going to mobilize. We got midterms coming up, we getting in your ass. In the next presidential election, you don’t have to worry about the count, we ain’t going to give one vote. That’s going to be your vote.” That’s what you do, organize. Well don’t, we get caught up in this thing like with Trump, I don’t have no problem with him. He is what he is. My problem is making sure that I tell people and organize people and help people get some type of sense of security.

So we should be food building co-ops, food co-ops. Because $99 for a dozen eggs? No, we should be building a food co-op. We should be doing things where we really looking to each other to start a network. And on campus, we should be looking at how are we going to take and organize ourselves into a block where once we decide an issue then all we’re going to be forced to deal with that issue and try to make a difference.

See some fights is not a fight worth taking because all it’s going to do is cause a loss. So you got to be strategic in your fight. We put a 10-point platform program together for the reason of identifying the social conditions that existed in society as it related for oppressed people. We chose to police the police because that was the number one issue that was affecting people. But our main thing was feeding our children, medical, housing, and education. Those were the main things we did. So we took over education institutions. That was our main thing. Our main thing wasn’t walking around with shotguns and guns. Those was things that we did to protect the community, but our main focus was programs that directly related to serving people’s needs.

Student:

Thank you. Thank you.

Mansa Musa:

You’re welcome.

Student:

Hi, I do have a question. First of all, I want to say great job, amazing conversation and the topics are so important. So I guess my question to you is how do… you mentioned this, like how do college students on campus build morale and boost momentum? Because I know it can kind of be a little iffy and hard to do so, especially if you have that backside fear of like this could cost me my entire like college education and the future I was wishing to build for myself?

Mansa Musa:

Right, and see and that’s not something that shouldn’t be taken into account. I invested in this, you know, and I invested in for a reason. I spent money. This money, my parents put in. They ain’t going to be sitting back like, “What? You did what? All that money going down the drain? Nah, that ain’t happening.” But the reality is this here, you mobilize around educating yourself, raising your consciousness and understanding historical conditions like Kent State, what college students did back then. Vietnam War and groups like this, young Democrats, socialists of America come to create political education classes, bring in speakers much like myself.

We pass around literature of books, videos, and look at those things and develop a space for y’all coming together to talk and discuss, how that’s going to come a direction. And look at issues off the campus. Look at issues like if it’s around in this area right here, how many homeless people exist? How much property do the campus, do the school own? All right, I ain’t telling you, I ain’t going to say like don’t mess with them over in the Middle East because that’s wrong. No, I’m going to say, “Oh, damn, you know what, y’all got all this land and property and within this radius you got like homeless people sleeping on the ground. We asking that you take some of this property and turn it into homeless shelter, and in the name of Ms. Snyder or give it a name of somebody. We asking, now now we’re moving in the area, we’re asking that you take this money and feed some people.

Now in this area, now we’re talking about that. We’re taking that you dig in this area and you help people that can’t, don’t have medical insurance but need certain things that you can get done, like dental. We’re asking that you take this money and putting it… This is things that free dental health. So you can take and say, “We providing free medical assistance at this level. We tested people for sickle cell, we tested people for HIV.”

When Huey and them decided to do the Black Panther Party, they looked at Malcolm and they picked up where Malcolm left off at. That’s how they got in the space that they got. They just took the social conditions said that these are areas you need to focus on, because you got what they call objective and subjective conditions. Objective conditions is what you see every day. The subjective conditions is what we do, how we organize, how we develop ourselves, what we’re doing. Because that’s going to determine how effective we going to be when we go out. So if we can’t come to no consensus on direction then we ain’t going to be effective when we go out. Because somebody going to be saying do this and somebody going to be saying do that, but that ain’t going to be the problem. Problem going to be I don’t like what you doing. So now you my enemy.

Student:

Thank you.

Student:

So I think one of the questions was actually about Maryland Correctional Enterprise. So we could talk about that. Yeah. In response to student concerns about Maryland Correctional Enterprises, President Pines said students concerns is that inmates are underpaid. That’s out of our control and we have to abide by state law. But the other side of the story is that the inmates actually want the employment because it gives them skills. How do we combat this messaging?

Mansa Musa:

All right, so the basic thing, and somebody asked earlier, what can you do? It’s legislation because the argument is why can’t you give them minimum wage? So when we tried to unionize back in the seventies and it’s a celebrity case, North Carolina versus somebody, we tried to unionize, they said no. And the reason why they said no because then you talking about the whole prison in the United States of America, [inaudible 00:44:30] you got 2.9 million people there in prison or better. So you’re saying we in the union, we got the largest union in the country.

So the issue is legislation and advocating for them prisoners to get minimum wage, a livable wage, no matter how much time you got. That allowed for MCE, we’re not opposed to them making money, we’re opposed to them profiting off of us and we’re not getting the benefit of it. So the issue is if I left out of prison and I had my quarter paid into social security, I had my quarters three times over. Now I’m forced to work. I got to work at least three more years or more before I get my quarter. Because when I left the street, I ain’t worked like maybe three years on it all.

But if a person got their quarter while they in, they get minimum wage or they allowed to save money, they can make a contribution to their family. A lot of guys got locked up, they got children, they could do something for their children. They got their mother, their families travel long distances to see them. They could pay for that transportation. The phone calls, they could pay for the phone calls. So they’d be able to take a burden off their family.

It don’t cost MCE nothing. They got preferential treatment and contract for all state institutions. Any institution that’s in state under the state of Maryland, they can do them. Whatever they make, clothes, the chemicals, signs, signs you see up and down there. They do all that. Tags, all the furniture. All the furniture you see in the state cabinet, all that. They do all that. So yeah, they could do that. That’s the alternative is for the legislator to pass a bill that says that prisoners can get minimum wage from any industry, any prison industry. If you hired in the prison industry, then you should be given minimum wage. And they got meat cutting, they do the meats, they do the furniture, they do the laundry for like different hospitals, and they do them tags. Them tags, I’m telling you, that was like… I really realized how people felt on the plantation doing them tags. That was like some… Yeah. That was labor.

Student:

This isn’t on the responses but this is like one of the questions that we’ve thought about. In your previous podcast episode, you interviewed the state senator and he mentioned the 13th Amendment and the connection between prison labor and slavery. So what do you think are some of the connections between the prison abolition movement and like the historical movement for the abolition of slavery?

Mansa Musa:

Right now, you know the 13th Amendment says that slavery is illegal except for involuntary servitude if you’re duly convicted of a crime. So if you’re duly convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. And the difference between that and the abolition movement back in the historical was the justification. The justification for it now is you’ve been convicted of a crime. Back then, I just kidnapped and brought you here and made you work. So the disconnect was this is a human, you taking people and turning them into chattel slaves. Versus, oh the reason why I can work you from sun up to sundown, you committed a crime. But the reality is you put that in there so that you could have free labor.

All that is a Jim Crow law, Black code. It’s the same. It’s the same in and of itself. It’s not no different. You work me in the system. In some states they don’t even pay you at all. South Carolina, they don’t even pay you. But they work you. In Louisiana, they still walk, they got police, they got the guards on horses with shotguns and they out there in the fields. In some places in North Carolina and Alabama, Alabama they work you in some of the most inhumane conditions like freezers, women and men, put you to work you in a meat plant in the freezer and don’t give you the proper gear to be warm enough to do the work.

And then if you complain, because they use coercion, say “Okay, you don’t want to work? We’ll take the job from you, transfer you to a prison where now you’re going to have to fight your way out. You going to literally have to go in there, get a knife and defend yourself. So this is your choice. Go ahead, work in this inhumane conditions or say no and go somewhere and be sent back to a maximum security prison where you have to fight your way out.” So now it’s no different. Only difference is it’s been legislated, it’s been legalized under the 13th Amendment.

And abolition, in response to abolition, so we’ve been trying to change the 13th Amendment. We had an attempt in California where they put a bill out to try to get it reversed, and the state went against it. The state was opposed to it. Because why would I want to stop having free labor? The firefighters in California, they do the same work that the firefighters right beside them, they do the same work, the same identical work. They fighting fire, their lives are in danger. They’re getting like 90 cent a day, maybe $90 a month. They don’t have no 401k, they don’t have no retirement plan, and they’re being treated like everybody else, go out there and fight the fire.

So yeah, in terms of abolition, the abolition movement is to try to change the narrative and get the 13th Amendment taken off, out of state constitutions because a lot of states, they adopted it. They adopted it in their own state constitution, a version of the 13th Amendment that says that except if you’ve been duly convicted for a crime, you can be treated as a slave. If you’ve been convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. That’s basically the bottom line of it. Thank you.

Student:

So like, I saw two questions kind of talking about state repression and like attempts to divide solidarity movements. So how do you kind of feel like state repression has changed over the decades and how can we kind of respond to those situations?

Mansa Musa:

The thing with state repression now is it’s a little bit more insidious. It’s not as overt like it was back in the sixties when they crossed the Edmund Bridge and they beat them, put dogs on them, or like they just took a move in Philadelphia, they burned the house down, burned the whole block down. There’s one house right here we got a problem with, oh hey, you had no business living in that neighborhood. We burned the whole neighborhood down, dropped a bomb on it. Or like they went to in California and they shot the headquarters of the Black Panther Party up. Or they ran down and killed Fred Hampton, drugged him and then came in there and shot him. His wife was in the bed with him. They put like 90 holes in him and not one on her. So you already knew you had the diagram where he sleep at, you knew he was drugged because the agent provocateur spiked his milk. So he was drugged, he was knocked out. And you came in there and killed him and said, “Oh, he fired out the window.”

So the difference is now because of the media and the propaganda, you have a different slant on things, and the fear of corporate America in terms of perpetuating this fear. So you change the narrative. You can’t say certain things. You can’t. If you say certain things about certain people or certain countries, you’re going to be Blackballed, labeled. And the pressure going to come in the form of okay, you don’t care. Okay, I’m going to attack your family. I’m going to find somewhere in the scenario where I can get you to back up. If that don’t work, then I’m going to round your ass up and send you to Guantanamo Bay. I can make up something. We got the illegal combatants. You got people that’s been in Guantanamo Bay since the Gulf War and has not been sent nowhere, had not been, no due process, no where are my accusers. Oh you’ve been labeled illegal combatant, state sponsored terrorism.

So they got so many different things they can say to make it where as though it seems to be an issue of you resisting and your right to protest and demonstration. It becomes you’re a threat to society or you’re a threat to the government. And this is how we’re saying it. We’re saying that, oh you was on the internet with somebody that’s been branded a terrorist. And that become enough to get them to say, “All right, lock them up.”

So now the difference is when they had COINTELPRO, COINTELPRO they was doing all these things and setting people up and killing them. But we knew what was going on and we made people aware of it. Now all this misinformation, it’s hard to get a read on what’s going on. So the response got to be, again, we got to organize ourselves, develop our own information source and all the misinformation, be prepared to identify it and put it in perspective. This is misinformation. And start educating people on understanding that be mindful where you’re getting your information from. We’re addicted to social media. We’re addicted to being like, how many likes I get today? Hey, they don’t like me. Oh my God, I’m having a fit. No, I don’t care if you don’t like me because if they lock you up and send you to another country, you ain’t want to be liked by nobody. I don’t know.

In terms of supporting countries and movements that’s fighting for their liberation in the Congo, in the hemisphere, South America, then yeah, we support a person’s right to self-determination. For us, our position right now should be to educate ourselves, politically educate ourselves to understanding social, economic, political conditions and the relationship they have between us and people. Because people going to resist. People going to be hungry, they’re going to go to stores and take whatever the hell they want to take because they don’t have nothing to eat. That’s just the reality. They ain’t got nothing to do with, I have a propensity to steal. No, I don’t have the ability to pay to feed my children.

Versus somebody that had ability. Food is high. And then medical, they talking about the Medicaid and all that. So if they take that and poor people rely on that, how you going to get the medical treatment that you need? How you going to get the medicine that you need? So these are the areas that, this is when you’re talking about organizing people, you got to look at what they’re doing, what the repression is, how they trying to repress people and organize around the counter to that. What’s the counter to this? What’s the counter to the medical? Do y’all have medical students here? What are their attitudes towards providing services for people?

What’s the problem with mental health? Do y’all have mental health people here that’s in that field? Social workers in that field? Then your responsibility is come and get them to say, “Listen, we need you to go in the community to organize, to help us organize this. Show us how to organize this for the community to get them to be more proactive.” Okay, what’s your purpose of your education? The purpose of my education, I want to get a degree and make some money. Okay, and what? The federal government? What’s your chances of getting a job in the federal government?

They find people that’s on probation, person that got 20 years in one job, get a better job and they put them on probation. They say, “Oh you fired because you’re on probation.” No, I just took a better job. But the arbitrariness of this thinking is that I’m putting fear and I’m turning people into snitches because I’m making you, in order to keep what you got, you got to tell on somebody as opposed to us saying, take the institution of higher learning and look at the different departments and see how you can go into new departments and get them to become more proactive in doing some things in the community.

And that’s the whole thing about the higher learning. Look at these other disciplines and start asking yourself, how can I get them to start doing some things in the community to help raise people’s consciousness? How can we come together to do a plan, a program around how we can invest in the community? How can we get a plan to start dealing with getting trauma to be recognized as a national mental health and get the government to do what they supposed to do in terms of providing services for people that’s been traumatized. And stop, oh, oh yeah, you traumatized but you shouldn’t have did what you did. But you’re saying that trauma, I’m in trauma, that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Yeah, but we don’t recognize that because you did it. All we recognize as a problem, we’re not recognizing as it relate to you. Double talk.

Student:

I had a question about the role of electoralism, because one part of the Black Panther Party’s historical activism that’s somewhat forgotten is elections and campaigns like Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland. A lot of the modern American left is starting to be more wary of the use of elections because we’ve seen people who maybe are supposed to represent our values get elected, and then do things against what their constituents want, things like that. But I was wondering if you had any thoughts about if there’s still a role for elections to, you know, be agitational and grow the organization, or you know, how we can make sure that we’re still, you know, being agitational against the establishment.

Mansa Musa:

And you know, Tip O’Neill said, “All politics are local.” And Tip O’Neill was the speaker of the House, the Democrat party back in caveman days. But my position, and to reflect on what you said about Bobby Seale, when the party took that position of running Bobby Seale for mayor, we knew that he wasn’t going to get elected. But the objective was, this was the ability to mobilize people around, educating them around what this government, what the city government is supposed to do, what your government is supposed to do. So now we are on the campaign trail saying, “No, the budget is the people’s budget. The money is the people’s money. The budget got to be like this. If I’m elected, I’m going to do this,” and make him respond to it.

But then at the same token we looked at, when we started doing that, I was telling [inaudible 01:01:59], we started looking at local elections. Our institution of elected. Ericka Huggins, who was a member of the Black Panther Party, she ran for the position to be the director of the Juvenile Services. And when she got in that position, she changed the whole narrative of how they treated the kids. So that was one way we got in there and changed policy.

What we recognize though, that in terms of electoral system, there’s no such thing as two parties. It’s one party, the capitalist party. That’s it, that’s all. They knew that this is reality, this is the reality we confronted with. If you know Biden ain’t going to be able to cut the mustard for two years, just hypothetical, you know he ain’t going to cut the mustard for two years. Why you didn’t in two years at the end there say, “Listen, the Democrat Party that’s responsible for putting all the money up, let’s start getting a candidate now. We’re going to have open primaries, whoever come out there.”

No, you put Kamala Harris, the top cop in this position and expected, one, they’re going to put a woman in there. Hillary Clinton was more qualified and more fascist than all of them put together. And they ain’t put her in there more qualified. She’s secretary of state, senator, her husband, Obama, Biden, Trump, Bush one, two, and three. More qualified than all of them. They definitely wasn’t putting her in there. And then they’re going to turn around and put Kamala Harris in there. That wasn’t happening.

So what you did, so it ain’t made no difference. Trump, they got somebody come on. I don’t know if it’s AI generated or not where he’s saying that he stole the election. That yeah, Elon Musk knew how to work the computers, so that’s why I won Pennsylvania. All right. What we did on that? Ain’t nobody in their right mind think they won’t let this woman get in there. And this is a two-party system and then y’all at the 11th hour, y’all got to… So now you’re putting the pressure on everybody donate, donate. And her position was, “Look what you want to do? What you want to do? So I’m going to do something but my thing is, I’m telling y’all don’t, I’m here. This your alternate. Vote for me, don’t vote for him.”

Why? “Because y’all going to… Look at him.” Yeah. It wasn’t like what I’m offering y’all, what am I offering y’all? How am I changing? Food was still high, gas was high. People’s everyday needs. And he, look, he did a whole bunch of crazy fire too but he played, he ran on that. Oh, he ran on that record. Oh look, y’all can’t put gas in y’all cars? Y’all can’t put food on your table? Oh man, y’all ain’t safe? Yeah, we wasn’t safe when you was in there, we didn’t have food on our table when you was in there. But you saying, “Look. Oh yeah, but look. Forget what I did. Look what they’re doing to y’all now.” Yeah. Come on.

So in turn, in response to I look at the electoral politics like this here, certain municipalities that you can make impact policy, that you can organize people and put people in there that’s going to be responsible to that. Yeah. But when you look at Congress and they beholding to corporations, they beholding to them. You ain’t going to find a Ron Dellums. You ain’t going to find a Clayton Powell. You ain’t going to find these people like this here, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer. You ain’t going to find these people that’s like, I’m here, I’m here as a representative of the people.

Ron Dellums and he was a member of this right here. Ron Dellums was the first one that had congressional hearings about what they were doing to the Black Panther Party. This was when he was in the office and Hoover was in power. And so everybody was scared of Hoover, but Ron Dellums wasn’t scared of him. So when you look at the electoral politics, we got to take the position of Malcolm too. Malcolm said that we’re going to register as independents, we’re going to put our agenda together. You sign onto our agenda. If you don’t represent what you say you’re going to represent, then we’re going to be calling you. The same way we got you in, the same way we’re going to get you out. And make them sign on to that.

All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I got some stuff over here on Eddie Conway. I got my card over there. We can take a picture of the QR code, Rattling The Bars, real news. Appreciate this, appreciate this opportunity. My call to action for y’all is, you know, just go out, sit back, get together, start brainstorming, look at some of these institutions. How can I get… That’s where you go at, go to these bodies of work, psychology, go to these bodies of work. What are you doing? What’s your position on trauma? Oh, this is my position on trauma. All right, will you be willing to do a trauma workshop in a Black community, in a neighborhood where they traumatized? Would you be willing to help set that up?

