All Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together. I'm your guest host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is an episode about both of those things. Not Margaret and Killjoy, but about things falling apart and putting them back together. If you live in the US, you might have noticed that things are falling apart in the onslaught of new
federal changes over the past few weeks. There is one that is both astoundingly important and also likely to disappear below people's radars because it affects prisoners. Trans prisoners. Prison is the place that society puts people to forget that they exist. It shouldn't be that way, while prisons ought not to be how we solve problems as a society at all, but it is the way that things currently are.
Things that affect prisoners are routinely ignored, even though we live in a society built on the idea of incarceration. It's been in the news that US trans people somehow just sort of don't exist anymore, that everyone is either male or female, dictated at birth and immutable. Obviously, this flies in the face of biological and social reality, and it's going to impact us trans people quite a bit. One group of people that it's going to impact very immediately,
very dramatically, and very dangerously is trans prisoners. According to Bureau of Prison Statistics, there are currently one thousand, five hundred and twenty nine trans women and seven hundred and forty four trans men held in federal prisons, and not all of them are being held in gender appropriate prisons already. As we're going to talk about with our guests in a bit, prisoners have to go through an incredible amount of dehumanization in order to have a chance of being
placed in the right facility. But now that isn't an option, and women are being moved into men's prisons. Does the idea of being a woman in a men's prison scare you?
It should.
It's terrifying. It's worse than what you might imagine. One trans woman prisoner who's using a pseudonym for her lawsuit going by Maria Moe, has already filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop this new regulation. She is challenging it on both procedural and constitutional grounds. The government didn't go about this in the legal manner, and to house trans women with men goes against the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the Fifth
Amendments do process clause. I simply can't imagine putting a woman into men's prison as anything other than cruel and unusual punishment. The state can pretend that trans women aren't women, but the men in prison will not treat her like how they treat assists men. On January twenty first, the woman suing the prison system was told that she was going to be moved to men's prison after all of
her records were suddenly changed to mark her male. Federal data says that trans prisoners are sexually assaulted at ten times the rate of other prisoners, and that's the state's own reporting on the issue. But you know who doesn't know how to effortlessly transition to ads after saying something as serious as that, it's me, I don't know how
to effortlessly transitions ads. After giving you a statistic like that, When we come back, we're going to talk about how serious the situation is, but also provide just an absolute incredible number of things that you can do at various levels of risk to support the people whose lives are about.
To be ruined by this policy change.
Okay, and we're back. So to talk about how trans people fair in prison, I have brought on my friend with the most experience in prison, the former political prisoner Eric King. Eric served just shy of ten years in prison for throwing a molotov into an empty federal building one night in response to the Ferguson uprising of twenty fourteen. Those were a protests that were anti police protests that started in the wake of the police killing of eighteen
year old black man Michael Brown. Eric is also the co editor of a book called Rattling the Cages, Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, which has a forward by none other than Angela Davis and is worth checking out. Eric was released from the eighty X Supermax in December twenty twenty three. He walked out of prison wearing a support trans kid shirt and has been vocal about his support for us as soon as he walked out the door. So, Eric, thanks for coming on. It could happen here.
How are you. I'm doing really well, glad to be back. Thank you so much.
Yeah, so you reached out to me about this. What would you call it, like a policy change?
Yeah, executive order?
I guess, yeah, you know, And basically we talked about like how do we try and make sure that people know about what's happening. And I wanted to ask you, So, you're a SIS man and you didn't have an easy time in prison, right as far as I as far as I understand now, I think no one gets to have an easy time in prison is one of the things, especially in a supermax, So.
Not that easier than others.
I guess, yeah, you were not among the people who had it easier. And as I would follow your journey through the federal prison system, it seems like you had to defend yourself against both other prisoners and also prison staff. Is that a fair way to put it mildly?
Yeah, yes, that was what was going on.
