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Kite Line is a weekly radio program and podcast that focuses on issues in the prison system and beyond.

On the inside, a message is called a kite: whispered words, a note passed hand to hand, or a request submitted to guards for medical care.

Illicit or not, sending a kite means trusting that other people will pass it farther along, until it reaches its destination.

We make this show to pass along words, across the prison walls

309 | Captives with Jarrod Shanahan, Part One

June 24, 2022 Kite Line Radio 0 Comments

This week, Bella Bravo speaks with Jarrod Shanahan, a writer, activist, and professor of Criminal Justice based in Chicago. Shanahan has been on previous episodes, discussing mass incarceration and the George Floyd rebellion. We are speaking today about his new book Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage. Captives recounts the last seventy years of...

308 | A Great Moment to Push Further

June 17, 2022 Kite Line Radio 0 Comments

Interview with Maru Moro Villalpando of La Resistencia, a project that organizes against the Northwest Detention Center. In this conversation, Maru passes a kite along on behalf of immigrants housed in the facility. As they point out, facilities like this are “black boxes” where extra effort must be taken to shed light on conditions inside....

307 | Holding on to Your Humanity

June 10, 2022 Kite Line Radio 0 Comments

This week we return to our conversation between Baye Sylvester and Focus Initiatives’ Jok Huerta. Both formerly incarcerated in Indiana, they described the circumstances that brought them to prison in a previous episode. In this segment, they talk about the way the prison system strips people of their humanity- and the struggle to retain one’s...

306 | Immigration and E-carceration

June 3, 2022 Kite Line Radio 0 Comments

For this week’s episode, Bella Bravo spoke with Johana Bhuiyan, a journalist and author of a powerful series of articles about immigrant surveillance. She covers the vast program called “intensive supervision appearance program” which purports to be “humane alternative” to immigration detention. Managing the program on behalf of ICE is BI Inc, a subsidiary of...

305 | The Problem of Politicization

May 27, 2022 Kite Line Radio 0 Comments

This week we return to our conversation between Baye Sylvester and Focus Initiatives’ Jok Huerta. Both formerly incarcerated in Indiana, they described the circumstances that brought them to prison in a previous episode. In this segment, they talk about the way the prison system responds to politically-engaged prisoners. When prisoners become conscious and organized, the...

304 | Atlanta’s “Cop City”

May 20, 2022 Kite Line Radio 0 Comments

This week on Kite Line, we return to Atlanta’s proposed “Cop City”- a police training facility set to be built over a vast urban forest. People from across the city and the country have been organizing against its construction, which would make it the largest police training facility in the United States. People have been...

303 | The USA vs. Jessica Reznicek

May 13, 2022 Kite Line Radio 0 Comments

This week, we hear the first part of the recent webinar ‘USA vs. Jessica Reznicek: fighting the criminalization of Water Protectors’. The webinar description reads: “Since the No-DAPL movement, dozens of states have passed critical infrastructure laws that increase criminal penalties for anyone taking action against destructive fossil fuel projects. In 2017, 80 Republicans and 4...

302 | Not Trying to Hear No Again, with Renford Farrier

May 6, 2022 Kite Line Radio 0 Comments

In celebration of recently completing 300 consecutive episodes, we are airing some of our Kite Line crew’s favorite clips from our archive of hundreds of episodes. After we hear a round up of prison disturbances as compiled by Perilous Chronicle, we play a clip from episode 119, in which Talila Lewis (TL) describes some of...

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