Then go out there and find a community where they’re traumatized. Get somebody to say, “Look, hey, we want to come down here and educate y’all on trauma, but more importantly, we want to get the other part of this institution that we have that’s doing wellness to get them to create a wellness program for y’all to do it and make the institution pay for it.” Yeah, you ain’t got to tell them don’t invest in somebody. Say, “Look, invest in this.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

Maryland’s Second Look Act has passed the State House, and now awaits a vote in the Senate. The bill would allow prisoners to request judicial review of their sentences after serving 20 years of prison time. Advocates say Maryland’s prison system is in desperate need of reform; parole is nearly impossible for longterm inmates, and clear racial disparities in arrest and incarceration are immediately evident—72% of Maryland’s prisoners are Black, despite a state population that is only 30% Black. Meanwhile, opponents of the Second Look Act charge that the bill would endanger state residents and harm the victims of violent crimes. Rattling the Bars digs deeper, speaking with activists, legislators, and formerly incarcerated people on the real stakes and consequences of the Second Look Act.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Jheanelle K. Wilkins (Maryland State Delegate, District 20):

Colleagues, I rise in support of this legislation, the Maryland Second Look Act, but it may not be for the exact reason that you would think. For me, this legislation is about justice. Was justice served in this sentence? We know that in Maryland, Black residents are 30% of the population, but 72% of our prisons. Our own Maryland data tells us that Black and Latino residents are sentenced to longer sentences than any other group or any other community. I’m not proud of that. Was justice served? For us to have a piece of legislation before us that allows us the opportunity to take another look at those sentences for people who were 18 to 25 years old when convicted, for us to have the opportunity to ask the question, if justice was served in that sentence, why would we not take that opportunity colleagues? If you believe in fairness, if you believe in making sure that our justice system works for all, then colleagues, you will proudly vote yes for this bill.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. According to press releases published by the Maryland Second Look Coalition and the ACLU, “The Maryland House of Delegates passed The Second Look Act on March the 17th, recognizing the urgent need for reform in a state with some of the nation’s most pronounced citizen disparities.” The Second Look Act, House Bill 853, passed a final vote in the House. The vote was 89 yeas and 49 nays. Now, the bill will move over to the Senate, where it has until April 7 to pass. Delegate Linda Foley, representing the 15th District, who voted yes on the bill, sent a statement to The Real News Network providing some critical context. “The Maryland Second Look Act follows many other states, including California, Oklahoma, Colorado and New York, to allow a judicial review of sentences. The Second Look Act allows the individual who was convicted between the ages of 18 and 25 years old to request a review of their sentence by the court after serving 20 years in prison.”

Delegate Foley goes on to cover the details of what this bill achieves. She states, “It’s important to note the critical safety measures in the Maryland Second Look Act. The bill does not guarantee release of any individual. It allows an individual who was convicted between the ages of 18 and 25 years old to request a review of their sentence by the court only after serving 20 years in prison. A judge must evaluate individuals based on strict criteria, including the nature of their original crime, threat to the public, conduct while incarcerated, statements from the witnesses, et cetera. The court may only reduce a sentence if it finds an individual is not a danger to the public and that a reduction of their sentence is in the interest of justice.”

Recently, I spoke with two members of the Maryland Second Look Coalition, William Mitchell, a formerly incarcerated community activist, and Alexandra Bailey, a two-time survivor of sexual violence, about the organizing they are doing around the bill, and why it’s important to support The Second Look Act.

William Mitchell:

The Second Look Coalition is a group of people who come from all different backgrounds, some being returning citizens, some being people in the political realm, some being professors, and we all support what we call The Second Look Act. The Second Look Act is essentially, when an inmate has served 20 years day for day, the judge would have the authority to possibly review that inmate’s sentence, to see if the sentence is still warranted after the person has done tons of things to change their life.

Alexandra Bailey:

The Second Look is a mechanism that is being considered all across the country, and the reason it’s being considered all across the country is because America, for a long time, has led the world in incarceration, and part of the reason that we’ve led the world in incarceration is because we have a hammer and we think everything is a nail. We’ve addressed everything from poverty, trauma, veterans’ PTSD, domestic violence survivors’ responses, young children who are led astray by giving them lengthy prison terms, and we know that this doesn’t keep us safer. This has been statistically proven. If you’re a survivor of violent crime as I am, I think the one thing that all of us would agree on is that we want no more victims. We want a safer society. We want people to be okay so that everyone can be and stay okay.

The first criminal offense that I ever lived through happened when I was a minor. It was a sexual offense, and the person who perpetrated that against me is serving a life without the possibility of parole sentence. I was plagued with the pain of this for many years, for a lot of my childhood and early adulthood, and as I came to my faith and came to forgiveness, what I wanted was to understand why this had happened. I reached out to the person who harmed me, and what I learned is that he had also been harmed. He also had been sexually victimized as a young person, really had nowhere to turn in order to gain support, and lived out the natural consequences of pain, PTSD, lack of health and support, mental health support, and I ended up caught in that cycle of violence.

What I say is, we need to get way upstream on the cycle of violence. Everyone, from those who are remorseful inside to those who are advocates for survivors, as I am, we have the same goal, and the only way that we’re actually going to address that is by taking our resources away from a public safety concept that we know doesn’t work, which is mass incarceration, and transferring it where it should have been, when the person who harmed me suffered his victimization. If that help had been there, if he had been able to go to a crisis center, receive the mental health support that he need, have the education and access that would have allowed him to divert his life and recover from his own trauma, I more than likely would not have been traumatized.

As a survivor, I’m here promoting Second Look because actually, if you take a look around at who our peer recovery specialists are, who our violence interrupters are, our credible messengers, the people who are out getting in the way of other people’s victimization, it is our returning citizens who have kept the peace not just in prison, but are now keeping the peace outside, and based on my own faith, I believe that people who are remorseful deserve a chance at forgiveness. We all deserve a second chance. Also, from a practical standpoint, if my goal is that nobody suffers from what I suffered from, then the people who are best suited to help me, unfortunately in many instances, are currently behind bars.

Mansa Musa:

Brian Stevenson says, we’re not our worst mistake. All right, William, let’s unpack the Second Look, because earlier, we talked about how this allows for a person, the bill that’s being proposed, and you can go over the bill that’s being proposed, after a person has served 20 years, they’re allowed to petition the court for a modification, or to review their sentence, and take certain factors into account. Why can’t they do it anytime? I know under Maryland’s system, don’t you have the right to modification sentence? Don’t you have a right to a three-judge panel? Explain that for the benefit of our audience that doesn’t know the criminal justice system, and understand that.

William Mitchell:

Our Maryland rules, specifically it’s Maryland rule 4-345, subsection E, what it does is, it allows for a judge to have the authority to review a sentence, but that reviewing power is only from five years from the imposition of the sentence. Meaning, if you have a lengthy sentence, no judge is really going to consider, within five years, if you have a lengthy sentence for maybe a serious crime, if you’ve changed your life. Most people’s thoughts on it are, if you’ve committed a heinous crime or something that’s bad in public view, you need to sit for a long time, which may be true. Some people transition, grow and mature at different stages and different ages. My crime, I was 23, so I really wasn’t developed. I had a very immature mindset, though an adult technically, by legal standards, I was still very immature. The law right now, as it sits, say you get 50 years for an attempted murder. You’re 20 years old, it occurred when you were on drugs, maybe you were gang affiliated, family structure was broken.

And then what happens is, you sit in prison, and right now, as the law stands, you could go into prison, take every program, become a peer specialist, work to transform everybody that comes through that door, and unless you are collaterally attacking the legality of your sentence, there is no legal means for somebody to have a judge look at their case for compassionate reasons, or to see if the very system, because the Maryland Department of Correction, their job is to correct criminalistic behavior, but right now you have a department that is supposed to be correcting it, and if they do, there is no legal avenue for you to bring it to the judicial branch and say, “Hey, DOC has done her job. This behavior has been corrected. Now, what’s the next step?”

The system was set up many years ago to punish, to correct behavior, and then in that correction or rehabilitation, to allow the person to assimilate back into the community as a productive member. That has been taken away over the years because one law is added on top of another law, which moots out the point of the first law, and before you know it, you can’t get out. For me, I had a 70-year sentence. That means I would have to serve half of the sentence, 35 years, before I could go for parole. Meaning, I committed a crime, intoxicated at 23, coming out of a broken background, and I would have had to have been 53 to show the parole board the first opportunity to say, “Hey, I’m worth a second chance.” Most people age out of criminalistic behavior, number one, and number two, if you commit in your 20s, by the time you’re 30 something, you don’t even think like that.

I always bring this point to anybody’s mind, whether an opponent or an advocate, nobody can say that they are the same person they were 20 years ago. I would like to meet somebody if they can stay the same from 20 years ago, because just life in general will mature you or change you. Right now, there’s just no way to bring it before the judge or a judicial body, to get any relief. Even if you change your life, right now, you’re pretty much stuck in prison until, if you have parole, you might get the opportunity to possibly get relief.

Mansa Musa:

Alexandra, talk about what you look for in this particular narrative, because as William just outlined, we do a lot of time, we don’t have the opportunity to get relief. We do good works while we’re incarcerated, and we have no way of having that good work brought to the attention of someone that can make a decision. Talk about that.

Alexandra Bailey:

Well, Second Look is just that, it’s just a look. It is not a guarantee of relief. It is not a get out of jail free card. It is literally a mechanism whereby, after two decades of incarceration, where the criminological curve shows us that most people have aged out of crime, that you can petition a judge to show your rehabilitation, and the survivor of your offense or their representatives get to be part of that process. Some of the most miraculous moments that I’ve ever seen are those moments of forgiveness. There’s this false story that goes around, that what prosecutors are doing is giving permanent relief to victims. I’m going to give them, in William’s case, 50 years before anybody can even say hi, and that’s going to heal you. That’s going to make you feel better.

Mansa Musa:

That’s what you mean by permanent relief?

Alexandra Bailey:

That’s what they would say. It’s permanent relief. We are making sure that this person stays safe permanently. Now, there are some people who do not rehabilitate, but in my experience, they’re very much in the minority. The people who do rehabilitate, like I said, they’re the ones raising other people in the prison, getting them out of criminal behavior, and all we’re asking is that the courts be able to take a look. When the survivor steps into that room, and I’ve witnessed this, and actually receive the accountability, the apology, the help that they need from the system, that is where the healing comes in. It’s rarely through punishment. You know that this is true because I watch survivors who have not moved on a single day from the day that this happened to them, and if you’re reliving that trauma day by day, what that tells me is that you haven’t received the mental health counseling, support, grief support that you needed. Why don’t we focus on that and rehabilitation, as opposed to permanent punishment?

To what William was saying, the criminological curve tells us that people age out of crime. Crimes are more often than not committed by young people who very frequently are misguided, and that is certainly true for Maryland, with a particular emphasis on the Black and Brown community. There was actually a national study that was done of survivors, which I was actually interviewed for, 60% of us who have survived specifically violent crimes are for more rehabilitation and second chances than we are for permanent punishment. Permanent punishment doesn’t get us to what it is that we need, which is a safer society, a more healed society, a society that when things are going wrong for folks, there is a place for them to turn. Our lack of empathy and kindness is not serving us.

Mansa Musa:

Also, I had the opportunity to talk to Kareem Hasan. Me and Kareem Hasan were locked up together in the Maryland penitentiary. He’s talking about some of the things that he’s doing now that he has gotten a second chance. I’m outside of 954 Forrest Maryland Penitentiary. I’m here with Kareem Hasan, who’s a social activist now, both us served time in the Maryland Penitentiary. When did you go into the Maryland pen?

Kareem Hasan:

1976, at 17 years old.

Mansa Musa:

All right, so you went in at 17, I went in at 19. When you went in the pen, talk about what the pen environment was like when you went in there.

Kareem Hasan:

Well, when I went in the penitentiary, like you asked me, the first day I went in there, I walked down the steps and it was just confusion. I was like, “Where am I at now?” People were running everywhere, all you hear is voices and everything. It was like you were in the jungle.

Mansa Musa:

Now, what type of programs did they have to offer when you went in there?

Kareem Hasan:

Well, when I went in there, they had a couple of programs, but I wasn’t too interested in the programs because I was still young and wild, running wild. I wasn’t even thinking about educating myself. All I was thinking about was protecting myself, because of all the stories I heard about the penitentiary.

Mansa Musa:

Right. All right. Now, how much time did you do?

Kareem Hasan:

I did 37 years.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, you did 37. I did 48 years. When I went in the penitentiary, they had no programs, like you say, and everything we were concerned with was protecting ourselves. When did you get out?

Kareem Hasan:

I got out in 2013, on the first wave of the Unger issue.

Mansa Musa:

The Unger issue is the case of Merle Unger versus the state of Maryland, that dealt with the way the jury instruction was given at that time, it was unconstitutional. I got out under Unger. When Unger first came out, what did that do for you in terms of your psyche?

Kareem Hasan:

Oh man, that really pumped me up.

Mansa Musa:

Why?

Kareem Hasan:

Because I saw daylight.

Mansa Musa:

And before that?

Kareem Hasan:

Before then, man, I was gone. I was crazy. I wasn’t even looking to get out, because I had a life sentence.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Didn’t you have parole?

Kareem Hasan:

Yes, I went up for parole three times.

Mansa Musa:

And what happened?

Kareem Hasan:

First time, they gave me a four-year re-hear, and then the second time, they gave me a two-year re-hear with the recommendation for pre-release and work release.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

Then they come out with life means life.

Mansa Musa:

Glendening was the Governor for the state of Maryland at that time.

Kareem Hasan:

Yeah, he just snatched everything from me, snatched all hope and everything from me.

Mansa Musa:

Hope, that’s where I want to be at, right there. When Unger came out, Unger created Hope.

Kareem Hasan:

Unger created hope for a lot of guys, because when it first came out, I think it was Stevenson.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

I had it in my first public conviction in 1981.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

But they said it was a harmless error.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Kareem Hasan:

And then, Adams came out, and then, everybody kept going to the library, and everybody was running back and forth. Everybody was standing in those books, because they saw that daylight, they seen that hope.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

And then, when Merle was fortunate enough to carry it all the way up the ladder to the courts, the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, they made it retroactive.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

All that time we were locked up, it wasn’t a harmless error. They knew it, but they just kept us locked up.

Mansa Musa:

And you know what? On the hope thing, you’re supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act. You’ve been going down to Annapolis, supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act. Why are you supporting the Maryland Second Chance Act?

Kareem Hasan:

Look at me. I’m a second chance, and everything I do, I always refer back to myself. I’m looking at these young kids out here in the street, and when I talk to them, they relate to me. I need more brothers out here to help with these kids out here, because y’all see how Baltimore City is now. These young kids are off the chain, and they need somebody that’s going to give them some guidance, but they’re going to listen to a certain type of individuals.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

They’re not going to listen to somebody that went to school, somebody that’s a politician or something like that. They’re looking for somebody that’s been through what they’ve been through and understands where they at, because that’s all they talk about.

Mansa Musa:

When you went into Maryland Penitentiary back in the 70s, you said ’77?

Kareem Hasan:

’76.

Mansa Musa:

You had no hope?

Kareem Hasan:

Oh, no. I had a fresh life sentence.

Mansa Musa:

Right. When Unger came out, then we had legislation passed to take the parole out the hands of the governor, that created hope. Then we had the Juvenile Life Bill, that created hope. Your case, had you not went out on Unger, you’d have went out on Juvenile Life, because they were saying that juveniles didn’t have the form, the [inaudible 00:22:12] to do the crime. Well, let’s talk about the Maryland Second Chance Act. Based on what we’ve been seeing and the support we’re getting, what do you think the chances of it passing this year?

Kareem Hasan:

I think the chances are good, especially the examples that we set. We let them know that certain type of individuals, you can let out. Now, there’s some people in there I wouldn’t let out, but the ones we’re talking about will help society, will be more positive for the society, especially for Baltimore City, and we need that.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Kareem Hasan:

The Second Chance Act is something that I support 100%.

Mansa Musa:

What are some of the things you’re now doing in the community?

Kareem Hasan:

Well, I have an organization called CRY, Creating Responsible Youth.

Mansa Musa:

What is that?

Kareem Hasan:

It’s a youth counseling and life skills training program, where we get kids, we come to an 11-week counseling course. After they graduate from the counseling course, we send them to life-scale training courses such as HVAC, CDLs, diesel training, and things of that nature. The program is pretty good, and I’m trying to get up off the ground more, but I need some finances.

Mansa Musa:

How long have you had this idea, and how long has it in existence thus far?

Kareem Hasan:

Well, when I first got the idea, I was in the Maryland House of Corrections, because we had a youth organization called Project Choice.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Kareem Hasan:

I had a young guy come in, and the counselor told me, he said, “Hi son, can you talk to him?” He can’t relate to any of us.” I took the kid on a one-on-one, and the kid said, “He’s trying to tell me about my life, but he’s from the county. He never lived like me. My mother and father are on drugs. I’ve got to support my brother and sister. I’m the one that’s got to go out there and bring them something to eat, because my mother and father take all that money and spend it on drugs.”

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Kareem Hasan:

The kid said, “He doesn’t understand my lifestyle, so how is he going to tell me about my lifestyle?” And then he looked at me and said, “Now see, where you come from, I can understand you. We can talk.”

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

“Because I know you understand where I’m coming from.”

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

“Because you’ve been there.”

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Kareem Hasan:

He got to talking about his mother and father, and he started crying. When he started crying, I was telling him about when my father passed, when I was on lockup, and I was in my cell crying.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Kareem Hasan:

And then, later on that night, I was in bed, and it just hit me. I said, “Cry, create a responsible youth.” That’s how I came up with that name, and just like those boys in the penitentiary, they’re crying out, just like in the Maryland state penal system, the ones that’s positive and they change their life, they’re crying out for help, and we’re here to help. We’re here to create responsible youth.

Mansa Musa:

Last, you will hear from Bobby Pittman, who was in the Maryland Prison system and is now out, a community organizer and leading a bully intervention program. This is what he’s doing with his second chance, in the interest of justice.

Robert Pittman:

Bobby Pittman, I’m from Baltimore. I’m a Baltimorian, and I actually went to prison when I was 17 years old. I was sentenced to a life plus 15 year, consecutive 15 year sentence at 17 years old, for felony murder.

Mansa Musa:

How much time you serve?

Robert Pittman:

I served 24 years on that.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, come on.

Robert Pittman:

The crazy thing, it’s been a year and a few days, it’s probably been 370 days I’ve been free.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. Come on. Welcome home.

Robert Pittman:

Thank you. Since I’ve been out here, it’s been amazing. The things that I learned while I was inside of prison, actually, it carried over, with me out here. Within the last year, I helped 50 people get jobs with a connection with the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development. Shout-out to Nigel jobs on deck Jackson.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, Mr. Jackson.

