It’s been more than 45 years since a thousand inmates at Attica Prison (Correctional Facility) in New York took control of the prison. In her 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, Professor Heather Thompson pieces “together the whole, gripping story, from the conditions that gave rise to the rebellion, which cost the lives of 43 men, to the decades of government obstructionism that prevented the full story from being told.” (NYTimes)

If you listened to our most recent Episode 113: In-Studio-Locking People Up, you know we’re talking about the fact that more than 2.2 million people are locked up in America’s prisons and jails. We invited scholars who have spent their professional lives researching and reporting on this crisis of incarceration, and a man who was incarcerated in California for more than 20 years, to join us in the studios of KQED in San Francisco to talk about how we got here and what it would take to make a safe and humane society.

Immediately after our conversation at KQED, Troy Williams and scholars Rebecca McClennan, Keramet Reiter, Ashley Rubin, and Heather Thompson drove about an hour away to San Quentin State Prison, to go inside the prison for a round-table (recorded) discussion with men locked up, to talk about their right to be heard and to protest behind the walls.

We begin with an introduction by Shadeed Wallce Stepter, producer of this episode, a reporter with the San Quentin Prison Report and Chair of the San Quentin Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Listen: Episode 114

Inside San Quentin — TO BE HEARD

  • Participants in roundtable discussion inside San Quentin State Prison

  • Inside San Quentin for roundtable discussion among scholars and journalists

  • Rebecca McClennan and Keramet Reiter

  • Author, Heather Ann Thompson with two men following discussion at San Quentin.

  • Greg Eskridge, Reporter with San Quentin Radio with Heather Ann Thompson, Author.

  • Heather Ann Thompson with Kevin Sawyer, Reporter with the San Quentin News.

  • Rebecca McClennan, Scholar at UC Berkeley following discussion.

  • Brian Acey, Reporter with San Quentin Prison Report and Heather Thompson, Author

  • Lonnie Morris, with the San Quentin Society of Professional Journalists speaking with Ashley Rubin

  • Emile DeWeaver, Reporter with Prison Renaissance, Heather Ann Thompson, Author and Rashaan Thomas, Reporter with Prison Renaissance

Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley and author of Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century and The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941

Keramet Reiter

Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Law at UC Irvine and author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement.

Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and author of the soon to be published book, The Deviant Prison: Eastern State Penitentiary and the Advantage of Difference, 1829-913. 

Professor of History at the University of Michigan and winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy

Chair of the San Quentin Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and reporter for the San Quentin Prison Report.

Journalist and new editor of SF Bay View and founder of the San Quentin Prison Report

Inside San Quentin: To be Heard — was produced by Shadeed Wallace Stepter, a reporter with the San Quentin Prison Report and Chair of the San Quentin Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and Life of the Law’s Senior Producer, Tony Gannon.

We want to thank Rebecca McClennan, Keramet Reiter, Ashley Rubin, Heather Thompson, and the men for joining us for this special Inside San Quentin episode. We also want to thank Emile De Weaver, Rashaan Thomas of Prison Renaissance, and Larry Schneider, Lt. Sam Robinson, and Ron Davis, Warden of San Quentin State Prison, and Jonathan Simon, Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley and author of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Case and the Future of Prisons in America, and  Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Culture and Created a Culture of Fear, and Rosann Greenspan, Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society for making this very special project possible.

Our post production editors are Kirsten Jusewicz-Haidle and Rachael Cain.  Our music was composed by Ian Coss and David Jassy. Ceil Mueller of KQED in San Francisco, was our engineer.

We’re a non-profit project of the Tides Center and we’re part of the Panoply Network of Podcasts. You can also find Life of the Law on PRX, Public Radio Exchange. Production of this episode was funded in part by the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley; the Law and Society Association; the National Science Foundation and by you.

© Copyright 2017 Life of the Law. All rights reserved.

Suggested Supplemental Reading:

Ashley Rubin

 

Rebecca McClennan

  • Response, in The Will to Punish, by Didier Fassin (2016 Tanner Lectures), Oxford University Press (forthcoming, 2017)
  • “America’s Human Rights Crisis in Historical Perspective,” Social Justice 42: 2 (2016).
  • “Why Prison Stories Matter” (2014), Public Books, http://www.publicbooks.org
  • “When Felons Were Human” (2011), On the Human, National Humanities Center (featured contributor). http://onthehuman.org/
  • “The Convict’s Two Lives,” in David Garland and Michael Meranze, eds., Rethinking the Death Penalty in Historical Context (forthcoming, 2010, NYU Press)
  • “Imprisonment’s ‘Square Deal’: Prisoners and their Keepers in 1920s New York,” Journal of Urban History 28: 5 (Jul. 2003).
  • “The New Penal State: Globalization, History, and American Criminal Justice, c. 2000,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Fall, 2001).
  • “Revolutions and Rights,” and “Equality and Citizenship,” Contemporary Civilization Reader, 7th ed. (New York: Heritage Press, 2000).
  • “Writings of the American Revolution,” Contemporary Civilization Reader, 6th ed. (New York: American Heritage, 1997).

 

Heather Ann Thompson (for a more complete list)

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