Can you tell me a bit about the experience of trans people in prison, because when you look at this executive order, it sort of implies like all trans women are in women's prison and all trans men. Actually, I literally have no idea or transmit are held. I would rather if I was a transmit, I'd probably rather be in women's prison. I just Anyway, I don't know what was the situation like before this executive order.
So I want to start with saying, like, the reason I hit you up is because there's so much like horror happening this first week of like Trump's new presidency, and I didn't want this issue to get swept under the rug. Yeah, a lot of times, the bigger, more mainstream issues will get the most attention. And I still remember our trans family inside, and so that's what scared me enough to be like, dude, I need to talk to you about this.
Yeah. So when I was.
Inside, there was not very many trans people, and they're like, correct prison, Like a trans woman should be in a women's prison, Yeah, a trans man should be in a man's prison.
And that wasn't happening on the level that it should have.
And there was a rare case like Marius Mason who had enough support, enough publicity where they were able to Most people were stuck at their gender at birth. And so over the last couple of years, people started getting a lot more access to safe prisons. That's why I'll call them my prisons where they feel safest. So I trans women were starting to go to women's prisons, and it wasn't very many.
It's not like there's tens of thousands, but handfuls.
Because it is it's very hard in the federal system to get recognized as a transgender person. You have to go through years of degrading and humiliating therapy with the prison psychologist. You have to get just horribly treated by doctors who ignore you, gasight, you diminish, you try to push Christianity on you, and then if you make it through their brutality, then you were one of the lucky ones.
You got to say, like, I am this person, this is who I am.
And if you're even more lucky, you got to be transferred to a prison that would make you feel the safest, the most whole is a human and that's the goal, Like, that's the safety goal. Basically, that's where we wanted things to be pushed. That people would be recognized for who they are, they would get treated for for who they were, and they would be sent to a prison that was congruent with who they were. And that's what's all being taken away.
Yeah, and when you talk about the safety, I don't want to like necessarily go on at great length about how trans women suffer invents prisons, but it's probably worth talking about, like because you've described it as there's like literal sexual slavery happening in the prisons. Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, one hundred and ten percent yes, yes, And I only speak for federal prisons. I know in some states it's different. Like in some states people are able to use like their femininity as like a power play as a tool to keep themselves safe. And so if that, if that's an option, then great. But what eye witness in the federal prison was the exact opposite of that.
People are getting destroyed. And if you go into a men's prison presenting as female in any way or soft anywhere, or as any type of one or any type of nonsense straight male, you are an automatic target. And it's not like hyperbole to say that if you walked onto a penitentiary yard and you had makeup, if you had your hair long, if you had breast, if you had anything presenting as female, you will get butchered within an hour. You won't survive that, or you'll get by some group and.
You will be a site like you will be property.
And at the lower custody levels it's a lot safer if you're at a low security like FCI Englewood.
You're not in danger there.
You're a danger of humiliation and being degraded by staff, but you're not going to get stabbed there. But God forbid you go to Victorville Medium, Florence Medium, or any PENITENTI tree, like, that's a death sentence for real.
Yeah, do you want to talk about the worst things I've ever happened to you? Do you want to talk about you and I? We did another episode on my other podcast, Live like the World is Dying and talking about how to survive prison, and in it you talked a little bit about what was necessary to kind of stand up for trans prisoners. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, So, like everyone needs to have like consequence awareness and they need to work on the lines that make them feel most comfortable. Of course, but for me, I was not comfortable at all watching trans or gay prisoners get brutalized. And so there were times where we have to raise money to buy a prisoner.
Out of sex slavery.
Yeah, we just have to buy them and then basically free them or pay off whatever debt they owed.
So that they no longer have to be in that situation.
And there was other times that you you have to knife up or you have to show up physically. And I'm not a big guy, of course, but like I don't tolerate like anti trams bullshit in my life anywhere, and that includes in prison, and so like there are times you have to step to people and say, like I am not gonna let this person have this happen to them, and if you want to continue doing this, then like we're going to take it to the next level.