Robert Pittman:

We’ve got individuals, like a couple of mothers, single mothers into schooling.

Mansa Musa:

Okay.

Robert Pittman:

With full scholarships. Got 10 people into schools, people that never believed that they’d have an opportunity to get their education. We got about 10 people in school. And then, I did all that through my peer recovery knowledge, my lived experience, and understanding where these individuals come from, and assessing these individuals, seeing some things that they might need or whatever.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Robert Pittman:

You know that you can get that. You can do that.

Mansa Musa:

What made you stop, once you got to a point where you said you needed to change, what made you get to a point where you started looking and thinking that you can get out? What inspired you about that?

Robert Pittman:

This is crazy. I actually fell off. I was on lockup one time, and I heard all this screaming and yelling. I’m like, “What is this screaming and yelling for?” It was 2012.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Robert Pittman:

They’re like “The law passed.”

I’m like, “What law?”

They said, “The Unger, the Unger’s passed.” People on lockup are screaming and all this stuff. I can hear, on the compound, individuals screaming and celebrating, and things like this. The crazy thing, they were screaming and yelling about a chance.

Mansa Musa:

Come on, yeah.

Robert Pittman:

You know what I mean? It wasn’t even a guarantee.

Mansa Musa:

I got a chance.

Robert Pittman:

All they know is, I’ve got a chance, because I’ve done exhausted all of my daggone remedies.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Robert Pittman:

But I’ve got a chance right now.

Mansa Musa:

Come on.

Robert Pittman:

To have my case looked at again.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Robert Pittman:

That’s when it started.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Robert Pittman:

That’s when it started. The Ungers went out, it wound up being 200 and something.

Mansa Musa:

People started seeing people going home.

Robert Pittman:

People I’ve been looking up to, now they’ve taken my mentor. My mentor is gone. I was happy for them, but now, it made me like I had to step up more, because I had to prepare for my chance. I see it now, Maryland. They said that they had a meaningful opportunity for release through the parole system.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Robert Pittman:

But there wasn’t one person that got paroled since 1995.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Robert Pittman:

It was a fight. It took about six years, but it gave us hope. We’re just waiting.

Mansa Musa:

Oh, yeah.

Robert Pittman:

We’re sitting there like, “Man.” Six years later, 2018, that’s when it was an agreement with the ACLU and Maryland courts that we’re going to restructure the parole system.

Mansa Musa:

Right, for juvenile lifers.

Robert Pittman:

For juvenile lifers, and on that, they created a whole new set of criteria that an individual on parole, or going up for parole had to meet. If they meet these things, the parole commission has the opportunity to release them. I started going through that. I went through it, went through the whole process in 2018, went up for parole and all that, was denied at my first parole hearing, of course. I saw people going home.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, through the system.

Robert Pittman:

I’m sitting there like, “Oh man, I saw somebody go home from parole. This is real.” The first couple I saw, I’m like, “Oh, this is real, now. I see how real this is.”

Mansa Musa:

Right. Talk about what you’re doing now.

Robert Pittman:

Now, I do peer recovery work. I’ve got a nonprofit, Bully Intervention Teams. What we do with Bully Intervention Teams, it’s not your average bully intervention. We look at all forms of injustice as bullying.

Mansa Musa:

Right, you’re talking about bullies.

Robert Pittman:

Yeah, all forms of injustice is bullying. One of the things that I see, I was seeing bullying when I went down to Annapolis this week. They’re bullying individuals through misinformation. This organization will try to make sure these individuals that receive this misinformation will receive proper information, because they’re being bullied through ignorance. It just was horrible. What we do on the weekend, Saturdays, individuals that were incarcerated, a lot of people look at them, “They’re doing good,” but they don’t know the stress of that, because you know what you’re representing. You’ve got to be a certain type of way, because you’re trying to be an example for these individuals. You’re trying to pioneer for these individuals that come out.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, you don’t hae the luxury make a mistake.

Robert Pittman:

We have our session, our peer-run session, where we can just relieve ourselves, because it’s a lot of pressure.

Mansa Musa:

Oh no, that’s there. You’ve got a wellness space.

Robert Pittman:

We need it.

Mansa Musa:

You’ve got to have it, because like you say, our reality is this here. We don’t have the luxury of making a mistake, and everything that we’ve been afforded, and every opportunity that we have, we don’t look at it as an opportunity for us. We look at it as an opportunity to show society that we’re different. Therefore, the person that I’m talking about, who I’m representing on their behalf, I’m saying that I’m different, but this person I’m asking you to give the same consideration that y’all gave me is also different.

We want to be in a position where we can have a voice on altering how people are serving time. One, we want to be able to say, if you give more programs, if you give more hope, you’ll meet your purpose of people changing and coming back out in society. But more importantly, we want to be able to tell the person, like you said, rest assured that you’ve got advocates out there.

The ACLU of Maryland and advocates urged the Senate to pass The Second Look Act, House Bill 853. For those that are interested, the hearing for The Second Look Act, House Bill 853, in front of the Senate Judiciary Proceeding Committee will be held Tuesday, March the 25th, 2025, 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM, in the East Miller Building, room two. For more information, visit Maryrlandsecondlook.com, or ACLUMaryland.org.

There you have it, the real news and Rattling the Bars. We ask that you comment on this episode. Tell us, do you think a person deserves a second chance, and if giving a person a second chance is, in fact, in the interest of justice.

Photo of Linda Foley in committee by Maryland GovPics (CC 2.0). Link to license​.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

The fingerprints of antebellum slavery can be found all over the modern prison system, from who is incarcerated to the methods used behind bars to repress prisoners. Like its antecedent system, mass incarceration also fulfills the function of boosting corporate profits to the tune of $80 billion a year. Bianca Tylek, Executive Director of Worth Rises, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss her organization’s efforts to combat prison profiteering across the country, and expose the corporations plundering incarcerated people and their communities to line the pockets of their shareholders.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

In the heart of downtown Baltimore lies the Maryland Reception, Diagnostic and Classification Center, commonly called Diagnostic, which is a place where people convicted of a crime go to be classified to a particular prison based on their security level.

December the 5th, 2019, I was released from Reception Diagnostic Classification Center after serving 48 years. I was given $50, no identification, and no way of knowing how to get home. I’m not from Baltimore, I’m from Washington, D.C, and I heard my family member called me. I realized then that I had a way home. This is the state that most people are released from the Maryland system, and prison in general. No source of income, no identification, and no place to stay. So I had a few items, so I had to go get my stuff from my apartment. So they let everybody else look… Everybody came out the back, but they let them go “pew, pew, pew.” So most of them dudes wasn’t long term, they was familiar with the layout, right? Me, I know… I’m familiar with Green Mountain Madison, right? Me and another dude stand down here on the corner. I’m like, “Man…”, because I ain’t know my people. I ain’t know my people here was going to be, I ain’t know if they had got… Because they wouldn’t let me make no collect calls. Right? So every time, and I had money.

Speaker 2:

You’ve been released, and they…

Mansa Musa:

I had money on the books. I’m serious. They wouldn’t even let you make the call. So I kept on dialing, and it would go to a certain point, then it cut off, but my sister say, “Look, come on. Something going on. Let’s go down there.” This is what this show is about. This show is about giving a voice to the voiceless.

As we venture into the segments and the stories that we’ll be telling, we want people to take away from these stories, the human side of these stories. More than anything else, this is not about politics. This is about humanity. We’re trying to address the concerns of people, their families, their friends, and their loved ones that’s affected by the prison industrial complex, be it labor, be it medical, be it the food, be it being released with all identification and just a minimal amount of money to get home, and you don’t even live in the city that they released you from. Rattling the Bars will be covering a multitude of subject matters and a multitude of issues, and we ask that you stay tuned and tune in.

Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Recently, I had an opportunity to talk to Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises. Worth Rises is an organization whose mission is to complete abolishment of the prison industrial complex as it now exists, they have a strategy where they identify major corporations that are investing in or exploiting labor out of the prison industrial complex. You’ll be astonished at how many corporations have their tentacles in the prison industrial complex and the amount of money they’re sucking out of it in astronomical numbers, but first, we’ll go to this interview I had with Lonnell Sligh, who was on one of our previous episodes to talk about the impact the prison industrial complex is having on the communities at large.

We’re in East Baltimore at Latrobe Projects talking about how, in the shadow of the Maryland Penitentiary and Diagnostic, the housing projects are affected by the existence of these prisons. Many women walk out of their houses in Latrobe into the Maryland prison system, and why? Because of the devastation of the social conditions that exist in this particular community.

Now, my interview with Lonnell Sligh.

When I first got out, I never thought I’d be out and not be in the van. These vans right here, this is all our modes of transportation, three-piece shackle, and that’s how we’re being transported.

Lonnell Sligh:

What we said about the gloom and doom, one of the first things that I noticed when I got to MRDC was the projects and the kids playing outside of their area. Looking out and seeing the kids, and they looking up at this place. So I’m making a connection of that pipeline, because this all they see.

Mansa Musa:

Then when… That’s what he’s seen. What I seen when I came here, this building wasn’t right here. This was a parking lot. This building wasn’t right here. This was a lot. So the kids had a clean shot to the Maryland Penitentiary. So every kid that lived in these projects right here, this is what they seen. They see barbed wire on the Maryland Penitentiary. Then they seen another big building come up, there’s another prison. Then they seen this is a prison, and outside their front door, what they see when they come out their house is barbed wire and a wall.

Lonnell Sligh:

So it might be ill concealed to us, but for them and their mindset, this was a perfect, “Oh man, we got our clients and our…”, what’d you call it when you check in the hotel? Our patrons, you know what I mean, right here, because they got their industry, they got their pipeline, they got everything that they designed this to be.

Mansa Musa:

As you can see from my conversation with Lonnell Sligh, the prison industrial complex has a devastating impact on everyone. The men and women that’s in prison, the communities that they come from, the infrastructure they build on, the entire system has devastating consequences that should be recognized and addressed.

Some communities that they’re building, it’s the major source of their industry, like in Attica and Rikers, Hagerstown, Maryland, Louisiana, but some communities that they’re building, they’re building it for one reason only. To occupy the psyche of the community. So people walk out of their houses every day, this is all they see, and ultimately they find themselves in these spaces, but now you are going to see who’s behind this, the corporations that’s responsible for this exploitation.

I have the list right here. The Prison Industrial Corporation Database put out by Worth Rises. Super Ammo, Visa Outdoors, Warburg Pincus, 3M, T-Mobile, Tyson Foods, SS Corporation, Advanced Technology Groups, major corporations that are using prison labor to exploit it, profit, and profit alone, with no regard to human life.

Now my conversation with Bianca Tylek.

Yeah, we’re talking to Bianca Tylek from Worth Rises. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Bianca, and how you got in this space.

Bianca Tylek:

Sure. Thank you so much again, Mansa, for having me, and so great to meet you, and I’m glad that you’re home. My name is Bianca Tylek, as you noted. I am based in the New York area, and I’m the executive director and founder of Worth Rises. We are a non-profit criminal justice advocacy organization that works nationally to end the exploitation of people who are incarcerated and their loved ones and dismantle the prison industry.

I came to this where I founded the organization, it’s seven and a half years ago now, and we’ve been doing a tremendous amount of work all over the country towards our mission, and I come to this work through a few different sort of paths. I think most recently, I’m an attorney. Before that, I was on Wall Street, and so I actually worked in the investment banking and corporate sector, and then I think previously, what really makes me passionate about this issue is that I was myself an adjudicated youth and had others in my life who had experienced incarceration and were touched by this system, and all of those sorts of experiences collectively have brought me to this point.

Mansa Musa:

Worth Rises is dedicated to dismantling the prison industrial complex, it’s an abolition group, and as I listened to some of the things that you talked about, I thought about the war in Vietnam when the North first became known for their ferocious fighting where they had what they call a Tet offense, and the Tet offense was like when they had their initial salvo of repelling or resisting the United States and South Vietnam, and I thought when I heard some of the ways you was attacking this industry, that came to mind how systematic your group is in terms of dismantling, as you say, dismantling this group.

Bianca Tylek:

Yeah, I appreciate that so much. So I would say we have a three part strategy that we deploy at the organization, and it is narrative policy and corporate, and so each one of those tentacles is sort of a part of how we approach the industry, and specifically not so much guilting it as much as demanding and forcing it and pressuring it into better getting out or not exploiting our people in the same way, and so just to expand a little bit on each, our narrative work is really designed to help educate the populace, the American people and beyond on the harms that the prison industry is committing.

I think in particular, we know that the prison industry is an $80 billion industry, more than that these days, and a lot of people just simply do not know and are not familiar with it. Folks who have done time, like yourself, are familiar with, for example, the cost of phone calls in prison, but a lot of people walking the streets are not. They don’t know that phone calls are so expensive, they don’t know the cost of commissary, they don’t know that people pay medical co-pays, they don’t know that people are making pennies, if anything, an hour for work, and I think often, when we talk about these things, people are pretty surprised, because all of the modern media has people convinced that you go to prison, you get everything you need, and it’s some kind of luxurious, pushy place to be.

So a lot of our role is to simply… Through our narrative work, what we’re trying to do is get people to understand the reality of prisons and jails, both what the experiences are of people there, the exploitation that happens, and then importantly, at the hands of who, and that’s the industry, and so we do everything from published research to storytelling and beyond to help people really understand what the prison industry is.

So that’s sort of the narrative work, and that really builds the foundation, because we need informed people in order to be able to cultivate their outrage into action, and that leads us to our policy work. Our policy work is really designed to undermine the business model of the industry, and so we work to change legislation and regulations that would sort of hinder the ability of these companies to continue to exploit people in the exact same ways, and so for example, what that means is when it comes to prison telecom, where we know that one in three families with an incarcerated loved one is going into debt over the simple cost of calls and visits, and the large majority of those folks are women who are paying for these calls.

So what we have done in the last about five or so years is we have started a sort of movement to make communication free in prisons and jails. We passed the first piece of legislation in New York City in 2018 to do so, and since then, we’ve been able to pass legislation at the county, state and federal level to make communication entirely free, and today, over 300,000 people who are incarcerated have access to free phone calls, and so that changes the business model and revolutionizes the space entirely.

We also managed to pass game-changing regulations at the FCC to curb the exorbitant charging of phone calls in those places that still do charge for calls, and then finally, in our corporate side of the work, we sort of harness the work we do on the narrative side and the policy side to bring these corporations that are exploiting our communities to account, and really, in some cases, shut them down.

So we have companies that we’ve gone… We’ve had investors divest, we have removed their executives from the boards of cultural institutions like museums. We have blocked mergers and acquisitions. I mean, we’ve done all types of corporate strategies when it comes to those who are exploiting folks who are incarcerated and their loved ones, and we’re bringing some of them to their knees fully to bankruptcy, and so that is the kind of work that we do and really stress that it’s time that this system stopped responding to the profit motives of a few.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, let’s throw in this examination because in California, they was trying to get a proclamation passed about the 13th Amendment, because the genesis of all this has come out of the legalization of slavery under the 13th Amendment. I think that a lot of what we see in concerns of us versus the interest of them comes out of the fact that they can, under… Anyone duly convicted of a crime can be utilized for slave labor, and in California, they voted against this proclamation. How do you see… Is this a correlation between the 13th Amendment prison industrial complex, and if it is and you recognize that, how do y’all look at that? Because this industry is always fluid, it’s continuing to grow, it’s got multiple tentacles, and it’s all designed around profit. So when it comes to profit and capitalism, profit is profit is profit. That’s their philosophy. So however they get it, whoever they get it from, but in this case, they got a cash cow. Talk about that.

Bianca Tylek:

So we actually run a national campaign called End the Exception campaign that is specifically about the 13th Amendment. So we’re very close to this particular part of the fight. So if you visit EndTheException.com, you’ll see that entire campaign, which is, like I said, a campaign to pass a new constitutional amendment that would end the exception in the 13th Amendment.

While we run the national campaign at the federal level, which has over 90 national partners, a lot of states are taking on similar causes, including the state of California, and so California was one of several states in the last five or six years that brought a state constitutional amendment through a ballot initiative. Eight others have won in the last five years. So I do think despite the fact, and I have thoughts about California, despite the fact that California lost, other states like Alabama, Tennessee, Oregon, Vermont have all passed, and so I remained hopeful that it’s something that we can do both at the state level, but also at the federal level.

I think unfortunately, California lost, I think for various reasons, both the moment in time in California. There was also Proposition 36, which was expanding sort of tough on crime policies, and I think Prop 6 got a little bit mixed up into that. The language of Prop 6 was really not particularly helpful, and I think some of the local efforts also needed to coalesce and have those things happen, maybe, and hopefully it would’ve passed. It lost by a relatively small margin, albeit it did lose.

So I think your question, though, about how do these things relate, I mean, I guess what I’d say which degree with you, which is that I think that exploitation in prisons and jails is absolutely rooted in antebellum slavery, right? I think that what the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment in large part did was certainly, obviously, free a lot of people, but it also transitioned slavery behind walls, where you can’t see it, and then our carceral system, because in the years that followed during reconstruction, the prison population went from being 99% white to being 99% black. Many of the practices of antebellum slavery were shifted into the carceral setting and became normalized in that setting and continue today.

I tell people all the time, when you think of solitary confinement, which, as you know, is often referred to as the hole or the box, those are terms that come from antebellum slavery. When enslaved people disobeyed, their enslavers, they would be put in what was called the hot box or a literal hole.

Mansa Musa:

A hole, exactly.

Bianca Tylek:

And held there in darkness, in solitary without food, separation affairs, things like that, and those are essentially punishments that we’ve just modernized, but don’t actually change the true function of them. They’re meant to break down people into obedience, and the same terminology is used and the same practices are used.

Consider another example. When people who are enslaved again would disobey their enslavers, they would often be separated from their families. Their children would be sold off or their spouse would be sent away. Well, similarly, when people who are incarcerated exhibit what the system would call disobedience, they can be denied visits and phone calls with their families, contact, right? All of these sort of penal sanctions that exist today were the same ones that existed then, just in a newer 2025 version, and so I’d say I think much of… And that’s not to obviously mention the most obvious aspect, which people in prison are forced to work and they’re forced to work often for essentially nothing, and then are expected to be grateful for crumbs when given 15 cents or 30 cents on the hour or something like that, and so I think it would be foolish for anyone to suggest that the system isn’t once that was adapted from antebellum slavery.

Mansa Musa:

As you can see from our conversation with Bianca Tylek, the extent to which the prison industrial complex and corporate America merge is beyond imagination.

