May 21, 2023
This episode featured an interview with Tommy Bassio, who is incarcerated in Archambault prison in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec. He talked to us about a report he co-authored with other prisoners called The Archambault Report 2.0. We also aired an interview with someone from the Barton Prisoner Solidarity Project in Hamilton Ontario about a recent hunger strike in the Barton jail there. We ended the show with audio from an event that was put on at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture by the New York City Public Library’s Jail and Prison Services Team. The event was called Sostre at 100 and celebrated the life and work of Martin Sostre. Martin Sostre who was born in 1923 and died in 2015, advocated for prisoners’ rights to religious freedom, political expression, and due process regarding prison censorship and solitary confinement. He was also a teacher and mentor, as the owner of the radical Afro-Asian Bookshop in Buffalo, New York, and a community organizer with the Juvenile Education and Awareness Project in New Jersey.