And I wish to god there was more prison allies that would be willing to do that inside, because once someone is shown to have like support, it makes them less easy to be a victim. If people see that like this person's trams or like other people are riding with them, they're less likely to go after them because they'll be consequences. But if they're all alone, then they're just a sitting duck. And so like we need that, we need CIS men to show up and be like
this is not happening. I don't care what race you are, I don't care what gang you in you're in, You're not going to hurt this person, and that's stuff that we had to do. Sometimes it's scariest shit because you don't know what's gonna up.
But you have to, like, you have to live your ethics.
One of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you about it and have you on this show is because, unfortunately, I mean, prison is kind of a concentration of the worst parts of society. I do not want to say the worst people in society. I believe it has much more to do with the incarceration and the way that people are forced to be right when they're incarcerated. There's a tangent. But have you heard the whole thing where there's no such thing as an alpha male wolf in the wild.
I've only heard from you, and I loved it.
Okay, I probably said this exact same thing last time we time in captivity. Yeah, And so it's like it obviously is going to bring out the worst in people. That One of the reasons I want to have you want to talk about this is because I think that the experiences that you're talking about, they're much more real and intense than most people on the outside are like really thinking, you know, they're like, oh, that sounds bad. But then their brain kind of turns off and they
stop imagining what bad looks like. And I think that this idea that we're going to have to stand up for fa regardless of the risk and cost to ourselves sometimes is what it takes to create a society that is resistant to fascism. I think it's the same energy that people are going to have to do with, like no, you can't take my neighbors right in the era of ice.
I think that's really well said too. I think the way I used to wear inside is like we can't take steps backwards. We can't relinquish any progress we've made,
not a single pinch of it. Like everything has to move forward, and whatever you're capable of doing, Like not everyone's capable of like physically stepping to someone and saying like no, right, But everyone's capable of something, whether that's doing calling campaigns, organizing protests outside of prison, whether it's contacting region, contacting this person, raising money, doing whatever it takes.
Everyone can do something to keep people safe. And it's the same in the free world, Like it's not different. Everyone has something to offer. But it can't be apathy, it can't be this nihilism that like what does it matter, Like they're going to do it anyway? Do that like we're just forfeiting the future and we're letting our family get butchered.
Yeah. I really like that way of phrasing it. Yeah, we can't forfeit the future. How can people support transprisoners with what's going on right now? I don't know how in touch you are with people on the inside and things like that. How are people feeling, like what's the vibe?
What can be done?
So I assume, like when you're asking what can people do to support transprisoners, I assume you're asking what can free world people do to support those inside?
Yeah?
I mean you actually kind of have said what people on the inside can do, all right, which is necessary and important, but people on the outside, what can people do?
Visibility is safety, Like I saw that in my bid, and I've seen that in other people's bids. And if you look at someone like Marius Mason, if you look at people like Jennifer Rose keeping people visible and letting the prison know that like we're not turning a blind eye to this person, like you're not going to get a free one on them.
That cups people alive, Okay.
And so the more the staff and the administration knows that, like this person is looked after, the more they are likely to look after them because they don't want to be held accountable. Okay, So things like getting books into people, things like getting pin pals of people, raising money so that they don't have to go into debt, Like that's real, Like this debt stuff is serious. So making sure they have money on their books, Like I don't care what they spend it on.
I don't care if they spend it on drugs. I don't care if they spend it on twenty bags of coffee.
Are gambling as long as it keeps them out of slavery or out of that knife, like that's what matters. And then Patsy names around like it's almost as if we concentrate like all of our prisons supporting like five or six people and then we forget that there's like fifteen thousand trans people in prison.
Yeah, and so.
Organizations like Black and Pink do a really amazing job, but like there's there's not enough. Like we need visibility, like we need to keep people present in our lives that we don't know and we might not like their charges. They might not be nice people, like, they might not be cool, but we need to get keep them alive.