She was once involved with the criminal justice system. This in and of itself helped her to focus on what she wanted to do. She worked on Wall Street, and while on Wall Street, she started seeing the impact that corporate America was having on the prison industrial complex, the profit margin. From this, she developed this strategy and this organization on how to attack it. As you can see, she’s very effective, as is her organization, in dismantling the prison industrial complex.

Recently, I had the pleasure and opportunity to speak to some young people at the University of Maryland College Park. The group is the Young Democrat Socialists of America. You’ll see from these clips how engaging these conversations were, and when they say we look to our future, remember, our movement started on the college campuses. The intelligent element of society started organizing. As they started organizing, they got the grassroots communities involved, and this is what we’re beginning to see once again.

Student:

So today we have a speaker event with Mansa Musa, AKA Charles Hopkins. He is a former Black Panther, political prisoner. He’s done a lot of activism after re-entering society. He spent nearly five decades in prison, and that kind of radicalized him in his experience, and you can learn a lot more about him today during this meeting.

Mansa Musa:

We’re about completely abolishing the prison system. What would that look like? We was having this conversation. What did that look like? You’re going to open the doors up and let everybody out? I’ve been in prison for their year. It’s some people that I’ve been around in prison. If I see him on the street today or tomorrow, I might go call the police on it, because I know that’s how their thinking is, but at the same token, in a civil society, we have an obligation to help people, and that’s what we should be doing.

People have been traumatized, and trauma becoming vulgar, everybody like, “Oh, trauma experience.” So trauma becoming vulgar, people have been traumatized and have not been treated for their trauma. So they dial down on it, and that become the norm. So we need to be in a society where we’re healing people, and that’s what I would say when it comes to the abolition. Yeah, we should abolish prisons as they exist now. They’re cruel, they’re.

You got the guards in Rikers Island talking about protesting and walk out, wild cat strike, because they saying that the elimination of solitary confinement is a threat to them. How is it a threat to you that you put me in a cell for three years on end, bringing my meal to me, and say that if you eliminate this right here, me as a worker is going to be threatened by that not existing? How is that? That don’t even make sense, but this is the attitude that you have when it comes to the prison industrial complex.

The prison industrial complex is very profitable. The prison industrial complex, it became like an industry in and of itself. Every aspect of it has been privatized. The telephone’s been privatized, the medical has been privatized, the clothing’s been privatized. So you got a private entity saying, “I’m going to make all the clothes for prisons.” You got another private entity saying, “I want the telephone contract for all the prisons.” You got another company saying, “I want to be responsible for making the bids, the metal,” and all that. Which leads me to Maryland Correction Enterprise.

Maryland Correction Enterprise is one of the entities that does this. There’s a private corporation that has preferential bidding rights on anything that’s being done in Maryland. I’m not going to say these chairs, but I’m going to say any of them tags is on your car, that’s Maryland, it’s Maryland Enterprise. I press tags. So I know that to be a fact. A lot of the desks in your classroom come from Maryland Correction Enterprise. So what they giving us? They gave us 90 cents a day, and you get a bonus. Now, you get the bonus based on how much you produce. So everybody… Now you trying to get, “Okay, I’m trying to get $90 a month. I just started.” So somebody’s been there for a while, might be getting $2 a day and some. We pressing tags till your elbows is on fire, because you’re trying to make as much money as you possibly can, you’re trying to produce as many tags as you possibly can to make money, but they’re getting millions of dollars from the labor.

Student:

In your previous podcast episode, you interviewed the state senator, and he mentioned the 13th amendment and the connection between prison labor and slavery. So what do you think are some of the connections between the prison abolition movement and the historical movement for the abolition of slavery?

Mansa Musa:

Right now, the 13th Amendment says that slavery is illegal except for involuntary servitude if you’re duly convicted of a crime. So if you’re duly convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave, and the difference between that and the abolition movement back in the historical was the justification. The justification for it now is you’ve been convicted of a crime. Back then, I just kidnapped and brought you here and made you work. So the disconnect was, this is a human, you’re taking people and turn them into chattel slaves, versus, “Oh, the reason why I can work you from sunup to sundown, you committed a crime,” but the reality is you put that in there so that you could have free labor. All that is is a Jim Crow law, black code. It’s the same. It’s the same in and of itself. It’s not no different.

You work me in a system… In some states, they don’t even pay you at all. South Carolina, they don’t even pay you, but they work you, and Louisiana, they still walk… They got police, they got the guards on horses with shotguns, and they out there in the fields.

In some places, in North Carolina and Alabama, they work you in some of the most inhumane conditions, like freezers. Women and men. Put you to work in a meat plant in the freezer and don’t give you the proper gear to be warm enough to do the work, and then if you complain, because they use coercion, say, “Okay, you don’t want to work? We’re going to take the job from you, transfer you to a prison, where now you’re going to have to fight your way out.” You are going to literally have to go in there and get a knife and defend yourself. So this is your choice. Go ahead and work in these inhumane conditions, or say no and go somewhere and be sent back to a maximum security prison where you have to fight your way out.

So now it’s no different. Only difference is it’s been legislated, it’s been legalized under the 13th Amendment, and in response to abolition, so we’ve been trying to change the 13th amendment. We had an attempt in California where they put a bill out to try to get it reversed, and the state went against it. The state was opposed to it. Why would I want to stop having free labor? The firefighters in California, they do the same work that the firefighters right beside them… They do the same work, the same identical work. They’re fighting fire, their lives in danger, they getting 90 cents a day, maybe $90 a month. They don’t have no 401k, they don’t have no retirement plan, and they’re being treated like everybody else. “Oh, go out there and fight the fire.”

So yeah, in terms of abolition, the abolition movement is to try to change the narrative and get the 13th Amendment taken off out of the state constitution, because a lot of states, they adopted it. They adopted it in their own state constitution, a version of the 13th Amendment, that says that except if you’ve been duly convicted for a crime, you can be treated as a slave. If you’ve been convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. That’s basically the bottom line of it. That’s our reality.

So as we move forward, my message to y’all is don’t settle for mediocrity. Don’t settle for nothing less. Whatever you thinking that you think should be done, do it. If you think that, but more importantly, in doing it, make sure it’s having an impact.

There you have it. Rattling the Bars. As you can see from these conversations, the seriousness that corporations have on the prison industrial complex, how they’re exploiting prison labor with impunity. We’ve seen this from the conversation we had with Bianca Tylek, who talked about her involvement with the criminal justice system, but more importantly, how she worked on Wall Street, how she developed this strategy of dismantling the prison industrial complex by going straight to the heart of the matter, corporate America. Her strategy, the organization’s strategy is to dismantle it one corporation at a time.

We’ve also seen it from our conversation with Lonnell Sligh, as we talked about the impact that these corporations have on the community, how most communities live in the shadow of major prisons, like in East Baltimore, the troll projects, where kids come out every day and see these buildings and ask their parents, “What is that?”, and their parents say, “Oh, that’s where you going to go if you keep doing what you’re doing,” or, “That’s where your uncle’s at,” or, “You don’t want to go there.” At any rate, it has no positive value to their psyche, but more importantly, we’ve seen how the youth are taking the stand to change and find this place in the struggle.

The exception clause and exception movement to abolish the 13th Amendment is constant, and on the rise. We have suffered some major setbacks, we’re trying to get legislation passed, but the fact that we have a consensus on, “This has to go,” because this is the reason why we find ourselves in this situation, where corporations have unlimited access to free prison labor with impunity. We ask that you give us your feedback on these episodes. More importantly, we ask that you tell us what you think. Do you think the exception clause should be passed? Do you think they should abolish the 13th Amendment, or do you think that corporations should be able to profit off of free prison labor? Do you think that communities should not be overshadowed by prisons? That our children should have the right to be in an environment that’s holistic? Or do you think that our youth that’s taking a stand against corporate America, fascism and imperialism should be given coverage? That institutions of higher learning should be held accountable for who they invest in? Tell us what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

Across Maryland’s prison system, incarcerated workers assemble furniture, sew clothing, and even manufacture cleaning chemicals. In spite of making the state more than $50 million annually in revenue, these workers are compensated below the minimum wage in a system akin to slavery. But how does the system of forced prison labor really work, and how do state laws keep  this industry running? Rattling the Bars investigates how Maryland law requires government institutions to purchase prison-made products, and how legislators like State Senator Antonio Hayes are working to change that.

Producer: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to Rattling The Bars. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to State Senator Antonio Hayes from the 40th district of Baltimore City about a bill he sponsored around prison labor in Maryland. The bill was designed to regulate Maryland Correctional Enterprise, which is the prison industry in Maryland, around their preferential treatment they receive for contracts, be it furniture, tags, clothing, or any chemicals that’s used for cleaning. The purpose of the bill was to regulate how much money they were getting from free prison labor.

Antonio Hayes:

They bring in anywhere in a high $50 million a year in business that they’re generating. So they perform everything from furniture making to license plates, to, in some cases, even on the Eastern shore, they have inmates working on poultry farms and agriculture. So the variety of services that they offered have expanded dramatically since its inception.

So here’s the thing, it’s not just state universities. All state universities are using it. The General Assembly is using it. The Maryland Department of Labor is using it. The Maryland Department of Education is using it. Maryland State Police is using it. Maryland DHS is using it. If you are a state agency, you are required by state procurement law to purchase from MCE as long as they have the product. So that’s why they’re able to bring in that type of revenue. Like I said, if you look at their annual reports, it’s somewhere around $58 million a year.

Mansa Musa:

Later, you will hear a conversation I had with former prisoner Lonnell Sligh, who was sentenced in Maryland, but was sent out of state to Kansas. And while in Kansas, he worked in prison industry. I was surprised to hear how Kansas is treating this prison labor force versus how prisoners are being treated throughout the United States of America. But first, you’ll hear this conversation with Senator Antonio Hayes.

I want you to talk a little bit about why you felt the need to get in this particular space, because this is not a space that people get in. You hear stuff about prison, okay, the conditions in prison, the medical in prison, the lack of food, parole, probation. But very rarely do you hear someone say, “Well, let me look at the industry or the job that’s being provided to prisoners.” Why’d you look at this particular direction?

Antonio Hayes:

Yeah. So interesting enough, I’ve been supporting a gentleman back home in Baltimore that has an organization called Emage, E-M-A-G-E, Entrepreneurs Making And Growing Enterprises. So the brother had reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m manufacturing clothing, but I hear the correctional system is teaching brothers and sisters behind the wall these skills. I’d like to connect with them. So when brothers and sisters return into the community, I’d like to hire them.” Muslim brother, real good, very active member of the community. So I said, “Excellent. Let me reach out to Corrections.”

So I found the organization, MCE-

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. Maryland Correctional Enterprises.

Antonio Hayes:

Maryland Correctional Enterprises. And I asked them to come out and do a site visit with me so we could build a pipeline of individuals returning back to West Baltimore, Baltimore City period, especially if they’re already learning these skills so they could get jobs. And I’ll never forget the CEO at the time responding to me, pretty much saying, “Look, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. How dare you invite us to come into the community?” So I was taken aback by the thought that they would clap back in such a way. But if you look at my legislative agenda, it’s really focused around economics. A lot of the things that I push is around economics.

When my mom showed me how to shoot dice in West Baltimore-

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Antonio Hayes:

… one of the things she used to always say, “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Antonio Hayes:

So when I looked at this, like why MCE existed and the fact that they had a procurement law in the state, a preferred provider status, there’s three organizations that have a preferred provider status. It’s America Works, who hire individuals that have disabilities to have employment. Because if they didn’t do it, these individuals would probably be getting state resources from some other pot. But it takes people who have disabilities, so people who are somehow impaired. There’s another organization called Blind Industries.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Antonio Hayes:

They supply janitorial products to the state of Maryland, and these people are blind or visually impaired. And then you had MCE, which were people who were incarcerated for whatever reason. And it didn’t seem to really fit with the other two that were serving populations of individuals with disabilities. So then I began to research even more the existence and how much money they were generating. And I found out, here in the state of Maryland, they were generating revenue of upwards of fifty-something million dollars a year. Whereas, the individuals who are incarcerated, the individuals that were doing the work, were getting paid no more than a $1.16 a day. So that alarmed me, one, the fact that they had a monopoly, because they were eliminating opportunities for other individuals to participate in the economy. Right?

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Antonio Hayes:

So they had a monopoly over. And then two, they had an unfair advantage, because they were essentially paying wages that were subordinate to any other wage anyone could afford. So their overhead was so much cheaper, because they were taking advantage of the status of people who are incarcerated and paying them far less than anyone else could even think of competing against.

Mansa Musa:

And you know, it’s ironic, because as we’re sitting there, we’re talking, and we’re at this table, these chairs, all this furniture was made at Maryland Correctional Enterprise. But on back, I worked in the cash shop at Maryland Correctional Enterprise. And prior to becoming Maryland Correctional Enterprise, it was State Use-

Antonio Hayes:

State Use Industries, correct.

Mansa Musa:

… which is my next lead to my next question. So this particular, going back to your point, it’s three people, or it’s three organizations, three industries that get preferential treatment, but they created… In your research, did you find out that they created this entity solely to be able to get that preferential treatment procurement, or was it a bid more on who is going to get the third slot? Because the first two slots, I can understand, they [inaudible 00:07:45] the Maryland Penitentiary. Some guys had brought in. And they were networking with the Library of Congress to try to bring all the books in the Library of Congress into Braille. And they were getting minimum wage, and they were paying it to the social security. All that was being done in that entity.

But from your research, was this particular… Maryland Correctional Enterprise, was this created as an institution by the private sector for the sole reason to have access to the label?

Antonio Hayes:

Right. So what I found was, actually, the federal government at some point had made it against the law to transfer prison-made goods across state lines. So in order for the industry to… So also, there’s some tie to this. This has really evolved as a result of the abolition of the 13th Amendment.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Antonio Hayes:

So when you had the abolition of slavery, and individuals… They lost a workforce that they would’ve had.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Antonio Hayes:

So there was a need to supplement that workforce, and the way they did that was through the, what is it called? The loophole in the constitution-

Mansa Musa:

The constitution, right.

Antonio Hayes:

… that said that slavery was illegal except for those who were being incarcerated-

Mansa Musa:

Convicted of a crime, right.

Antonio Hayes:

… due to convicted of a crime. But in Maryland and another state, I think they needed a way to create an artificial audience, because they didn’t necessarily have an audience to make the purchases in order to make it sustainable. So what they did was they put this preferred provider label on it through the state procurement so they could create an audience and customer base to support the work that they were doing.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And now I can see. I can see it now, because, like you say, it’s all about exploitation of labor on the 13th amendment, giving them the right to use convicted convicts. So they saw that loophole, they saw the opportunity.

Antonio Hayes:

Yes.

Mansa Musa:

This is continuing black hole. They saw the opportunity. Okay. As we wrap up on this particular segment of this thing, you spoke on the economics, that’s your focus. And we know that, coming out of prison, a person having job, the likelihood of coming back to prison is slim to none. Because if you got an income… This is just my philosophy, and I’m a returning citizen, I came out of prison. Once I got an income, it allowed me to be able to get my own place. It allowed me to be able to create a savings. It allowed me to get my credit score.

In terms of, from your perspective, what would it look like if, and this is something that you might want to look at from your office level, as opposed to the opposition of them having that right, wouldn’t it be more feasible if they gave minimum wage? If the advocacy from policy would be, “Okay, you get this preferential treatment, but in order to get it, you have to provide minimum wage and you got to let them pay into their social security.” Is that something that you could see happening?

Antonio Hayes:

I think something that shows that isn’t as unbalanced as the current system is, is definitely where we want to be. Remember, a lot of the stuff that I do is around economics. I would’ve never looked at the criminal justice system or this system as something that I would want to focus on. I just wanted to make sure that individuals that were returning back to the communities that I grew up in, West Baltimore, had an opportunity to be successful. And this current system, the way it’s structured, it doesn’t give individuals an opportunity to transition back into the community, to have a greater chance of success. It’s literally setting them up for failure.

And my last visit to Jessa, I met three individuals, if you combine their sentences together, they had a hundred years. Some of them were life, some of them were never coming back to the community, ever. And I know to some degree, you need something for these individuals to do. But what I’m told anecdotally is the people that most likely will have these opportunities are people who have very long sentences. Because from a labor perspective, going back to the whole 13th Amendment thing, it’s more predictable that they will be around for a long time, as opposed to just the opposite, using this as a training opportunity. So when they reintegrate back into society, they will have a better chance of being successful and a productive member of society.

I think this current system, the way it’s working, even if you look at the suppliers, where are they getting the equipment from? We’re subsidizing MCE, and the supplies we’re getting from, from somewhere out of state. Right?

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Antonio Hayes:

We’re not even doing business. This wood is being procured from some out of state company. We’re not supporting Maryland jobs. So I think we need to just reevaluate and deconstruct piece by piece, how could we better get a better return on its investment, not just for the state, but also for the individuals who are producing these products that we enjoy?

Mansa Musa:

That was Senator Antonio Hayes, who, as you could see, sponsored a bill to try to get the labor force, prison labor force in Maryland regulated. We’ll keep you updated on the developments of that bill.

Now, my conversation with Lonnell Sligh. Lonnell Sligh told me about his experience in working with the prison industry in Kansas. He told me that the average prisoner in Kansas has saved up to $75,000 while working in prison industry. That it doesn’t matter how much time you’re serving, if you have a life sentence or not, most of the prisoners that’s working in the industry have long term. But because of them being able to work in the prison industry, they’re able to save money, to assist their families, pay taxes, buying to social security, and more importantly, live with some kind of dignity while they’re incarcerated.

Lonnell Sligh:

The blessing of me going to Kansas, I saw the other side of that slave industry that we called and we thought about for so many years. Now, going to Kansas, I saw an opportunity where they afforded guys to work a minimum wage job. And in that, guys were making living wages. I met guys that had 60, 70 or a hundred thousand dollars in their account.

Mansa Musa:

From working in the prison industry?

Lonnell Sligh:

From working in the prison industry. So when I saw that, that kind of changed my mindset. Because at first, I thought it was a joke. Because they asked me say, “Hey, Mr. Sligh, you want to work in the minimum wage shop? Because you’re doing a lot of good things.” And I said, “Man, get out of here.”

So going back to what I was saying, when I found out that it was true and I was afforded to get a job there, it changed my whole outlook on it. Because now, my wheels started turning on, how can we make this better?

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lonnell Sligh:

You know what I mean? How can we change the narrative?

Mansa Musa:

Right. Okay. In every regard, okay, how did you change the narrative? Because, okay, now, reality being reality, Kansas might be an anomaly, and by that, I mean that might be in and of itself something that they doing. But overall, when you look at the prison industry throughout the United States of America, and it’s massive, they don’t have that narrative. So what would you say? How would you address that? What would you say about the Kansas model and the need to adapt it to other states’ prison industries?

