September 9, 2025
Prison Radio Show
Today is the prisoner's justice state episode on prison radio show. This year we are celebrating 50 years of prisoners Justice Day. We will be airing audio from the prisoners justice day events that took place in Montreal on Prisoners Justice Day on Sunday, August 10th.
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August 26, 2025
Prison Radio Show
This inaugural episode of a very special series called Prison Radio Internationale. From those of you who may be new listeners, Prison Radio is a bi-weekly show at CKUT that brings you news and stories about people who are incarcerated in prisons and struggling against the greater prison industrial complex. Usually our show focusses on issues based in where our listeners live. In Canada and the United States. But this summer, 2 of our members were lucky enough to travel throughout Europe and do some deep dive reporting into the conditions of people facing the violence of prisons, policing,...
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August 12, 2025
Prison Radio Show
This episode is focussing on prisoners justice day. It's the 50th prisoners justice day that just went by on Sunday, August 10th, and we are focussing this episode and highlighting what prisoners justice day is.
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July 29, 2025
Prison Radio Show
This episode covers a panel discussion on prison labour in Canada. Key points include that prisoner pay has been frozen at a maximum of $6.90/day since 1981, that the work prisoners do is effectively forced labour with real economic value, and that there is an ongoing legal effort to have prisoners recognized as employees with the right to unionize. Panellists include a government investigator, academics, a formerly incarcerated activist, and a labour lawyer, all arguing that the current treatment of prisoner workers is exploitative and in need of reform.
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July 15, 2025
Prison Radio Show
This episode covers the criminalization of Indigenous land defense, provides a news update on Ontario provincial prison conditions, and discusses policies and realities faced by incarcerated trans persons, hearing from lawyers, activists, and scholars working and advocating in this area.
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July 1, 2025
Prison Radio Show
Today we're airing audio from the Final Straw Radio which airs on Asheville FM in North Carolina. Their show on June 23rd featured 2 interviews one talking about the annual “Shut’em Down Week of Action”, called by jailhouse lawyer speak for December of this year and one talking with Monsour Owolabi sharing some perspectives on inside outside collaboration, the role of isolation in prisons as counterinsurgency, and the importance of transitional housing projects. We will start with the interview about JLS Jailhouse Lawyer Speak’s Week of Action this interview features...
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June 17, 2025
Prison Radio Show
Today's episode features a book launch event that took place on April 11th at the Shift Centre. The book is titled “Defund: Conversations towards abolition” published by Haymarket Books. The book features the collection of interviews with prison abolitionist organizers and thinkers on how to bridge the divide between reform and abolition. Calvin John Smiley is the books author; he's also a professor of Sociology at City University in New York. We will hear today on the show from Calvin John smiley in conversation with Freeman of the Termite Collective you will...
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May 20, 2025
Prison Radio Show
This episode focused on Palestinian prisoners and featured an interview with the Director of the International Committee of the Palestinian Prisoners' Society, Rahid Ahmer, who is based in Nablus in the West Bank. As always the audio from the previous show bleeds into the start of this one! We are trying to catch up with a year of shows that have been absent in our podcast feed and so we have been downloading directly from the CKUT archives and posting here. The way the archives work, there is often a minute or two of the previous show at the start of the hour.
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May 6, 2025
Prison Radio Show
This show was our funding drive special! We talked to folks on parole and people in prison about why CKUT and the Prison Radio Show matters to them. Then the hosts share a bit about why they care about the show and their motivations for volunteering with the station.
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April 8, 2025
Prison Radio Show
This episode featured audio from a panel discussion that happened in March 2025 in Montreal. It was part of the Rafales Anarchist Learning Camp, organized by the Revolutionary Anarchist Organization. The panel was on police and prison abolition and featured Mélina from the Comité Autonome du Travail du Sexe, Marquis Bey who is a professor of Black Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and English at Northwestern University, Fallon who once faced terrorism charges and spent a year in jail in Mexico, and Cedar from the Hamilton, Ontario based Barton Prison Solidarity Project. The panel was...
info_outlineThis episode featured an interview with Lauren Aarons. She is one of the authors of a recently released report from Amnesty International entitled Aftermath: Injustice, Torture and Death in Detention in North-East Syria (available here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/MDE24/7752/2024/en/ ). The report talks about the conditions in the camps and prisons where Islamic State fighters, affiliates, and anyone still living in Baghouz when it fell to the Syrian Democratic Forces in 2019 are all held. The report talks about intense conditions of torture, death, and inhumane treatment of children and while we avoid talking about most of the horrific specific instances detailed in the report, we want to put a content warning on this interview. We talk about distressing situations facing children, and some of the specifics of torture that people in the camps and prisons told the Amnesty International researchers. We also talk about the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the regions where all the camps and detention facilities are based, as well as the United States led coalition and it's role in the camps and detention facilities.