Like that's what abolition is. So visibility.
Yeah, that makes sense. I sort of know the answer to this, but I'm gonna pretend like I don't know it at all. What's Black and Pink. Black and Pink is an organization. I know it used to be an anarchist organization.
It might be something else now, but it's an organization that's focused strictly on supporting trans and queer prisoners.
That's all they do.
Social prisoners, political prisoners, it doesn't matter. We're gonna find you a pin pal and we're gonna get people to write you. And they do a really amazing job. Like I honor them for putting in that work because it's hard.
And so someone who's listening, who's never considered being pen pals of the prisoner could get in touch with Black and Pink and be hooked up with someone to write to.
Yeah, if you like.
Even just like right now, someone googled Black and Pink pin pal m, black and Pink prison pinpal, Like it'll pop up the website. You just click on flying a pin pal and you can find someone in your city, find someone in your state, find someone back to relate to, like to have a little biography, and you can find someone like to connect with and potentially save their life or save your life.
Yeah, it can make you better too.
Yeah, okay, so writing helps when you talk about putting money on people's books, like who does that? Is that something you also could go through Black and Pink. Should people be doing their own fundraisers and then like working with prisoners that they've already made connections with, Like how should people either plug in or start things?
So each prison is different, like state and federal, but to put money on someone's books, she can do that yourself. You go you find out wherever prison that person's at, and you can just go to the BOP website or
that prison's website. BOP is Bureau Prisons. It's for federal people and it will just walk you through how to do it, how to send the money ground from Walmart, or how to do the JPay and put it on through your credit card, and you can do it, like if there's an ABC in America's Black Cross.
Community near you, you can fundraise with them.
If there's any like books through bars or ablitions groups near you, like you can and should fundraise with them to raise awareness, but you don't have to. But everyone can do this on your own, Like this is a a single person job, but it's better if we do it as a community.
Well, the way that I fund raised is that I have advertisers that interrupt me talking about anti capitalist things. And here's one of those interruptions. And I'm gonna go ahead and donate my pay for this episode to exactly what we're talking about. And here's ads they are not donating. You can think of whatever you want about these ads,
and we're back, okay with this new executive order. Like, how are people feeling either inside or people who are doing prison abolition work, or like how crisis does this feel?
Like? What's going on?
I can't like speak for it should keel like a ten out of ten? Yeah, like this is a carceral genocide. Yeah, real, this isn't a rature of an entire people. So like, if you're not at a ten for this, like you either do not care or you're not understanding how serious the prison system is. I've talked to a couple homies inside. I have to be really delicate because I'm still on probation.
But those people understand that, like the mood is turning dark. Okay, they see inside that like when fascists come into power, it empowers everyone else below them to be brutal because they can get away with it now. And so these people that were already monsters under the most liberal of prison director are now getting told by the president that they do not have to respect this person's entire life.
And so it's a very serious situation. We've got a non binary person about to go in name Casey Goonan, and they got sentenced for allegedly firebombing some cop cars and support with Palestine, and I talk with them on a weekly basis, just trying to prepare them because like right now, where they're at is a jail and they haven't really experienced the prison yet, and so it's all about like getting them ready for like here are potentials, like here's what they could do, but it's dark in there,
like the Nazis are are celebrating, and that includes the ones with badges especially.
Yeah, that makes sense. What kind of support felt the most useful to you in other prisoners? He talked about this a little bit, But I'm I'm like curious about like you talked about, like visibility, are protests outside of jails? Do they do they make people feel like good and welcome or does it make the guards cracked down on everyone?
Like I know that there's this you know, habit of noise demonstrations every New Years, and what kind of stuff felt good, and what kind of stuff felt good but scary, and what kind of stuff was just annoying? Like I don't know, I'm just trying to find more stuff that people can do.