Lonnell Sligh:

Well, you know firsthand that when I first came back to Maryland, my whole mindset was bringing some of the things from Kansas back to Maryland and taking some of the things that was progressive and good for Kansas back to Kansas. Now, the prison industry, we are in process now trying to bring that to Maryland. And one of the things that I’m advocating for, and I’m sure, because in the process when I got the job and I saw how we can, it’s an opportunity to make some changes and make it better for the people that’s inside, I crafted a set of guidelines and things that I presented to the administration.

So one of the things was allowing people with long-term sentences to be afforded that opportunity. So when they gave it to me, and I showed them through example that… Because I was never supposed to get out of prison.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Lonnell Sligh:

So I was never supposed to have that job. But the blessing in that, I showed them two sides of promise, and that was that now the companies that were coming in there had a long-term person that can be there that they can depend on, because they had a high turnover rate.

Then secondly, I crafted a thing as far as giving dudes the opportunity to learn financial literacy, things of that nature. Because one of the things that I know for sure, a lot of guys that’s getting those jobs, that was getting those jobs were leaving out of the prison with a lot of money, but they were just as ignorant as when they came in.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lonnell Sligh:

So if you got a hundred thousand dollars in your account and you don’t know how to pay bills or you don’t know any financial literacy, the first thing you’re going to do is go out and buy a Cadillac, a bunch of flashy clothes.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, yeah.

Lonnell Sligh:

So you’re going to end up broke or back in prison. So that’s one of the things that we are working to craft, bringing this to Maryland, having it upfront, having a criteria, a curriculum that’s designated the design for success. And one of the things that, like I said, in Kansas, the politicians, the prison industry, the corporate industry, if y’all want to help with this cause, you say you want to give people a second chance, what better way than bringing in private industry jobs, but making it something for the better, not as a slave camp?

Mansa Musa:

In terms of, how did you come out? And were you able to come out, after being in the industry, to be able to feel some sense of security financially? Or were you in need of getting support from family members to make sure that you had what you needed? Or were you able to save some money, bottom line?

Lonnell Sligh:

Absolutely.

Mansa Musa:

Not going into how much.

Lonnell Sligh:

Yeah.

Mansa Musa:

But what did your savings allow you to do in terms of adjust, readjust back into society? That’s really what it’s all about. If you’re coming out and you can’t adjust in society with the money that you made out of the industry, if you don’t have no sense of security with the money that you’re making out of industry, then likely your chances of survival is slim to nothing.

Lonnell Sligh:

Yeah. But I’m going to take it back even before, because remember, I was never supposed to get out of prison.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lonnell Sligh:

So having that job really took a burden off of my family.

Mansa Musa:

Okay.

Lonnell Sligh:

And it took a burden off of me, because now I didn’t have to reach out and ask for money, somebody to send me money to make commissary. So my whole strategy when I first got the job, because remember, I wasn’t ever thinking about getting out of prison, so my thing was helping my family, saving as much money as I can, building a bank account, like some of them guys that I knew had 60, 70, a hundred thousand dollars in their account.

So then I transitioned over to finding out that now I may have an opportunity to get out of prison. So that really changed the whole narrative and outlook that I had, because now I got in my mind that if I’m able to get out, not only can I afford to pay for a lawyer to help this cause, but now when I get out, I don’t have to come out in a desperate situation not knowing where I’m going to live at, not knowing if I can put a roof over my head or get a car.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Right, right. So then in that regard, the model that Kansas had in terms of giving the minimum wage, allowing you to pay into your social security, and allowing you to save, in that model, it allowed for you to transition back in society. But more importantly, while you were incarcerated, it allowed for you to be able to feel a sense of self-sufficiency in terms of taking care of your family, or providing for your children, not having to rely on them to put money on your phone or put money in your books. So that Kansas model is really a model that you think that… Well, then let’s just ask this, why do you think that other states haven’t adapted this model?

Lonnell Sligh:

Because one of the things we know is that it’s an old mindset. It’s an old way of thinking, that’s not progressive. And it’s not beneficial for a lot of states to transition or to try to do something better. They don’t want to help us. They don’t want to help the incarcerated person or the person that’s serving their times, even though they say their Division of Corrections. And they need to change that name from the Division of Corrections, because they’re not helping correct anything.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right, right.

Lonnell Sligh:

But Kansas most definitely afforded the opportunity for… But their mindset when this first started was in the seventies, so they were about making a dollar themselves.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right, right, right.

Lonnell Sligh:

So it evolved, and just like I said, it was still a hundred years behind the timing, by me being afforded to get in that space, it was a blessing because I was able to help bring a different light to it. But other states, just like I say, it’s about their bottom line and their control and old way of thinking. But my thing is, and what I’m advocating for is, is that you have to think outside the box. Because if you don’t think outside the box, then you’re going to get the same results, the same thing.

Mansa Musa:

Well, how do you address this part of the conversation? That long-term imprisonment people, that most people in those situations, those jobs after you spoke on this and have long-term, and so therefore, the benefits for them is not in comparison to the benefits of people that got short-term that can get the skill and get the money and come out. How do you… Can you have it both ways, or either/or?

Lonnell Sligh:

I think, for me, you can have it both ways. But one of the things that we mess up so much on in our way of thinking in society and in the department, we’re stuck on a certain way of thinking. So my thing is that, if you want to breed a successful person, no matter what kind of time you have… That’s my focus and my mindset, because I took a stance knowing I was never getting out of prison, but I took a stance that I was going to better myself and I was going to walk every day and do the things that I needed to make myself successful and act like I was getting out of prison tomorrow, even though I knew I was never getting out of prison. So for me, it was about me better than myself.

So having a minimum wage job or allowing a person to have a job that they can create wages, it makes a better person. It gives you a better product, whether you’re getting out or not. But you have to instill those things in people so that they can understand that it’s a different way. If not, you’re going to think that old way of thinking. Nothing is going to change.

Mansa Musa:

There you have it. Two conversations about prison labor. The prison industry. I worked in MCE. I earned 90 cents a day, a dollar and something with bonuses, approximately $2.10. The bonuses came from how much labor we produced.

On the other hand, you had the conversation I had with Lonnell about Kansas. In Maryland, I didn’t pay taxes, I wasn’t allowed to pay into the social security. I didn’t pay medical, and I didn’t pay rent. In Kansas, a person is allowed to pay into social security. That means when he get released, he had his quarters to retire. Pay the medical. That means, if he is released, he’ll be able to afford medical. Pay taxes. That means that he’s also making a contribution to society in that form. But more importantly, they’re allowed to save money. And in saving money, they will become less of a burden on the state upon their release.

What would you prefer? A person that earns slave wages and don’t pay back into society, or a system where the person is paying into society in the form of taxes, social security, medical, and also becoming economically sufficient upon their release? Tell me what you think.

Speaker 4:

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. We need your help to keep doing this work, so please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

Authorities in Vietnam have barred a monk from leaving the country to attend an international religious freedom conference in the United States, he told Radio Free Asia.

On Jan. 26, Venerable Thich Nhat Phuoc, whose real name is Nguyen Thanh Cuong, of the Unified Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam, was stopped by security guards at Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport from taking a flight to South Korea.

The officers cited “national defense and security” as stipulated in Article 36 of the 2019 Law on Exit and Entry as they prevented him from setting off on the first leg of his trip to the United States, he said.

The temporary exit suspension notice from airport police said the Venerable Phuoc could contact Ba Ria-Vung Tau Provincial Police to resolve the exit ban.

Speaking to Radio Free Asia on Tuesday, the monk said he planned to transit to South Korea, and continue to the United States to attend the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington on Feb. 4-5.

“There is no reason for them to ban me, I am not a transnational criminal and I have not violated Vietnamese law,” he said.

“They banned me from leaving the country. The fact that they didn’t want me to go to attend the conference shows that Vietnam doesn’t have religious freedom.”

RFA called the Immigration Department of Ba Ria-Vung Tau Provincial Police to ask for information about the ban but no one answered the phone.

Nguyen Dinh Thang, director of U.S.-based refugee support group BPSOS, is a co-organizer of the 2025 International Religious Freedom Summit. He said that as soon as he learned that Vietnam had banned Thich Nhat Phuoc from leaving, he sent a report to the United Nations and the U.S. State Department as well as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and the summit’s steering committee.

“First, it is clear that they discriminate. Monks from the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, established by the State in 1981, were invited by the government to be part of the government delegation to the U.S. and other places to promote the regime,” he said.

“Monks of the Unified Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam were prevented from leaving the country, not only Thich Nhat Phuoc, many others such as Venerable Thich Khong Tanh and Thich Thien Minh were also banned from leaving the country.

“Second, it is clear that the Vietnamese government wants to cover up serious violations of religious freedom, so they do not allow victims who are witnesses to go and present to the international community the reality in Vietnam.”

Thang argued that by banning religious freedom conference participants from leaving, the government was further exposing to the international community the reality that Vietnam has no religious freedom.

Venerable Phuoc used to be the abbot of Son Linh Pagoda in Kon Tum province. At the end of 2022, the local government sent people to demolish the pagoda, saying it was illegally built on agricultural land. After demolishing it, the government also prevented efforts by monks to restore the pagoda, forcing Venerable Phuoc to practice at Thien Quang Pagoda in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province.

Over the years, the local government has regularly sent people to prevent the construction of facilities at Thien Quang Pagoda and Phuoc Buu Pagoda, two religious establishments belonging to the Unified Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam that are not recognized by the state.

Dak Lak Protestants monitored

As the date of the U.S. religious freedom conference approaches, several independent Protestant groups in Dak Lak province say that for more than a week they have been monitored by police and some of their members have been summoned for interrogation by the police.

On Jan. 22, the Dak Lak Provincial Police Department’s Investigation Security Agency ordered preacher Y Wen Nie to appear the district police headquarters to “coordinate in providing information” related to a case of “undermining the solidarity policy” but did not specify which case.

A family member told RFA that police came to his house to take him to the station, but he refused.

Another Protestant told RFA that recently, authorities sent people to monitor families belonging to his church with plain clothes officers “following wherever they went.”

RFA called Dak Lak Provincial Police and Cu Kuin District to verify the information but no one answered the phone.

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EXPLAINED: Why Vietnam wants to join the Human Rights Council – again

2 independent Protestant pastors shot in Vietnam’s Central Highlands

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In previous years, Vietnamese security agencies have repeatedly prevented representatives of a number of independent religious organizations from attending regional or international conferences on religious freedom, such as the Southeast Asia Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief or the International Religious Freedom Summit – events organized annually by the U.S. Department of State.

In addition to being blocked from leaving the country, many people are arrested, interrogated and beaten, as was the case with two missionaries, Doctor Eban and Y Khiu Nie, in 2022.

Over the past two years, under the administration of President Joe Biden, Vietnam has been placed on the U.S. State Department’s “Special Watch List” for religious freedom, while the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly recommended that Vietnam be listed as a Country of Particular Concern over its refusal to allow citizens freedom to practice their religion.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.

“At a crucial juncture in Georgia’s history, steps to restrict journalists’ access to Parliament are concerning and threaten to hamper citizens’ right to be informed about vital political processes,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Georgia’s Parliament should withdraw the excessive entry restrictions on the media and ensure that the press is able to work freely.”

Under the measures announced by Parliament, only accredited broadcast journalists are permitted to enter the Parliament building. Journalists from non-broadcast media are reportedly barred from entry for an indefinite period. The restrictions also limit entrances to two teams from each broadcaster, with selected teams only allowed to report on parliamentary sessions from a designated area and not permitted to broadcast live.

The purpose of the restrictions is “to ensure a safe and secure working environment” in the building, according to Parliament’s statement.

Georgia’s Parliament has similarly restricted journalists’ access on several occasions since amendments allowing it to do so were introduced in early 2023, notably during protests over a controversial “foreign agents” law in 2023 and 2024.

Georgian opposition parties have alleged fraud and are protesting the results of the October 26 parliamentary election, in which the ruling Georgian Dream party was declared winner, and police have beaten and obstructed the work of multiple journalists covering the protests.

CPJ emailed Georgia’s Parliament for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The listing, announced late Friday by the Department of Homeland Security, brings the total number of Chinese companies barred from exporting to America due to Uyghur forced labor to 107, following the blacklisting of three other Chinese companies earlier this month.

The companies include producers of agricultural, aluminum and polysilicon products, as well as copper, gold and nickel miners, it says, accusing them of “working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transfer, and receive workers, including Uyghurs, out of Xinjiang.”

Washington accuses Beijing of carrying out a “genocide” of the mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority in far-western Xinjiang, including by forcing Uyghurs to work for little or no pay. Chinese officials deny the claims and say many Uyghurs are in fact in vocational training.

But that has done little to convince U.S. lawmakers. The 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was passed on a bipartisan basis, allows the Department of Homeland Security to ban Chinese firms that it believes are using slave labor from selling their goods to Americans.

The blacklisting also comes amid an ongoing investigation by the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party into claims that U.S. venture capital firms are funding companies involved in Uyghur slave labor and thereby financing “genocide.”

Pressure campaign

In a statement, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that the latest bulk blacklisting shows Washington’s resolve “to ensure that goods made from the forced labor of Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang do not enter the United States.”

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US lawmakers mark East Turkestan National Day with Uyghur community

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EXPLAINED: What’s the controversy over ‘Uygur’ vs ‘Uyghur’?

Rishat Abbas, the chairman of the Istanbul-based Uyghur Academy, told Radio Free Asia that the blacklisting represented “a critical move in the fight against forced labor in supply chains” in China.

“By restricting goods from over 100 Chinese companies linked to the exploitation of Uyghurs in East Turkistan, this action sends a strong message to the Chinese Communist Party,” Abbas said, using the preferred Uyghur name for the Xinjiang region of China.

Abbas added that the mounting international pressure was pushing Beijing toward a position where it may soon be forced “to reassess its policies of oppression toward the Uyghur population.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns.

Supporters of Leonard Peltier are calling on President Biden to grant clemency to the Indigenous leader and activist, who marked his 80th birthday behind bars on Thursday after nearly a half-century in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. The ailing Peltier, who uses a walker and has serious health conditions, including diabetes, has always maintained his innocence over the 1975 killing of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation. His conviction was riddled with irregularities and prosecutorial misconduct, and he is considered to be the longest-serving political prisoner in the United States. For much of the last four years, Peltier has been held under near-total lockdown. For more on Peltier and the campaign to free him, we speak with Nick Tilsen, president of the NDN Collective, and two attorneys on Peltier’s legal defense team, Jenipher Jones and Moira Meltzer-Cohen.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“For two years now, José Rubén Zamora has been behind bars in horrific conditions, despite a court order for a retrial,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator. “This disgraceful travesty of justice suggests a breakdown in the country’s rule of law and punitive retaliation against independent journalists. Zamora must be freed immediately.”  

Zamora, 67, remains in pretrial isolation in conditions at Mariscal Zavala military jail in Guatemala City that his lawyers say amount to torture. Their urgent appeal to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment said that this included deprivation of light and water, aggressive and humiliating treatment, unsanitary conditions, and limited access to medical care.

The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has declared his imprisonment to be in violation of international law, and a February report by TrialWatch concluded that there were breaches of both international and regional fair-trial standards, and that Zamora’s prosecution and conviction are likely retaliation for his journalism.

Zamora, president of the now defunct elPeriódico newspaper, received a six-year prison sentence on money laundering charges in June 2023. An appeals court overturned his conviction in October 2023, but numerous delays have prevented the start of the court-ordered retrial.

On May 15, 2024, a Guatemalan court ordered that the journalist be released to house arrest to await trial. However, authorities kept him in jail, as bail applications remained pending in two other cases. On June 26, an appeals court revoked the lower court’s order for his conditional release.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

It is only right that we all take a moment to celebrate the victory of Julian Assange’s release from 14 years of detention, in varying forms, to be united, finally, with his wife and children – two boys who have been denied the chance to ever properly know their father.

His last five years were spent in Belmarsh high-security prison as the United States sought to extradite him to face a 175-year jail sentence for publishing details of its state crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

For seven years before that he was confined to a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after Quito awarded him political asylum to evade the clutches of a law-breaking US empire determined to make an example of him.

His seizure by UK police from the embassy on Washington’s behalf in 2019, after a more US-aligned government came to power in Ecuador, proved how clearly misguided, or malicious, had been those who accused him of “evading justice”.

Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world.

No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.

Nor was that same political-media class prepared to factor in other vital context showing that the US was not trying to enforce some kind of legal process, but that the extradition case against Assange was entirely about wreaking vengeance – and making an example of the Wikileaks founder to deter others from following him in shedding light on US state crimes.

That included revelations that, true to form, the CIA, which was exposed as a rogue foreign intelligence agency in 250,000 embassy cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him and kidnap him off the streets of London.

Other evidence came to light that the CIA had been carrying out extensive spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s every move, including his meetings with his doctors and lawyers.

That fact alone should have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. But the UK judiciary was looking over its shoulder, towards Washington, far more than it was abiding by its own statute books.

Media no watchdog

Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or rather, they did what they are actually there to do: keep the rabble – that is, you and me – from knowing what they are really up to.

Their job is to build narratives suggesting that they know best, that we must trust them, that their crimes, such as those they are supporting right now in Gaza, are actually not what they look like, but are, in fact, efforts in very difficult circumstances to uphold the moral order, to protect civilisation.

For this reason, there is a special need to identify the critical role played by the media in keeping Assange locked up for so long.

The truth is, with a properly adversarial media playing the role it declares for itself, as a watchdog on power, Assange could never have been disappeared for so long. He would have been freed years ago. It was the media that kept him behind bars.

The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.

Even now, as he is reunited with his family, the BBC and others are peddling the same long-discredited lies.

Those include the constantly repeated claim by journalists that he faced “rape charges” in Sweden that were finally withdrawn. Here is the BBC making this error once again in its reporting this week.

In fact, Assange never faced more than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of evidence. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for so long not because of Sweden but chiefly because the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the leader of the Labour party), insisted on it dragging on.

Starmer made repeated trips to Washington during this period, when the US was trying to find a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. But as happened so often in the Assange case, all the records of those meetings were destroyed by the British authorities.

The media’s other favourite deception – still being promoted – is the claim that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants in danger.

That is utter nonsense, as any journalist who has even cursorily studied the background to the case knows.

More than a decade ago, the Pentagon set up a review to identify any US agents killed or harmed as a result of the leaks. They did so precisely to help soften up public opinion against Assange.

And yet a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers could not find a single such case, as the head of the team, Brigadier-General Robert Carr, conceded in court in 2013.

