Let’s get rid of prison rape. Let’s reinstitute rehabilitation. Let’s repeal certain draconian sentencing laws. All good and essential ideas. But very little – in some cases, nothing - will fundamentally change unless those ideas, and more, are advanced within a strategic framework of abolition.

Pierre Labossiere, a Haitian national, co-founder of the Haiti Action Committee, has been a long-time social-justice activist and advocate for the Lavalas Party of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, currently exiled in South Africa. Pierre has also been active in the campaigns to free political prisoners in Haiti and the U.S.

Our guest, Gioioa von Disterlo, is the current Civil Rights Organizer at Coalition on Homelessness. She also works as a staff writer and writer facilitator for Poor Magazine. Gioioa has organized in San Francisco for seven years, and has worked on a range of community issues including abuse, disability, mental health, racism, queer institutional predation, global systems of oppression, and civil rights.

August 02, 2010 - Znet

Athletes don't live on Planet Jock. They are part of this world and the level of crisis right now in the United States is something that has even breached the citadel of American sports. Recession. War. Immigrant bashing. Oil spills. These are hardly the salad days...[H]istory has returned with a vengeance, a vengeance severe enough to puncture the moated citadel of professional sports.

July 18, 2010 - Znet

The basic conflict can be understood in very conventional terms of people enduring and trying to resist an occupation...I think Israel is behaving like most occupying powers behave...It wasn’t easy to get the French out of Algeria, it wasn’t easy to get the Russians out of Afghanistan, it wasn’t easy to get the Americans out of Vietnam...[T]he fundamental fact is that the Palestinians are not only deprived of their basic human rights but they’re slowly, inexorably, being dispossessed of their homeland by the Israeli juggernaut.

In 2007, veteran journalist Michael Richardson began writing a series of articles for OpEdNews.com about Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, who are two Black Panther political prisoners known as the Omaha Two. Richardson argues that they were framed for the 1970 murder of a policeman as part of the FBI’s notorious counterintelligence program, dubbed “COINTELPRO.”

If one accepts, as I do, that prisons in the US are a contemporary extension of chattel slavery, that prisons are irredeemably rooted in racism and classism, that prisons serve no purpose save corporate profit and raw retribution, then one must call for their abolition. Prison “reform” is insufficient if the very notion and reality of prison itself is grounded in inequality, injustice and destruction.

Our Guest, Ricardo Alvarez, is the medical director of Clinica Esperanza, the Mission Neighborhood Health Center's HIV clinic, a multidisciplinary clinic serving the needs of mostly Latino uninsured or under-insured HIV patients. Clinica Esperanza is one of the premier HIV clinics in the city of San Francisco.

Phavia Kujichagulia, a Griot / Djialli (Oral Historian), musician, writer, poet, dancer who utilizes music, poetry and dance to heal and reveal history -- was a professor of Ethnomusicology and African Civilizations at World College West and Stanford University's Workshop on Political and Social Issues. For more than 16 years, she taught Creative Writing and Performance Art for the California Department of Corrections at Folsom, Soledad, Vacaville, Susanville and San Quentin Prisons.

Video-interviewed by Angola 3 News in May, 2010, Ramona Africa is the sole adult survivor of the May 13, 1985 massacre of 11 members of the MOVE organization. Founded in the early 1970s by John Africa, MOVE is a mostly black religious and family-based political organization that, in their words, works "to stop industry from poisoning the air, the water, the soil, and to put an end to the enslavement of life - people, animals, any form of life.”

Jennifer Friedenbach has worked about 18 years on homeless and poverty issues, including welfare rights, housing, homeless prevention, healthcare, disability, and human and civil rights.

Our first guest is Georgia Schreiber, Board Chair of California Prison Focus (CPF). CPF staff work with prisoners and their family members to expose human rights abuses with a larger vision of closing the SHU and ultimately abolishing California's racist, genocidal prison system.

By Fernando Garcia - June 11, 2010

New evidence has emerged that casts doubt on the claims of a US Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a fifteen-year-old Mexican boy on Mexican soil on Monday. The teenager, Sergio Adrian Hernandez Güereca, was shot in the head on the banks of the Rio Grande that divides the United States and Mexico.

By Noam Chomsky and Ollie Mikse - May 2010

"By now, not only the world, but the survival of the species depends on sophisticated science. We're not going to get out of the environmental crisis unless there are significant scientific innovations, figuring out some way to harness solar power. That's not going to happen by itself. Unfortunately, a lot of science tradition throughout the years has been going into developing better means of destruction."

- Noam Chomsky

Our guest, Attorney Dennis Cunningham, established the People's Law Office in Chicago from which he and young Attorney Jeffrey Haas conducted a landmark civil rights case ultimately winning a large settlement for the Panthers' families -- although Chicago's killer cops were never criminally charged.