Yeah, the noise demos are cool, but they're performative. Mm hmm. It's more for the people that are doing them than the people inside. M hm.
But like, let's say you're a trans person out of jail and there's thirty five people outside waving your banner. That will get your respect inside, get people to say, oh right, what the hell is going on with them?
Okay?
Yeah, like that is that's serious to where you can build up a rep if someone's already in prison, that's you'll probably get them fucked up and put in the shoe.
That's what happened to me.
If there's a noise demonstration with your name, yeah, yeah, be delicate.
How you do it? Yeah, because that's what put me in ad X.
Oh shit, so that's a real that's a real double edged sword, right.
Yeah.
They use that as the as the thing saying I was the leader of Antifa because I got people to come out and protest for me.
So I got Pulley Bell, Chapo.
We shouldn't tell everyone that you we have to keep it on the DL that you're the leader of Antifa.
For real. We dropped the ball. I know.
Wait, I've been told I'm the leader of Antifa.
You're my leader?
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally yeah.
I'm more regional leader.
The things that help the most, like in a real life situation, are the things that provide mental safety and something to do. Okay, so books, magazines that gives you something to do, like empower yourself and pass the time and stay out of the way. Money helps because then you can do crafts, you can paint, you can do art, you can sell things, you can do crochet. That stuff helps. And then letters on this like that gives you someone to talk to it. People are actually putting thought into
the letters. And I always encourage and I always will for as many people as possible to on a daily or weekly basis, call that prison, call the prison, no matter what prison, state, federal, county, and demand to speak with the warden, the captain, the warden's secretary, the lieutenant, the head of psychology, and demand to know how is this person doing? What are you doing to keep them safe? We're hearing this in this what is going to happen
to our family? That makes a difference. Okay, if you know a lawyer, pay the one hundred and twenty dollars an hour to have them do a legal call. That way, the prison sees this person as a lawyer protecting them. They don't need to know that it's just a one time call. Yeah, but that legal call, just the wellness check is what they call it. Let's that person get
word out about what dangerous stuff is happening. But it also forces the prison to recognize that they might be protected by legal system.
Okay, so these things help.
Yeah, what's the master plan here for how we're going to respond to this executive order? Because obviously we're not necessarily in a position to immediately reverse this order and get women put into women's prison, which is a crazy thing to have to say. We're not gonna be able to get women put into women's prisons. But is organizing
with a local group. You create a group and you basically like figure out who the local trans prisoners are in your area and make sure that you're communicating with them and that they're getting wellness calls from lawyers and basically like just making sure that the prison knows that people are paying attention to the fact that there's now women in the men's prison.
Is that that's a soft version of what we should do, Yeah, fair enough.
There's other versions that are yeah, okay.
There's the other version that I wish people would do. Yeah, there's a version where we do BDS but for every single company that's benefiting from prison labor. Yeah, and say, as long as you let this transgender hate go on, we're not going to support your business. There's boycotting. There's putting people on the road so that the cops can't show up to their jobs.
Uh huh.
There's protesting outside wardens houses. There's protesting outside governor's houses if it's for a state prison. There is tangibly putting your body on the line. There is sabotaging cop cars that go into the prison, there is barricading the entrances. There's a thousand things we can do to say, if you heard our people were hurting you, whether it's in your pocket, whether it's in your car, whether it's in your daily life, whether it's annoying you. We can find
things to do if we care enough. And we saw people do it for Palestine. And I don't think transgender lives are less important than Palestinian lives. Yeah, it has to be an equal thing in my mind. Yeah, but the subu side's really great too. That's like that's daily stuff.
No, No, but you're right, and it's like it's funny because it's like, in my mind, it's so hard to ring the alarm bells when all of the alarm bells are ringing, and everyone's kind of ignoring alarm bells right now. I mean, I guess the answer is that we talk about it like this, but like, how do we make sure that people actually listen to the alarm bells that
are happening right now? And I think part of it is being really unfortunately brutally honest about what it's like to be a woman in men's prison.