Despite having a newsroom stuffed with hundreds of correspondents, including those claiming to specialise in defence, security and disinformation, the BBC still cannot get this basic fact about the case right.

That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when journalists allow themselves to be spoon-fed information from those they are supposedly watching over. That is what happens when journalists and intelligence officials live in a permanent, incestuous relationship.

Character assassination

It was impossible to post on social media about the Assange case without dozens of interlocutors popping up to tell you how deeply unpleasant he was, how much of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his walls in the embassy with faeces. None of these individuals, of course, had ever met him.

It also never occurred to such people that, even were all of this true, it would still not have excused stripping Assange of his basic legal rights, as all too clearly happened. And even more so, it could not possibly justify eroding the public-interest duty of journalists to expose state crimes.

What was ultimately at stake in the protracted extradition hearings was the US government’s determination to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether Assange was a narcissist had precisely no bearing on that matter.

Why were so many people persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws were crucially important to the case? Because the establishment media – our supposed arbiters of truth – were agreed on the matter.

The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian.

Liberals and left-wingers were exposed to a steady flow of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his desperate, lonely struggle against the world’s sole superpower to stop him being locked away for the rest of his life for doing journalism.

The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – showed him precisely zero solidarity when the US establishment came knocking, determined to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making those revelations possible.

For the record, so we do not forget, these are a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and not the law-breaking US security state – the villain.

Marina Hyde in the Guardian in February 2016 – four years into his captivity in the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the concerns of a United Nations panel of world-renowned legal experts that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” because Washington had refused to issue guarantees that it would not seek his extradition for political crimes:

BBC legal affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given space in the Guardian on the same day to get it so wrong in claiming Assange was simply “hiding away” in the embassy, under no threat of extradition (Note: Though his analytic grasp of the case has proven feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine further this week on the Assange case).

Two years later, the Guardian was still peddling the same line that, despite the UK spending many millions ringing the embassy with police officers to prevent Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was only “pride” that kept him detained in the embassy.

Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, published by the Guardian in 2019, just as Assange was being disappeared for the next five years into the nearest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleaning staff must be feeling.

Anyone who didn’t understand quite how personally hostile so many Guardian writers were to Assange needs to examine their tweets, where they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge”, while Suzanne Moore said he was “the most massive turd.”

The constant demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably supplied by the intelligence services, but easily disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians.

This notorious news hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the dozens of CCTV cameras surveilling every approach to the embassy – is still on the Guardian’s website.

This campaign of demonisation smoothed the path to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.

It also, helpfully, kept the Guardian out of the spotlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” at the heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly released a cache of files unredacted – as I have explained in detail before.

Too little too late

The establishment media that collaborated with Assange 14 years ago in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes only began to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – more than a decade too late.

That was when five of his former media partners issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”.

But even as he was released this week, the BBC was still continuing the drip-drip of character assassination.

A proper BBC headline, were it not simply a stenographer for the British government, might read: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or war criminal?”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The Union Election Commission barred both the Democracy and Human Rights Party, founded by the mainly-Muslim Rohingya group, and the Kachin National Congress Party, representing the Kachin people, from its proposed 2025 election.

The commission told junta-backed newspapers that the Democracy and Human Rights Party was barred because it did not comply with the branding and policy requirements of the Political Parties Registration Law, but it didn’t specify which point the group had violated.

The party’s secretary general, Kyaw Soe Aung, told Radio Free Asia that it had not received any specific information from the commission.

“The Union Election Commission has not yet responded to us in detail, so it is difficult to say,” he said on Tuesday. “We have to see if we will be allowed to amend the violations we were rejected for.”

The Democracy and Human Rights party has resurfaced multiple times throughout the country’s complicated political history. It was founded in 1989 and won four seats in a 1990 election, after which it dissolved and re-registered in 2013.

The Kachin National Congress Party, which was founded in 1949, was barred from the election under Section 6 of the political party law, which prohibits groups from carrying out speeches or campaigns that cause ethnic conflict. 

In 2021, Kachin National Congress Chairman M. Kawn La criticized Chinese investment on social media and was sentenced to two years in prison under notorious defamation laws. He was released in 2023. 

The party did not respond to RFA’s inquiries by the time of publication. 

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In November 2020, the National League for Democracy party, led by the now-jailed Nobel Peace Laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi, swept to power in a general election. However, the following February, the military overthrew the civilian-led government claiming the election was invalid due to voter fraud and incorrect voter registration lists.

The junta is expected to extend a state of emergency imposed since the 2021 coup for another six months on Aug. 1. A sixth extension of emergency rule would push back the date of an election as the constitution mandates that an election must be held within six months after a state of emergency is lifted.

Opponents of military rule say the junta’s promised election will be a sham given that the country’s most popular political leader, Suu Kyi, has been jailed for 27 years on charges she denies, and the election organizer has banned more than 80 parties from any political activity.

Junta leader Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing told Russia’s ITAR-TASS news agency in March he planned to hold elections if and when peace and stability could be restored, although he did not set a date.

In early October, junta officials will hold a census to draw up voting lists for a general election to be held in 2025, according to Min Aung Hlaing’s statements to junta-backed newspapers. 

On Jan. 26, 2023, the junta amended the political party law, to require that all parties re-register under the military regime within 60 days.

The election commission says it has accepted the applications of 49 parties and rejected six. Recently, the commission banned the Rakhine state based Arakan National Party on the grounds that it was engaged in activities that supported terrorism.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

On Wednesday, a court in the Russian capital, Moscow, gave Kuznetsov, a reporter with the independent news website RusNews who has been in detention since September 2021, a suspended sentence, rather than the four-and-a-half-year prison sentence that prosecutors had requested, according to media reports and his outlet.

But the journalist will remain behind bars because he is also being tried for allegedly inciting mass disturbances in group chats on Telegram, for which a prosecutor in December requested a nine-year jail sentence, those sources said.

“Russian authorities have held journalist Igor Kuznetsov for over two-and-a-half-years on a range of spurious charges aimed at silencing him and his outlet. Correspondents of RusNews are some of the last remaining independent reporters in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Authorities should drop all the charges against Kuznetsov, release him immediately, and stop jailing independent voices.”

The court also banned Kuznetsov from managing websites, working in media, and organizing mass and public events for four years, and sentenced him to one year of restricted freedom, those sources said.

Restriction of freedom involves not being allowed to leave home at certain times of day, not visiting certain places, not participating in certain activities, not leaving the territory of a specific municipality, and not changing your place of residence.

Russian authorities accused Kuznetsov of being connected to the Left Resistance, an anti-war movement created in 2017, which authorities have labeled as extremist. RusNews chief editor Sergey Aynbinder told CPJ that Kuznetsov denied being an “extremist.”

In addition to Kuznetsov, Russia has jailed two other RusNews journalists.

Maria Ponomarenko was given a six-year sentence in 2023 for spreading “fake” information about the Russian army and could face an additional five years in jail in a second criminal case where she is being tried on allegations of using violence against prison staff.

In March, Roman Ivanov was sentenced to seven years in jail on the same charge of spreading fake information about the army.

Russia was the world’s fourth worst jailer of journalists—with 22 behind bars, including Kuznetsov, Ponomarenko, and Ivanov—on December 1, 2023, when CPJ conducted its latest annual prison census.

CPJ’s email to Moscow’s Meshansky District Court requesting comment on Kuznetsov’s sentence did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Monday, a court sentenced Kustov, chief editor of local broadcaster Bars, to 10 days imprisonment on charges of disobeying a police officer, according to his outlet, multiple media reports, and a court statement.

Police detained Kustov, who was reporting on the crash of a Russian military aircraft in Ivanovo, a region northeast of the capital, Moscow, on March 12, for four hours before releasing him; his phone was also briefly confiscated.

“The arrest of journalist Sergey Kustov, who was covering a plane crash, is yet another attempt by Russian authorities to stifle any independent reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities should immediately release Kustov, drop all charges against him, and let members of the press work freely and without fear of being detained.”

According to the court statement, Kustov “showed disobedience to military police officers, namely, he did not comply with repeated lawful demands of military police officers to leave the area of the IL-76 [Russian military aircraft] crash site.”

Kustov denied that the military police made any demands, saying that “if they had, he would certainly have complied with them,” his outlet reported. CPJ’s messages to the outlet for comment did not receive a reply.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said on March 12 that one of the aircraft’s engines caught fire, resulting in the death of all 15 people aboard, according to Russian state news agency TASS.

Separately, on Sunday, March 17, police in Saint-Petersburg detained Fyodor Danilov, a correspondent with local news outlet Fontanka, while he was covering the election at a polling station, according to his outlet.

Danilov, who was accredited to cover the elections, arrived at the polling station around 11:30 a.m. and was arrested after 5 to 10 minutes for allegedly waving his arms and using obscene language, which he denied. Danilov was released after two hours without charge, he told CPJ, adding on March 18 that he was “continuing” his work.

At noon on that day, thousands of people, led by the Russian opposition, turned up at polling stations in Russia and abroad to peacefully protest the re-election of Vladimir Putin.

CPJ did not receive a response to emails sent to the Saint Petersburg police and Ivanov district court requesting comment on the journalists’ detentions.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

PRISTINA -- Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti says he will not suspend a move by the central bank to ban the circulation of the Serbian dinar in parts of the country with Serbian majorities but will accept the forming of an Association of Serb-Majority Municipalities once Belgrade agrees to sign a basic agreement on bilateral relations.

The basic agreement for the normalization of relations with Serbia was reached in February 2023, and includes the formation of the association, which is expected to more adequately represent predominantly ethnic Serb areas in Kosovo.

Kosovo is not a member of the European Union or its common currency area, the eurozone, but it unilaterally adopted the euro in 2002 to help bring monetary stability and to simplify and reduce transaction costs inside and outside the country.

Serbia, which has never acknowledged its former province's 2008 declaration of independence, still pays many ethnic Serbs at institutions in Serb-dominated parts of Kosovo in dinars. Many also hold their pensions and get child allowances in dinars.

"Regarding the Serbian-dinar-versus-euro issue, it is Kosovo's central bank that decides and they have already decided on December 27 last year," Kurti told RFE/RL's Balkan Service in an interview on March 19, arguing that the ban, which came into force on February 1, was meant to fight financial crime and terrorism.

"We have, thanks to them, a new regulation that is going to enhance the integrity of the financial system to fight illicit activities financing terrorism," Kurti said in Pristina on the same day top Serbian and Kosovar negotiators were holding bilateral meeting in Brussels with EU special envoy Miroslav Lajcak.

The Serbian dinar ban was reported to be high on the agenda, although no joint trilateral meeting has been confirmed so far.

The ban ratcheted up already high tensions between Serbia and Kosovo and threatened to scupper efforts by Washington and Brussels to get the dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade back on track.

"The dinar is not banned in Kosovo, but the euro is the only means of payment," Kurti told RFE/RL, echoing the central bank's line that the ban doesn’t stop anyone from accepting money from any country, it just means the money is converted into euros.

Still, the conversion adds a layer of cost and complication to the daily lives of ethnic Serbs still tied to the dinar.

"We cannot allow bagfuls of dinars in cash to enter our country. (It can happen) only through official financial channels with full transparency, who sends money to whom and for what purpose," Kurti said, adding that any disparities on the ground would have time to be smoothed out over the three-month transition period.

"Serbia can send dinars, we will exchange them into euros and Serbs in Kosovo can benefit from that financial aid," Kurti added.

However, the U.S. envoy to the Western Balkans last week warned that the ban had caused problems for some citizens in the region and challenges for the U.S.-Kosovo relationship.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Gabriel Escobar told RFE/RL on March 14 that Kosovo's controversial decision on the dinar was "an issue that we need to address immediately."

Escobar said that the issue had presented challenges in the bilateral relationship, although Washington remains Kosovo's most reliable ally.

The U.S. envoy also said that his proposals for resolving the issue had been rejected by Kurti during their meeting.

"It's not me as prime minister to decide about this thing," Kurti told RFE/RL when asked about why he refused Escobar's solutions.

"We're a democracy where powers and duties are separated. Therefore, I can only help the central bank to affect a smooth transition," Kurti said, declining to elaborate on Escobar's proposals.

"Let those who made the proposals speak," he added, reiterating that he cannot cancel the decision of an independent institution.

"No suspension will come out of talking to me, because the bank is an independent institution," he said, adding that its governor reports only to parliament, not the government.

Asked whether he would at least advise the bank to extend the transition period, Kurti replied: "I cannot also advise the central bank of Kosovo. The governor has his own advisers."

Referring to the basic agreement, Kurti said it was Belgrade that was hampering its implementation.

"I want the normalization of relations and I think that the signing of the basic agreement and its implementation annex can certainly cancel previous violations on one hand and, on the other hand can bring legal certainty for the future.

"The problem is that eight out of 11 articles of the basic agreement have been violated by Belgrade," Kurti said, mentioning a letter sent by Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic to the European Union, in which, according to him, her government said they were withdrawing their pledge to the deal "because they will never recognize independence of Kosovo, never accept Kosovo's membership in the United Nations, and likewise they are not going to respect the territorial integrity of our country."

Referring to the forming of the Association of Serb-Majority Municipalities, which is mentioned in Article 7 of the basic agreement, Kurti reiterated his government's statement from October 27, which blamed Serbia for refusing to sign the document endorsed by the leaders of France, Italy, and Germany.

"What more can I do? We are leaders who are supposed to turn the text that we have agreed upon into signed agreements. Obviously, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic initially said yes to the agreement without intending to sign it and then regretted saying yes, as Mrs. Brnabic's letter explained," Kurti said.

"I believe that whoever mentions an association of Serbian-majority municipalities outside the basic agreement or before it serving Serbia's quest to turn Kosovo into Bosnia," he said, adding that such an association has to be established withing the framework of the Kosovar Constitution.

"In Brussels I said one cannot serve coffee without a cup. If you ask for coffee without a cup, I will show you an empty cup. The cup is the Republic of Kosovo. What is the legal framework of the association? Is it the constitution of the Republic of Kosova or that of Serbia? If I'm there, it's the constitution of the Republic of Kosovo. No coffee without a cup.

"This is crucial to understand. Belgrade wants to put the cart before the horses. It's not possible. There will be no movement as we have seen since February and March last year," he said, adding that he was ready to go to Brussels again together with Vucic.

Referring to the frustration voiced by the United States and the European Union because of the lack of progress toward the Serbian dinar and the municipalities association, Kurti said that while they are indispensable partners, sometimes differences may arise.

"I consider United States an indispensable ally, friend, and partner. But this does not mean that we have an identical stance toward official Belgrade. As the prime minister of Kosovo, I cannot regard Belgrade through the eyes of the State Department...they do not see Belgrade as I see them. We do not have an identical stance. We have a different experience and history," Kurti said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

The Jewish Communal Fund is one of the country’s largest donor-advised funds: a type of charity that collects often large donations, then lets the contributor direct the funds to nonprofits. Now, the Jewish Communal Fund has barred its members from directing their own contributions to the organization Jewish Voice for Peace, according to an interview with a Jewish Communal Fund member, backed up by correspondence reviewed by The Intercept.

In December, Jordan Bollag, who uses the Jewish Communal Fund to organize his contributions, began making distributions from his accounts. As had always been the case, they all went through, except for the contribution to JVP, a progressive Jewish American group that criticizes Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Bollag assumed there must be some mistake — the money is effectively his, after all. He contacted the organization and eventually got a call back in January from Rachel Schnoll, the Jewish Communal Fund CEO.

Schnoll explained to Bollag that, in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel and subsequent war on the Gaza Strip, there had been a policy change, and donors were no longer allowed to support JVP. (“I’m not going to comment on our grant-making, thanks,” Schnoll told The Intercept.)

“This is all just because JVP believes that everyone should have equal rights and a right to vote for the state that rules them — that’s it.”

That left Bollag in a jam, as he had already moved his money to the fund — since moving money in bulk to a donor-advised fund is the reason the funds exist in the first place.

“Jewish Communal Fund is blocking one of its Jewish fundholders from donating to Jewish Voice for Peace — how ironic is that?” Bollag told The Intercept. “And this is all just because JVP believes that everyone should have equal rights and a right to vote for the state that rules them — that’s it.”

A donor-advised fund is a philanthropic innovation that provides donors with significant tax advantages relative to their charitable contributions. By giving to a donor-advised fund, someone can immediately write off the entire amount of their donation, even while the money sits in the fund. When the donor has identified an organization they wish to support, the donor directs the fund to transfer the money, much as one would with a bank account.

Donor-advised funds generally serve as a pass-through entity and do not exert control over the funds parked in their accounts, though it is within their legal rights to do so, depending on their charter documents.

According to its tax documents, the Jewish Communal Fund recorded just under $1 billion in revenue in 2022.

In response to a request for comment, JVP said the organization had received other reports that the Jewish Communal Fund was blocking donations.

“Apartheid Communal Fund”

Schnoll told Bollag that JVP ran afoul of at least one of three criteria an organization must meet to be eligible for donations made through the Jewish Communal Fund. If an organization is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist, or engages in illegal activity, it is ineligible, she explained.

JVP rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state — the group opposes Zionism, the ideological foundation of such a Jewish ethno-state — but not as a state in general. The group calls for a single state with universal civil and political rights for all, regardless of religion or ethnicity. (Bollag said that, as far as he knows, the Jewish Communal Fund does not restrict contributions from going to organizations involved with illegal settlements in the West Bank; Schnoll did not respond to a question regarding settlement donations.)

Schnoll told Bollag that if, for instance, he attempted to contribute to the American Nazi Party, such a gift would similarly be barred. She quickly added, Bollag said, that she did not mean to compare JVP and Nazis. Still, she said, the decision was final. The money was stuck.

The Jewish Communal Fund moves a lot of cash. After the March for Israel in Washington last November, Schnoll sent a letter to members — known as Fundholders — noting that more than $50 million had been passed through the group in support of Israel.

Before October 7, Bollag had successfully moved his money from the fund to JVP. He also made other regular contributions that touch on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including to the organization IfNotNow — which, like JVP, is committed to equality, albeit while “grappling” with Zionism rather than explicitly opposing it — and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

The donations to IfNotNow and PCRF went through even after October 7. Only Jewish Voice for Peace was forbidden.

“By shutting down Jews who support equal rights for all, Jewish Communal Fund is transgressing the Jewish values of debate and social justice,” Bollag said. “They should cease calling themselves Jewish Communal Fund and start going by Apartheid Communal Fund. I am currently exploring options to take my money out of JCF into a fund that is either unbiased or aligns with my values. I support a boycott of JCF until they change their policy.” 

