This is a the first of what I hope to be many guest posts to Prison Culture. This post is written by my friend Lewis Wallace. Lewis is a long-term anti-prison activist, writer, performer, artist and all around Renaissance man. He is based out of Chicago. I am grateful to have an opportunity to regularly collaborate with Lewis in dismantling the PIC and creating a more just world.

I recently had the opportunity to go to Detroit for the Allied Media Conference, held in Detroit annually every year. One of the conference tracks was called “Resisting the Incarceration Nation.” The track was led by organizers from around the country who are working to reform and/or dismantle the prison system, using creative media tools in the process.

I was particularly inspired by an organization based in rural Kentucky and Virginia called Thousand Kites. Thousand Kites does solidarity work with prisoners through performance, video, and radio. “Kite” is prison slang for a message; throwing a kite means passing along a message. This workshop was focused on their weekly radio program, “Calls from Home,” a broadcast that transmits messages from families, friends and supporters of incarcerated people through prison walls via a local radio station. “Calls from Home” has a very interesting story behind it, which the workshop facilitators shared; I am going to try to recount that story based on notes and memory, with major apologies to the organizers for any inaccuracies. I was deeply moved by their story and approach.

Thousand Kites began with a community radio station called Appalshop based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, in the Appalachians (WWMT 88.7 FM). When Appalshop started, the local people there had been the targets of a lot of media attention because of the War on Poverty, but felt like they weren’t being represented accurately in the media. They were represented as isolated, ignorant victims, not as people with their own culture and resourcefulness. They created a radio station to focus on local Appalachian culture; “The underlying philosophy has always been that Appalachian people must tell their own stories and solve their own problems,” their website said.

The vast majority of people living outside prison walls in rural Kentucky and Virginia are white. Not so for the people living inside of prison walls. For some time, Appalshop had one hip-hop show, once a week, for one hour. Well, it turns out that area in Eastern Kentucky and Western Virginia has nine different prisons located out there in the mountains. Two are supermax prisons, which means the people who live there are kept in solitary confinement almost all the time. Some of the prisons in the area are private, and have contracts with states all over the place to keep people there, thousands of miles from home in the middle of the mountains. Even from within Virginia or Kentucky, most of the people in captivity in that area are from urban places and many are African-American men. This one hip-hop show, called “Holla to the Hood,” was a source of comfort to people who loved hip-hop and were isolated from their home communities. The show’s creators began to receive letters from many of the men in the private prisons, documenting the extreme abuse and isolation. Eventually, in response to this letter-writing, a campaign grew to draw attention to the abusive practices at the supermax facilities, and to advocate for people being detained far from home to be returned to their home communities.

One of these campaigns, focused on a group of people who were transported all the way from the Virgin Islands to be kept in facilities in the Appalachians, partnered with a radio station in the Virgin Islands and with an organization called the Virgin Islands Prison Project. The campaign was successful! The men were moved to facilities in the Virgin Islands—still incarcerated (which I disagree with on my own abolitionist principles), but able to be visited by family and friends more easily. The Appalshop folks also partnered with organizations in Richmond, VA, in Pittsburgh, and in Connecticut to campaign against the prisons’ abuses.

Through this process, they realized that radio was an amazing way to stay in communication with people inside area prisons. Not all people in captivity have consistent radio access (especially in supermax facilities where many so-called privileges are restricted), but many do. They also learned from the prisoners’ letters that it was extremely difficult for them to keep in touch with their families; the prisons are located in unbelievably inaccessible places, even if you are coming from within Virginia (imagine a supermax facility on top of a mountain, for example). Visits are expensive, often prohibitively so, and phone calls are also a huge rip-off—controlled and overcharged by corporations who have exclusive deals with prison systems or private prison corporations. Radio waves, however, can’t be controlled by prison officials. So, Appalshop/Thousand Kites started “Calls from Home,” a show that allows the families, friends, or anybody who has a message for people incarcerated in this region to call in and leave a message. The messages are strung together each week into a radio broadcast, heard by all who are able to tune in, inside and outside prison walls.

The radio show has had many positive effects on the surrounding community, within and outside of the prisons. One is that families and friends can call a toll-free number with messages of comfort, love, support, holiday messages, and so on; these are broadcast to everyone which can help build community and personal connections between incarcerated people. It has also helped raise awareness in the majority-white region about the lives of the people who are being held inside prisons there; a lot of times prison guards, who were white, had only ever encountered an African-American person in the context of imprisoning them. According to the workshop presenters, some locals campaigned against the show initially; others, including prison guards, have expressed that they found the show illuminating because it connected them to the simple fact that incarcerated people have families, friends, and love in their lives, all rendered invisible by the physical isolation and control inherent to imprisonment.

One of the things that made this workshop so effective was that after explaining this whole history, the presenters went on to explain exactly how it is that they go about making “Calls from Home” work. It’s actually very simple. They have a toll-free number, 877-410-4863. Anyone can call from anywhere. Callers leave messages throughout the week. Every Sunday evening, they collect the messages through a Skype account and replay them into a basic audio recording/editing program. They then string the messages together into a radio show (yes, they occasionally have to edit out inappropriate messages, like sexual stuff or stuff that would put the program or people inside at risk). All the technology used to create the show is very simple and free to download (Skype, Audio Hijack and Audacity); Appalshop puts it on the air every week and voila!

Thousand Kites is in the process of creating a toolkit to help others start prison radio shows. I was so inspired by this and began to think about the possibilities for staying in touch and supporting family and community connections with incarcerated people in Illinois. It seems a little limited because we are based in Chicago, where the airwaves are very crowded; plus many of the people who are incarcerated here are far, far downstate. My friend and penpal who is in Tamms Supermax does not even have radio “privileges.” So, it’s not an option for everyone. Still, Thousand kites is doing a really amazing form of solidarity that also has concrete connections to and uses in organizing campaigns. Check out their website http://www.thousandkites.org/ or http://www.callsfromhome.org. You can listen to the show, and you can call the number anytime and leave a message yourself: 877-410-4863. We did that ourselves during the workshop and the listeners down in Kentucky and Virginia got our message of support and solidarity that very next week. Extra credit if you come up with brilliant ideas for how to use radio to reach incarcerated people in Illinois and email us ([email protected]).