I mean, I don't think people understand it all. And there's all this misinformation too, Like you'll hear these like fascist talking points coming out of liberals' mouths to where like well, I don't want my tax dollars going to like pay for their surgery, or I don't want some man just sneaking into a woman's prison saying these transgenders we can rape everyone. And these are like the same scare tactics and like misinformation that's used for every single,
like every single repression you've ever seen. And it's our job to confront those head on and call them out. His Lives show show the real information, and it's our job to continue to just force people to recognize that
this is a dangerous and real situation. We can't let this entire group of people be destroyed, because like, if you're going to turn your blind eye to transgender people, you're going to do it to gain people, You're going to do it to women, You're going to do it to black people, and then it's just you, and then no one's going to protect your stupid ass. We have to, as or as I have to as assist man, we have to keep bringing this bell.
We have to make people listen.
I mean as a as a not currently in prison trans woman, Like like one of the reasons I think this almost happens. I mean it happens because the cruelty is the point, but like it's terrifying. You've actually experienced the thing that's terrifying. It is terrifying the idea of going into prison in the United States, especially maximum security prison, potentially especially men's prison, both as a man or a trans woman. I wouldn't want to be in men's prison.
And I don't even want to compare it, by the way, Okay, it's not comparable. Okay, Like if I didn't have antique attachment on my face, I could walk into any prison in a country and be like, oh.
There's just a white guy, there's just a white roll. Yeah, I have no problem.
Yeah, a transgender person, there's a single place except for a protective custody yard, where they can walk in and immediately feel safe.
Yeah, it's the exact opposite. Everywhere they go is fight or flight.
The scariest moment you've ever had your entire life, point four to seven, all day, every day. Yeah, picture someone breaking into your home in the middle of the night. In that terror you get. They have to walk into a new prison every single time and face that terror every single day.
Yeah, it's not comparable at all. It's scary as shit.
No, that's fair. Like to be honest, like I think about and this is like maybe more honest than I'm usually I am on this podcast. Like, you know, I don't do as much frontline activism as I did. And part of that's like, oh, I'm like aging and I have other work that I do, And part of it is like I came out as trans, you know, part of it is like I never liked the idea of like because I always was trans and the idea of like being surrounded by only men was just viscerally terrifying.
But now in particular, like it's just such a it's a mind fuck. It's terrifying, And you know, I feel like one of my main roles is to try and help people be like, look, we're in this together enough that you should be scared, but you should get through
the fear. But it's like, the fear of prison is like such a I mean, it's part of the reason that people say, like, no one is free till everyone is free, as long as there is a single person in prison, you were not free because your freedom can be taken away from you at any point, and that
fear of prison it's funny, Okay, I'm almost doing. You know, people have kind of like figured out at this point that like certain branches of Christianity will use the fear of hell to force people to be good by their definition of good right. And it's a scare tactic. It's terrorism. It is like a you know, you better behave or infinite suffering awaits you. But then even the people who are critical of that haven't necessarily wrapped their head around that.
The existence of prisons, especially the existence of punitive prisons, like the sort of theoretical perfect model of the Norwegian prisoner or whatever, where you're just sort of separated from society, which I suspect is not actually I suspect Norwegian prison actually kind of sucks. But the American prison system is a prison system that exists to make you on the outside not feel free, like because it can be taken away from you and you can be thrown in prison.
That's my rant.
Yeah, well, I mean you're absolutely right, like that is the entire goal is to make sure that the community walks the government line, because if you don't, this is what will happen to you. And when people pull like the nonsense stuff like well, if you're not committing crimes, you shouldn't worry about it, Like they are not looking
at how like arbitrary crimes are. They're not looking at how quickly something can become a crime, or how quickly something that wasn't a crime can be portrayed as one. And the trans struggle, like trans people should not have to be on the front line, Like at no point should you or any of our trans family ever have to like put their freedom on the line, Like that is that's a privileged role, Like that's our role, my role, and my boss shouldn't have to get arrested for transliberation.