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

But the “law” — in a plutocracy — protects some individuals far more than others. Take the top execs at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Littlejohn had three separate stints working as an IRS contractor for Booz Allen, the last between 2017 and 2021. These execs would do their best, before Monday’s sentencing, to distance themselves from Littlejohn and his leaks.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the actions of this individual, who was active with the company years ago,” a Booz Allen spokesperson told the Washington Post. “We have zero tolerance for violations of the law and operate under the highest ethical and professional guidelines.”

But these professed law-abiding execs at Booz Allen, turns out, have themselves been playing exceptionally fast and loose with the law. Just last July, the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs announced that Booz Allen had “agreed to pay” Uncle Sam some $377.5 million “to resolve allegations” that the company had violated the False Claims Act and improperly billed “commercial and international costs to its government contracts.”

The difference between these Booz Allen misdeeds and the misdeeds of Charles Littlejohn? Booz Allen execs advanced their own private gain at public expense. Littlejohn did his leaking, his lawyers noted in their pre-sentencing filings, “out of a deep, moral belief that the American people had a right to know the information and sharing it was the only way to effect change.”

The Booz Allen settlement with the government does not require any prison time for any of the firm’s executives. Littlejohn, by contrast, now has to spend his next five years in prison, do another three years under probation, and perform 300 hours of community service. He also has to pay a $5,000 fine.

All this amounts to a perfectly justified penalty, federal prosecutors would have us believe, for Littlejohn’s heinous offense. The “extensive and ongoing” harm from his disclosures, they avow, remains “impossible to quantify.”

We can quantify, on the other hand, exactly how much our federal tax system’s current operations are costing the American public, thanks to the work that ProPublica has done with Littlejohn’s leaked disclosures.

One example: Since the start of this century, ProPublica reports, billionaire Jeff Bezos has had at least two years where he paid “not a penny in federal income taxes.” His fellow mega-billionaire Elon Musk enjoyed the same privileged status in 2018.

From 2014 through 2018, Bezos reported income of $4.22 billion and paid just 0.98 percent of his increased wealth during those years in federal taxes. Musk, for his part, paid just 3.27 percent of his wealth gains in taxes over the course of those years.

In those five years overall, ProPublica’s data crunching indicates, America’s 25 richest paid only 3.4 percent of what they added to their fortunes in federal tax.

Some perspective: Over those same years, 40-something Americans holding the “typical amount of wealth for people their age” paid almost as much in federal taxes — about $62,000 — as the $65,000 they added to their personal net worths.

How do we stop this pervasive perversion of tax justice? Simple. We could start by making basic data from tax returns available for public scrutiny. So argues Boston University’s Laurence Kotlikoff.

“Disclosure,” this economist notes, “could be an automatic enforcement device.”

And that disclosure doesn’t have to be particularly invasive. The information released need only be an individual’s income and tax liability, “figures that cannot be readily used to steal someone’s identity,” observes business journalist Anna Bernasek.

The United States, Bernasek points out, has actually had moments when the public could see just how much the richest among us were — and weren’t — paying in taxes. In 1923 and 1924, individual and corporate taxpayers had to reveal what they were paying out in federal income tax. Newspapers had “a field day,” notes Bernasek, publishing the tax liabilities of the famous and their corporations.

America’s rich would not be pleased. U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, himself one of the nation’s richest men, would flex his ample political muscles and soon get Congress to drop the disclosure mandate.

Today, a century later, we average taxpayers need to flex our own political muscles. Our wealthiest should no longer be able to keep private how precious little they’re paying at tax time.

Want to learn more about the Charles Littlejohn case and how you can help defray Littlejohn’s legal fees and expenses behind bars. Check the GoFundMe legal defense fund site that Littlejohn’s friends and supporters have just created online.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

Since the tit-for-tat strikes on January 16 and 18 against militant and separatist groups, Islamabad and Tehran have signaled they want to de-escalate the situation and that their foreign ministers will hold talks in Pakistan on January 29.

But the attacks have exposed the fine line between peace and conflict in the region and put the spotlight on China, a close partner of both countries, to see if it can use its sway to ramp down tensions and avoid a conflict that would jeopardize Beijing's economic and geopolitical interests in the region.

"For China, the stakes are high and they really can't afford for things to get any worse between Iran and Pakistan," Abdul Basit, an associate research fellow at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told RFE/RL.

China has tens of billions of dollars of investments in Iran and Pakistan and both countries are high-level partners that benefit from Chinese political and economic support.

Following the missile-strike exchange, China's Foreign Ministry called for calm and said it would "play a constructive role in cooling down the situation," without giving details.

Beijing is now expected to step up its engagement to head off another crisis in the region, in what analysts say is yet another test for China's influence after recently hitting its limit with the war in Gaza, shipping attacks in the Red Sea by Iranian-backed Huthi militants, and the growing instability across the Middle East these events have caused.

"We're yet to see anything really concrete where China has stepped in to solve an international crisis," Sari Arho Havren, an associate fellow at London's Royal United Services Institute, told RFE/RL. "[But] China has a reputational image at stake where it's presenting itself as the alternative to the United States, even though assumptions about how powerful it really is in the Middle East are now being scrutinized."

What's Going On Between Iran And Pakistan?

The Iranian strikes in Pakistan were part of a series of similar attacks launched by Iran that also hit targets in Iraq and Syria.

In Pakistan, Tehran said it was targeting the Sunni separatist group Jaish al-Adl with drones and missiles in Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan Province. Jaish al-Adl operates mostly in Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan Province but is also suspected to be in neighboring Pakistan. The group claimed responsibility for a December 15 attack on a police station in southeastern Iran that killed 11 officers.

In response, Islamabad said its military conducted air strikes in Sistan-Baluchistan targeting the Baloch Liberation Front and the Baloch Liberation Army, two separatist groups believed to be hiding in Iran.

The exchange of strikes was followed by Pakistan recalling its ambassador from Iran and blocking Tehran's ambassador to Islamabad from returning to his post.

On January 21, the Counterterrorism Department in Pakistan's southwestern Sindh Province announced it had arrested a suspect in a 2019 assassination attempt on a top Pakistani cleric who is a member of the Zainebiyoun Brigade, a militant group allegedly backed by Iran.

But since the strikes on each other's territory, Iran and Pakistan have cooled their rhetoric and signaled that they intend to de-escalate, echoing sentiment through official statements that the neighbors are "brotherly countries" that should pursue dialogue and cooperation.

Basit says this stems largely from the fact that the countries see themselves spread too thin in dealing with a host of pressing foreign and domestic issues.

Tehran has grappled with a series of attacks across the country, including a January 3 twin bombing that killed more than 90 people, and is engaged across the region directly or through groups that it backed such as Yemen's Huthis and Lebanon's Hizballah.

The tit-for-tat attacks, meanwhile, come as Pakistan is embroiled in an economic crisis and prepares to hold high-stakes elections on February 8, the first since former Prime Minister Imran Khan was removed in a vote of no confidence in April 2021, setting off years of escalating political turmoil.

"Between the economy, elections, and always-present tensions with India that could grow, Pakistan simply can't afford another front," Basit said.

Islamabad and Tehran are now pushing to cool down the situation, though Basit adds that the situation remains tense. "There is peace and calm now, but the animosity is ongoing," he said.

How Much Leverage Does China Have?

Following a week of tensions, China has leverage to push for a diplomatic settlement to the dispute, although experts say Beijing may be reluctant to intervene too publicly.

"China looks to be quite measured here in its response and that raises some questions about where China stands in using its influence," Basit said. "China knows it can influence the situation, but Beijing also usually shies away from situations like this because they worry that if they try and fail, then the West will look at it differently."

Beijing raised expectations in March 2023 it would play a larger political role in the Middle East when it brokered a historic deal between regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center's South Asia Institute, says China's willingness to be a mediator shouldn't be underplayed. "It looks like the Pakistanis and the Iranians had enough in their relationship to ease tensions themselves," he told RFE/RL. "But China was willing to do the Iran-Saudi deal, which is a more fraught relationship to get involved in. So, they might be relieved now, but that doesn't mean they won't step up if needed."

China also holds other cards if it needs to calm the situation between Iran and Pakistan.

As China's "iron brother," Islamabad has a close partnership with Beijing, with cooperation ranging from economic investment to defense. Pakistan is the largest buyer of Chinese weapons and is also home to the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship series of infrastructure projects within China's Belt and Road Initiative.

CPEC is part of Beijing's efforts to connect itself to the Arabian Sea and build stronger trade networks with the Middle East.

A centerpiece of the venture is developing the port of Gwadar in Balochistan, which would strengthen shipping lanes to the region, particularly for energy shipments from Iran.

For Tehran, China is a top buyer of sanctioned Iranian oil, and Beijing signed a sprawling 25-year economic and security agreement with Iran in 2021.

Arho Havren says that given both Iran and Pakistan's economic dependence on China, Beijing will do all it can, should tensions rise, but will likely do so behind the scenes. "China [is unlikely] to take a stronger public stake in the conflict, but will instead use its back-channels," Arho Havren said.

What Comes Next?

While the situation between Iran and Pakistan is moving towards de-escalation, the recent tensions highlight the often tenuous footing of regional rivalries that China's ambitions to lead the Global South rest upon.

Both Pakistan and Iran are members of the Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which also includes India, Russia, and Central Asia (minus Turkmenistan). The SCO has been an important part of Beijing's bid for leadership across parts of Asia and the Middle East while looking to bring together countries to work together on economic and security issues.

China has invested in growing the bloc and is in discussion to add more countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Belarus, but further conflict between its members could derail those moves and damage the SCO's credibility.

Arho Havren says Beijing will still have to grapple with the lack of trust between Islamabad and Tehran and is facing similar issues elsewhere in the Middle East as it walks a tightrope between simultaneously raising its international influence and limiting any diplomatic exposure that could hurt its reputation.

"Cooperation may be easy, but the relations between the countries in the region are complex, and China's journey [in the Middle East] is still in its beginning," she said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Photo by Sean Ferigan

In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet .

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Why 14th Amendment Bars Trump From Office: a Constitutional Law Scholar Explains Principle Behind Colorado Supreme Court Ruling appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mark A. Graber.

"Since his arrival at Prison No. 5, he has been held in cell block K1. It's not a solitary confinement area, but he has had to share the cell with two or sometimes three inmates, some of whom showed signs of mental illness,” his wife, Le Bich Vuong, told RFA Vietnamese shortly after visiting him. 

“They keep swearing, and they often scold him and insult him,” she said. Their behavior is seriously hurting his mental health, she said.

In April, the Hanoi People’s Court sentenced Nguyen Lan Thang, a long-time contributor of blog posts on politics and society to Radio Free Asia’s Vietnamese service, to six years in prison and two years of probation.

Authorities arrested him in July 2022 based on allegations that he posted videos on Facebook and YouTube that were said to “oppose” the Vietnamese Communist Party.

He did not appeal the verdict and was transferred to serve his jail term on June 15.

Vuong said that even when her husband is resting, inmates swear at him and incite him to fight with them or to file petitions to denounce prison guards,” she said. When he did not follow their request, these people insulted him with foul language.

Terrorizing other inmates

Vietnamese prison guards are known to use loyal inmates to terrorize others, especially political prisoners. The practice allows them to plausibly deny responsibility for a prisoner’s mistreatment.

After the visit, Thang’s family complained to the prison and requested that management take measures to improve the situation, including moving him to another cell. However, the management responded that he should deal with the situation because the prison has limited facilities.

According to two former prisoners who were held at Prison No. 5, cell block K1 is a temporary place for newly arrived male prisoners. These inmates are usually transferred to other divisions after a few days or a few weeks. Political prisoners are usually held in cell block K3 if they are men and cell block K4 if they are women.

Former political prisoner Nguyen Van Dien, who had been held in K1 for more than four years until his release at the end of February, told RFA that it had the best facilities among all the cell blocks. It even had sports facilities for inmates, he said.

However, not every inmate has access to K1 facilities.

Vuong said she did not understand why her husband had been held in K1 for the past six months.

He was allowed to leave his cell once a month to see his family and always had to stay in the cell at all other times, she said, adding that he hasn’t had access to the sports area.

Thang requested to be allowed to do prison labor to avoid staying in the stuffy cell all the time, but his request was rejected.

Denials

RFA contacted the prison by telephone and a staff member who refused to identify himself denied all of Thang’s claims, saying that his prison stay has been conducted according to regulations and the law. 

The staff member recommended contacting the Ministry of Public Security’s Department of Prison Management for detailed responses to questions.

The staff member also said that cell block K1 held prisoners with sentences ranging from eight months to life, and was not a transitory cell block as the previous prisoners claimed.

According to human rights lawyer Dang Dinh Manh, who fled Vietnam this year and currently resides in the United States, it is clear that Thang has been mistreated and retaliated against for his resilience. 

"There are no legal provisions that allow holding normal inmates with mentally ill inmates,” he said. “Banning prisoners who don't violate rules and regulations from coming out of their cells to do physical exercises and plant trees is also illegal. … These [practices] obviously violate not only regulations on prisoner management but also human rights. They should be condemned."

Thang’s treatment in prison was “no surprise” because he is being targeted as a political prisoner, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at New York-based Human Rights Watch, told RFA.

“Guards' use of so-called trustee prisoners to terrorize political prisoners is particularly common since the prison officials will then claim they are not responsible,” he said. 

“In fact, everything that goes on inside the prison is strictly controlled by the warden and their guards, which means that what is happening to Nguyen Lan Thang is no doubt international harassment and abuse."

In addition, Thang has also been unable to access any outside information.

According to his family, Thang said that he had sent them some letters in July and August, but they had not received them yet. His family also sent him letters and books many times, but due to the prison's time-consuming censorship protocols, he was not updated on his family's information and he has no books to read.

Vuong said that her family was preparing to send a petition to the Prison Management Police Department, the Thanh Hoa Provincial People's Procuracy, and Prison No. 5, requesting an investigation into Thang's allegations.

His family also requested the prison to move him to cell block K3, where prisoners are allowed to carry out some activities, including physical exercise and planting trees.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the president is an “officer” under the United States Constitution and that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to the president, reversing a ruling by a district court in November that Trump could appear on Colorado ballots for president despite engaging in insurrection on January 6, 2021. The Colorado Supreme Court ruling also denied Donald Trump’s appeal on eleven issues, affirming that Trump engaged in insurrection and that his actions on and leading up to January 6, 2021 are not protected by the First Amendment.

“My fellow plaintiffs and I brought this case to continue to protect the right to free and fair elections enshrined in our Constitution and to ensure Colorado Republican primary voters are only voting for eligible candidates. Today’s win does just that,” said petitioner and former Republican majority leader of the Colorado House and Senate Norma Anderson. “Long before this lawsuit was filed, I had already read Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and concluded that it applied to Donald Trump, given his actions leading up to and on January 6th. I am proud to be a petitioner, and gratified that the Colorado Supreme Court arrived at the same conclusion we all did.”

“The court’s decision today affirms what our clients alleged in this lawsuit: that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist who disqualified himself from office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment based on his role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and that Secretary Griswold must keep him off of Colorado’s primary ballot. It is not only historic and justified, but is necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country,” said CREW President Noah Bookbinder. “Our Constitution clearly states that those who violate their oath by attacking our democracy are barred from serving in government. It has been an honor to represent the petitioners, and we look forward to ensuring that this vitally important ruling stands.”

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, also known as the Disqualification Clause, bars any person from holding federal or state office who took an “oath…to support the Constitution of the United States” and then has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood before the nation and took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump violated that oath by recruiting, inciting and encouraging a violent mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a futile attempt to remain in office.

“We are gratified by the Colorado Supreme Court’s determination that Trump is disqualified from appearing on any Colorado ballot. He betrayed his oath to the Constitution by engaging in insurrection against it, and by doing so he made himself ineligible for public office,” said Sean Grimsley of Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray LLC. “We hope and believe other states will now follow suit.”

This is the second time that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to bar officials who participated in the January 6th insurrection from elected office. Last year, CREW represented residents of New Mexico who sued to remove county commissioner Couy Griffin from office, the first successful case to be brought under Section 3 since 1869. The judge in that case determined January 6th was an insurrection under the Constitution and removed Griffin from office based on his engagement in the insurrection.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the two groups were able to interact, and in fact North Korean propaganda portrays a unifying bond between the military and ordinary people.

But soldiers stole military supplies such as food, fuel and Chinese cell phones and smuggled them to civilians, who then sold them in the markets.

When the pandemic struck in early 2020, authorities banned contact between the military and public for health reasons – to keep the disease from spreading. 

And authorities found that the theft and smuggling of military goods plummeted, residents said. 

So the government wants to continue to keep soldiers and civilians separate even though the worst of the pandemic is over – despite hopes that normal interaction would be allowed again, they said.

Last month, the Korean People’s Army issued instructions to each unit saying that soldiers who contact residents without the unit's permission would be punished. 

A similar notice was sent to neighborhood watch units on Nov. 9: “Those who attempt to contact soldiers or invade soldiers’ security areas without any special reason will be severely punished.”

Not even casual chatting

Even bumping into a soldier that you know on the street is a no-no, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

“You can’t even ask him how he is doing,” he said of such interactions. “If you are caught talking to the soldier, he will be taken to the military police, and the resident will be taken to a nearby police station for investigation.”

The soldier and the civilian will be investigated separately, the resident said. 

“[They] must fill out a fact-check form detailing the circumstances in which they met each other and the conversations they had when they met,” he said. “The police officers compare the facts and if the information matches, they will be released. If the information is different, they will have to undergo an investigation for several days.”

Undermines propaganda

The decision to limit interaction between soldiers and residents is part of Kim Jong Un’s “new ruling style,” another Ryanggang resident, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, told RFA. 

She said Kim wants to “completely destroy the traditional relationship between soldiers and residents by controlling any contact between them” as a way of stopping goods intended for the military from appearing in the local market.

“Everything in the marketplace, from the medicine to gasoline and diesel fuel, food, military uniforms, and even salt were all items stolen from the military units by soldiers who were in close contact with the residents,” she said. “It would be difficult to run the market without the goods stolen by the soldiers.”

Soldier-civilian relationships also facilitate cross-border smuggling and information sharing with contacts in China, she said. 

“Kim Jong Un’s determination and ruling method is to break this vicious cycle even if the tradition of military-civilian unity is damaged,” she explained, referring to prevalent propaganda campaigns suggesting the two groups are one and the same. 

When the country’s nascent market economy was in its infancy during the rule of Kim Jong Un’s father Kim Jong Il, the elder Kim had enacted policies to eliminate marketplaces from emerging, but he was not successful, she said. 

“Since the close relationship between soldiers and residents is a means of survival that goes beyond the marketplace, it remains to be seen whether Kim Jong Un can break it off through the force of his will,” she said.

