This zine is a transcript from an episode of the podcast Rustbelt Abolition Radio, and 1312 Press publishes it in print-form in conjuncture with that project. We see carceral society as an extension of colonization. For the shared liberation of land and people, systemic imprisonment must come to an end.
Rustbelt Abolition Radio is an abolitionist media and movement-building project based in Detroit, MI. Each episode broadcasts the voices of those impacted by incarceration and explores ongoing work in the movement to abolish the carceral state (that is, prisons, police, courts as well as racial domination and capitalist exploitation).
The show seeks to strengthen community collaboration and undermine the common sense that putting people in cages and shackling them with electronic devices solves the problems produced by racial capitalism. As such, we aim to expand our ability to struggle against the ways in which the carceral state impacts our daily lives and to create a space where we can both imagine and remake our world anew.
Nick Estes identifies the anti-Indian origins of the carceral state within the U.S. settler colonial project and argues that indigenous liberation offers critical frameworks for understanding how to abolish it. Estes is a co-founder of The Red Nation: an anti-profit coalition dedicated to the liberation of Native Nations, lands, and peoples. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico and is a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.
[zine-cover] [zine-guts] [audio]