Like they should be safe, Like they should be able to feel comfort and warmth. You should be able to feel that safe and warmth and love. Like black people shouldn't be flighting the black liberation pipe. That's that's white people's flight. Trans people should not have to put their vulnerable lives on the line for this struggle if we really believe in in the liberation struggle.
Yeah, and it's hard because you also want to like while also not wanting to like lead that struggle, right, Like I think that like white people putting them ourselves on the line for black liberation is like super important. But then obviously you can get into.
There's the hero shit and trying to take a leadership. Yeah, do the David Gilbert role.
Be a soldier how they need you, and help and fight how people actually need you, not how you think it should be done.
Yeah, totally. Well, any last words for our audience around this particular issue.
Yeah, here in Denver, Brenn Rose's Legal Center, that's who I work for. It's a transgender ran civil rights law firm. We're about to put forward the trans Bill rights here in Colorado to guarantee safety. And I bring that up to say that not only is there direct action and protest we can do, we can also try to weasel into the legal system.
Yeah. There's a thousand ways we can fight these motherfuckers, and we got to use every single one of them. Yeah.
And I have nothing but love and solidarity for every transgender person alive anywhere, And I'm with you, and we're going to get through this.
I hope we are going to get through it. Because even as inndivid well we might not, right, But that's that's true about being alive, right, Literally, none of us are going to get through being alive alive, right at some point that's going to stop working for us, and
they can't get rid of us. We have always been here, we will always be here as long as there are humans that are going to be trans people, they are going to be queer people, they're going to be All of the identities that they're trying to destroy cannot be destroyed, even if us as individuals might. But again, we weren't going to get out of life alive anyway. That's what
I hold on to. I don't know about everyone who's listening, but the thing that I hold onto is just literally I was like, well I wasn't.
I'm not immortal, you know, it's got a time limit. Yeah, And all we.
Can do is to say, go back to one of the first things that you said, we just kind of can't compromise our ethics, you know, like there's like balancing acts right where you have to think like, well, I probably shouldn't do something where I like while out and get myself killed and accomplished nothing like to win, yeah, exactly, And some of fighting to win is knowing and not to fight and things like that, right, but not in a secretly you're just actually doing it at a cowardice way.
You actually have to be strategically being like where and when should I engage in what ways? And there are so many different ways that people can engage. Yeah, thanks for coming on, And do you want to talk about your book?
So rather than the cages out right now, it's with ak Press and it is a oral history of the political prisoner movement hold from the mouths of those prisoners. It covers like fifty or so prisoners from every movement, Black trans Our Elders are more recent anti fascists, and it is a beautiful way not just to hear about like oh I fought for this, but what was my life like inside? What did I experience? What gave me joy,
what gave me hope, what gave me sadness? And it's a way to see the vulnerability and humanity of those inside. And I think that's really valuable right now. And here soon my ad X book is coming out on the Impress. Oh cool, So I'll be.
Hounding you for that here soon for that coverage.
Yeah yeah, wait, well what's that book called or about it's gonna be called a clean Hell, and it's gonna be about how I want it trial because no one does that in the Feds. Yeah, zero point zero eight percent of people win in federal trial. And then how I got sent to the federal supermax and there's no books out about the supermax there's none. Well, and so one of your homies as the inside scoop.
Yeah I got Yeah, you were just an undercover journalist, just a real undercover solitary confinement.
So had Josh Davidson is helping me edit it.
Josh Davidson from rather than the Cages who who did also certain days.
So it seemed to be a really great project. Calso awesome.
All right, Well, people should check out both of those things and take care of people inside. And I hope that we'll have you on again soon.
Yay, thank you so much.
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