The first source explained how different government-aligned organizations can catch civilians having contact with soldiers if they are not careful. 

“The organizations that monitor encounters between soldiers and citizens include the youth crackdown group under the Socialist Patriotic Youth League, the inspection unit under the Worker-Peasant Red Guards, and the Ministry of Social Security’s patrol task force and strike force,” he said. 

“In addition, there are state security agents and social security agents in charge of each region. There is also a resident reporting system.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Moon Sung Hui for RFA Korean.

An U.S. district judge in Asheville, North Carolina, issued a second temporary restraining order on Oct. 10, 2023, barring members of the press from publishing about a former student who is suing the University of North Carolina System and multiple university administrators, according to court records.

The plaintiff, who filed the suit on Feb. 15 under the pseudonym Jacob Doe, alleges that he was wrongfully expelled from UNC-Chapel Hill after being accused of sexual assault by four undergraduate women.

When filing the suit, Doe simultaneously filed the motion for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, requesting that no information be released by the defendants or published by the media. Chief U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger granted that temporary restraining order on Feb. 22, citing possible irreparable harm to the plaintiff.

Immediately after the restraint went into effect, however, the parties jointly filed to withdraw the motion and Reidinger dissolved the order on March 1.

Doe refiled his motion seven months later, after UNC informed him that it had received a public records request seeking to identify him, according to court records. On Oct. 10, District Judge Max Cogburn Jr. granted the motion.

As with the initial prior restraint, the university is barred from disclosing any information about the disciplinary proceedings at the heart of the lawsuit. UNC is also required to instruct news outlets that they are barred from publishing any information about Doe or his disciplinary proceedings that they may receive.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

On Thursday, September 13, the 2nd Tatvan Court of Penal Peace granted bail to Yücel Baysali and Engin Kaplan, two bodyguards of the mayor of the eastern city of Tatvan who were arrested on charges of attacking local journalist Sinan Aygül in June. 

On the same day, the 5th Diyarbakır Court of Serious Crimes and the 2nd Bitlis Court of Serious Crimes declined to release Abdurrahman Gök and Mehmet Şah Oruç, respectively. Both are reporters for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency who have been held in pretrial detention since April.

Gök and Oruç are both charged with membership in a terrorist organization and propaganda in connection with their reporting. If convicted, they face up to 15 years in prison for membership in a terrorist organization and up to 7.5 years for propaganda, the journalists’ lawyer, Resul Temur, told CPJ.

“Thursday was a sad day for journalism in Turkey. Imprisoned for their work, journalists Abdurrahman Gök and Mehmet Şah Oruç will lose more months of their lives behind bars while those accused of brutally assaulting journalist Sinan Aygül enjoy their freedom while awaiting trial,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities are punishing journalists for doing their jobs and protecting those who assault them. Authorities must release Gök and Oruç and take action to ensure Aygül’s safety.”

During their Thursday hearing, Baysali and Kaplan claimed that Aygül, chief editor of the privately owned website Bitlis News and chair of the Bitlis Journalists Society, insulted them. The two accused demanded their release, claiming they were wrongfully detained and that it was the journalist who should be on trial, not them.

Their lawyers denied the charges of “intentional injury” despite video evidence of Baysali beating Aygül. The video also showed Kaplan, a police officer, touching his gun to intimidate bystanders who tried to intervene.

In a video posted to X, previously known as Twitter, Aygül said he does not believe he has “security of life” and told CPJ after the hearing that he wouldn’t be surprised if he were arrested as a victim of the attack. The next court hearing is December 14.

Gök and Oruç are charged with terrorism due to alleged ties to the outlawed organization, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, according to the indictments reviewed by CPJ. The evidence for these claims includes examples of their professional work and statements from witnesses who admitted to ties with the PKK, which Turkey deems a terrorist organization. 

Gök and his lawyers argued in court that the indictment lacked solid evidence and the charges were retaliation for his 2017 award-winning report about police officers who shot and killed a young man. 

Oruç and Temur told the Bitlis court that the case against the journalist was based on his journalistic works and he had no ties to terrorism. Oruç, who was not brought to court and attended the hearing by teleconference, said, “Kurdish journalism is being criminalized.”

Turkey was the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with 40 behind bars at the time of CPJ’s December 1, 2022, prison census. Of those, more than half were Kurdish journalists.

The courts set Oruç’s next hearing for October 31 and Gök’s next hearing for December 5. CPJ’s emails to the prosecutor’s offices in Diyarbakır, Bitlis, and the Municipality of Tatvan did not receive a reply. 

In 2022, Gök was sentenced to 18 months for propaganda. That appeal has yet to be heard.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The move to control access to the Sept. 15-17 sermon by prominent lama Gungthang Rinpoche Lobsang Jamyang Geleg Tenpe Khenchen in Gansu province’s Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture comes amid growing criticism of China’s policies in Tibet, where authorities restrict Tibetans’ political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity.

In a Sept. 10 directive obtained by RFA Tibetan, authorities in Dzoege county – a part of Tibet’s historical eastern region of Amdo – said the sermon “is only arranged for residents of [the city of] Tsoe (in Chinese, Hezuo)” and that there “are no arrangements made for Tibetan devotees coming to attend from other parts of Tibet.”

“To maintain the religious activities pertaining to Kalakchakra in order, and to keep everything in control including crowd and traffic, non-resident Tibetans will not be allowed to go near the teaching site,” the directive said. “Those [non-residents] who have already arrived are instructed to leave the premises.”

The Kalachakra, which means “infinite wheel of time” in Sanskrit, is a sacred event where key Buddhist teachings are passed on to devotees. Only a very few qualified Tibetan Buddhist masters, including exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, can deliver such sermons.

A Tibetan in the region said that the sheer size of the audience for the Kalachakra had prompted authorities to restrict access to the event.

“The Chinese authorities have barred Tibetans coming from other parts of Tibet from attending the teaching because they are fearful of such huge gatherings and are being cautious of possible demonstrations against the Chinese government, said the Tibetan who, like others RFA interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

“More than 100,000 Tibetan devotees have gathered for this Kalachakra but, besides residents, Tibetans coming from Qinghai, Sichuan and other parts of the region are not allowed to attend.”

Directive removed from website

The Gungthang Rinpoche is an influential religious figure from the Labrang Tashikyil Monastery in Gansu’s Xiahe county. In 2004, he was recognized as the seventh reincarnation of the Gungthang Rinpoche by the sixth one, Jamyang Zhepa.

The directive follows the earlier canceling of the Kalachakra in July when, despite obtaining permission from authorities, organizers were told they could not hold the event because it conflicted with the 70th anniversary of the establishment of Gannan prefecture.

Tibetans frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at eradicating their national and cultural identity.

Barring non-residents from Friday’s teaching due to security concerns has also made authorities the target of their anger, sources said.

On Thursday, the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of Hezuo City, which had originally posted the directive, appeared to have removed it from their website, with no explanation given.

Another Tibetan source told RFA that authorities may have felt helpless in the face of devotees “pouring” into the region for the Kalachakra.

“The authorities have not been able to control and restrict them as per their directive,” he said. “There are more than 100,000 devotees … who have come to attend the teaching and, in order to avoid any sort of conflict and commotion, I think that the government is now giving up on it.”

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibet. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lhuboom Tash for RFA Tibetan.

The Interior Department also said that it would limit drilling in more than half of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an Indiana-sized swath of tundra west of the Arctic refuge and an important subsistence area for local Alaska Native communities that depend on a healthy ecosystem and wildlife for food but also rely on oil royalties for revenue and essential services, like schools. The department would ban drilling on nearly 11 million acres in the area and restrict it on another 2 million. 

“With climate change warming the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, we must do everything within our control to meet the highest standards of care to protect this fragile ecosystem,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement accompanying the announcement. 

The Biden administration also proposed a ban on drilling across almost 3 million acres offshore, in the Beaufort Sea. Conservation groups largely applauded the flurry of moves, some of which reversed Trump-era efforts to open up protected areas to drilling. 

“We are pleased to see President Biden making good on his promise to implement durable protections for the irreplaceable landscapes and habitats of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities. “Wildlife such as caribou, grizzly and polar bears, and migratory birds all rely on these intact and undisturbed habitats which would be impossible to replace if they were disturbed and fragmented by oil and gas development.” 

Still, none of the proposals would restrict ConocoPhillips’ fraught Willow oil project, a huge expansion of drilling that the administration approved in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska earlier this year to the dismay of many climate advocates. 

For more than 40 years, Congress has debated whether to allow oil drilling on the coastal plain of the Arctic refuge, which encompasses the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, about 200,000 animals that are an important cultural resource and food source for Alaska Native people, particularly Gwich’in families on the southern edge of the refuge, where the caribou migrate. 

Beneath those plains lies an estimated 4 billion to 12 billion barrels of oil. In 1980, Congress established the 19-million-acre protected area but left open the possibility of oil development on 1.5 million of those acres, on Alaska’s northern coast. Since then, fossil fuel interests, Alaska’s state government, and Alaska Native corporations that own the rights to the area’s resources have been keen to unearth the oil.

For years, environmental groups, Gwich’in leaders, and Democratic politicians pushed to keep the area off-limits to drilling. But in 2017, a Republican-controlled Congress mandated the sale of oil leases as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, the Interior Department had already canceled and refunded two leases, at the request of companies that owned them. That left seven existing leases, encompassing 365,000 acres, and all were held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state agency that invests in industrial projects. 

The Biden Administration suspended the state agency’s leases two years ago, citing “multiple legal deficiencies in the underlying record supporting the leases.” On Wednesday, Secretary Haaland officially canceled those leases. 

Alaska’s oil and gas industry and state government, however, criticized the Biden administration’s moves. Governor Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, said the Arctic refuge leases were issued legally and added that the state “will be turning to the courts to correct the Biden Administration’s wrong.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden bars oil drilling across wide swath of Alaska’s Arctic on Sep 6, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Max Graham.

Prominent Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora faces 40 years in prison in his sentencing hearing Wednesday for what press freedom and human rights groups say are inflated charges of money laundering. Zamora is the founder and president of the investigative newspaper El Periódico and has long reported on Guatemalan government corruption. El Periódico was forced to shut down last month after months of intensifying harassment and persecution from President Alejandro Giammattei’s right-wing government. The government has held Zamora “as a hostage” for nearly a year as part of its wider crackdown on the press, says his son José Carlos Zamora, a journalist based in Miami who is advocating for his father’s release.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Montana House Republicans bar transgender Democrat Zooey Zephyr from House floor for rest of the legislative session
• House Republicans pass bill to raise the debt limit in exchange for deep spending cuts President Biden won’t approve
• Former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll weeps as she recounts her alleged rape by Donald Trump to a New York jury
• Transit advocates unveil five billion dollar package to save public transit systems facing insolvency — or deep cuts
• Oakland Education Association authorizes a strike — while a state lawmaker proposes a 50% hike in teacher and staff salaries statewide
• Biden Administration files legal brief appealing lower court ruling striking down abortion drug mifepristone

Image: Zooey Zephyr from website of National Democratic Training Committee

The post Montana House bars transgender lawmaker from House floor for remainder of legislative session; House Republicans narrowly approve bill to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for deep cuts; Oakland Education Association authorizes a strike: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – April 26, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

An Asheville judge issued an order barring members of the press from publishing about a former student who is suing the University of North Carolina System and multiple university administrators on Feb. 22, 2023, according to court records.

The plaintiff, who filed the suit on Feb. 15 under the pseudonym Jacob Doe, alleges that he was wrongfully expelled from UNC Chapel Hill after being accused of sexual assault by four undergraduate women.

When filing the suit, Doe simultaneously filed the motion for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, requesting that no information be released by the defendants or published by the media. Those filings appear to have been sealed and are not available for public review.

Chief United States District Judge Martin Reidinger granted the temporary restraining order on Feb. 22, citing possible irreparable harm to the plaintiff. The order bars the defendants from disclosing any information about the disciplinary proceedings at the heart of the lawsuit and requires them to inform media outlets about the restraint.

The order also requires the defendants to instruct news outlets that “they are prohibited from publishing any information concerning the Plaintiff, the disciplinary proceedings, or the outcomes of such proceedings.” It is unclear which media outlets, if any, were informed of the order.

Immediately after the restraint went into effect, the parties jointly filed to withdraw the motion, asking the judge to dissolve the TRO and cancel a preliminary hearing scheduled for March 7.

As of publication the restraining order remains in effect.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

A federal judge issued a nationwide order late Friday barring Starbucks from firing union organizers—a ruling that affirmed a long-established law which workers say the coffee chain has violated hundreds of times since unionizing efforts were first launched in Buffalo, New York in 2021.

U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith ruled in Michigan that former shift supervisor Hannah Whitbeck must be reinstated in her position, which she was fired from in April 2022.

Whitbeck and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Detroit Regional Director Elizabeth Kerwin argued that she had been fired because of her involvement in union organizing at the store where she worked in Ann Arbor—one of 366 Starbucks stores across the U.S. where employees have organized to create bargaining units. Nearly 300 stores have won union elections so far.

Starbucks Workers United, the employees' union, has accused the company of firing more than 200 employees in illegal retaliation for organizing.

The company claimed Whitbeck was fired for leaving 20 to 30 minutes early a single time without finding someone to fill in for her, but Kerwin argued that would have been a violation of Starbucks' own policy of issuing a warning for such an incident. Kerwin also noted that Starbucks was aware Whitbeck was involved in unionization efforts.

Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for the NLRB, said the nationwide order was significant.

"The district court's ruling confirms that Starbucks continues to violate the law in egregious ways, thus requiring a nationwide cease and desist order," Abruzzo toldBloomberg.

The NLRB has issued 75 complaints against Starbucks for unfair labor practices, including intimidating and retaliating against workers who are organizing.

"Firing workers for organizing is already illegal, of course," said Starbucks Workers United, the employees' union, of Goldsmith's order. "But this decision is HUGE for getting speedy justice for those retaliated against."

Goldsmith ordered Starbucks to post physical copies of the order at the Ann Arbor store and to read it at a mandatory meeting. The company was given 21 days to file an affidavit declaring it had complied.

Starbucks reported a 31% annual growth in profits in 2021, the year workers began unionizing, as well as $8.1 billion just in the fourth quarter of that year. Still, the company has aggressively fought union efforts by holding captive-audience meetings with CEO Howard Schultz and threatening the rights of workers who get involved in organizing efforts. This past week, Starbucks refused to send Schultz to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on the company's conduct.

Goldsmith's ruling showed that the company "can't just fire" its way out of listening to workers, said economic justice group Fight for $15.

"Love to see the NLRB push back against Starbucks' intimidation tactics," said the group. "Unionizing is a right!"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Guatemala's Supreme Electoral Tribunal ruled earlier this week that a leftist presidential ticket headed by Indigenous human rights defender Thelma Cabrera should be barred from the June ballot, prompting fury and vows of mass protests from Cabrera's supporters.

Thursday's ruling—which Cabrera's young political party, the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP), is vowing to appeal to the Supreme Court of Justice—stems from Guatemala electoral authorities' refusal to certify the candidacy of Cabrera's running mate, former human rights ombudsman Jordán Rodas.

Reporting indicates that election officials have justified stonewalling Rodas—a longtime target of Guatemala's right-wing political establishment—by citing supposed "anomalies during the collection of compensation" upon his departure from the ombudsman post last year.

But Cabrera and Rodas contend that the electoral tribunal's decision is a politically motivated attempt to keep a left-wing party—whose base is largely rural—off the ballot, which is set to include the daughter of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013.

Montt's victims were largely Indigenous peasants.

Last month, the same electoral body that deemed Cabrera and Rodas disqualified from the June ballot ruled that Zury Ríos can participate, despite a constitutional provision barring the relatives of coup leaders from serving as Guatemala's president. Ríos was blocked from the 2019 presidential ballot on those grounds.

That year, as Nick Burns of Americas Quarterly recently reported, Cabrera "gave the Guatemalan political establishment a shock" by winning 10% of the vote in the presidential election.

"It was the most successful presidential run by an indigenous person in Guatemala’s modern history—the only other was by Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú in 2007, who won 3% of the vote," Burns noted. "Cabrera’s biography is striking. She grew up in a Maya Mam family of poor laborers on a coffee plantation on Guatemala's Pacific coast and was married at 15. She described in a book how she and her sister Vilma went to school through the sixth grade because their mother—who could not read or write—saw education as crucial."

Cabrera's supporters have vowed to "paralyze the country" with large-scale demonstrations if the electoral body's decision isn't reversed.

"If they do not do it, we are going to take over the international airport, the three ports of the country, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, and all state institutions," said one MLP supporter. "We are Indigenous, we are Maya, and we can be out here for a month!"

Daniel Zovatto, a political scientist and expert in Latin American elections, said the tribunal's ruling against the MLP presidential ticket amounts to an "electoral coup" that "vitiates the integrity and credibility" of the upcoming contest.

Rodas, a human rights champion, lamented in response to the decision that "democracy in Guatemala has taken another step back."

"They are afraid of the people and their sovereign decisions," he said.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Marcel Lehel Lazar walked out of Federal Correctional Institute Schuylkill, a Pennsylvania prison, in August 2021. The 51-year-old formerly known only as Guccifer had spent over four years incarcerated for an email hacking spree against America’s elite. Though these inbox disclosures arguably changed the course of the nation’s recent history, Lazar himself remains an obscure figure. This month, in a series of phone interviews with The Intercept, Lazar opened up for the first time about his new life and strange legacy.

Lazar is not a household name by unauthorized access standards — no Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning — but people will be familiar with his work. Throughout 2013, Lazar stole the private correspondence of everyone from a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell.

“Right now, having this time on my hands, I’m just trying to understand what this other me was making 10 years ago.”

Marcel Lehel Lazar, known as Guccifer, opened up to The Intercept for the first time about his new life and strange legacy.

Photo: Nemanja Kneževic for The Intercept

“I was inspired with the name, at least, because my whole Guccifer project was, after all, a failure.”

Marcel Lehel Lazar shows old photos and his current ID photographs in his wallet while walking around Arad, Romania, on Jan. 8, 2023.

Photo: Nemanja Kneževic for The Intercept

A sculptural sign along a highway announces the city of Arad in Romania on Jan. 8, 2023.

Photo: Nemanja Kneževic for The Intercept

Hackers are still playing a game Guccifer mastered.

A portrait of Marcel Lahel Lazar in Arad, Romania, on Jan. 8, 2023.

Photo: Nemanja Kneževic for The Intercept

“I’m gonna keep keeping one eye on American politics and react to this. I’m not gonna let the water just flow. I’m gonna intervene.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.