Noelle’s Interview with KMUD

Tanya Horlick
Today, being Giving Tuesday, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our media affiliate Prison Radio, who needs individual contributions to continue their commentaries from Mumia Abu-Jamal and others incarcerated in America, whose stories need to be told. Prison Radio needs to raise $125,000 this winter, and every penny will be spent bringing truth to our listeners. Today I had a chance to learn more from Noelle Hanrahan, the co-director of Prison Radio.

Noelle Hanrahan
Hey, so I love KMUD. My name is Noelle Hanrahan and I work with Prison Radio and we produce Mumia Abu Jamal’s radio commentaries. And we need the partnerships that we have with folks like you, like the listeners that listen to these community radio stations and us. That’s what the magic is, of Prison Radio, that we go and find these amazing voices inside of prisons, and we bring them out, and then we create that connection. So we’ve been broadcasting Mumia Abu-Jamal’s voice for a very long time. He’s our major correspondent, and then in part too, we’re conducting campaigns to liberate people to promote abolition, so we are creating community culture of abolition, we’re amplifying people’s voices inside, we’re listening to them, we’re taking the leadership from them and their families, and you guys come in, in the way by helping, like if you can help it matters. Every $25 donation helps us, and we don’t get funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts or Ford Foundations. It’s all grassroots community people and a heck of a lot of people from up your way really leaning in to Prison Radio and the Redwood Justice Fund?

Tanya Horlick
Well, that doesn’t surprise me Noelle, because so many of our callers and listeners here on KMUD radio, just love Prison Radio, all the commentaries, and Mumia has quite a following, so it intrigues me to learn that Prison Radio is completely funded by individual donations. Is that true? So you don’t have any other funding source than the donations that people could give you right now?

Noelle Hanrahan
So right now we don’t get those grants. Like maybe we’ve always been on the cutting edge. Like now prison voices are somewhat ubiquitous with Ear Hustle and with, you know, Orange is the New Black and all of that. But we still maintain our edge, and part of that is because we don’t censor our broadcasts. We do the seven dirty words and we don’t privilege ad hominem attacks, but we encourage people to find their own voices and their own stories. Now, a lot of these other places are “approved” by the prison. Like when we took our pieces to National Public Radio, they censored us, right? So we don’t do that. We think people from inside can speak about the issues and that they’re capable of speaking about them and that hearing them and privileging their voices is super important. But does that mean that we do not get the National Endowment for the Arts grants? Yeah, so we apply. And who does support us? Honestly, we are filling out thank you cards in the office right now in San Francisco, because that’s how we stay afloat. Our average gift is like $35, and people give an average of $125 over the course of the year. When I go to people’s houses, I find the bookmarks in their coffee cups. I find the magnets on their refrigerators. When I go to colleges, I see these- they always print posters. Those posters are in people’s walls, you know, so we we’re trying to create a culture of listening and abolition, so that we roll back the tide of imprisonment. And everybody’s part of it, you know, and we only do it because like, this was just this amazing level of, it had to succeed, we had to survive, we had to keep amplifying Mumia’s voice, and it was the people that helped us.

Tanya Horlick
Now, as a fellow broadcaster, I am literally impressed that Prison Radio is bringing together new material every week with only two and a half full-time employee equivalent, so that is so little funding for all the work I imagining you’re doing, and my hat’s off to the Prison Radio team, and I hope our listeners are catching that on this Giving Tuesday, this is one of the programs that they have the power to support. As you’re referencing, their support for Prison Radio gives a voice to people otherwise voiceless, whose rights might not be fully met at this time, as so many of the commentaries have been so heartfelt and touching and eye opening, tear wrenching. At times, you know, the conditions that people can be in, and so I wonder, Noelle, what you would say about this that you call abolition. What is it that you’d like to see abolished?

Noelle Hanrahan
In our lifetime, in the last 30 to 40 years, the prison-industrial complex has exploded, and you know, there was only 200,000 people in prison in 1970 something. Now there’s over 2.3. So this being the frog in the boiling pot, has happened while we were all alive, which means it can go away. You know, I went to get my Master’s in criminal justice a while back because I wanted to understand, like, why is the U.S. doing this in this way. No other country on earth incarcerates like we do like- it is a funnel for capitalism. It’s a braceros program for the inner city workers. It’s- it’s a way in which people can be controlled by, you know, not being able to give them jobs and work, right, so then they have to do something else with the inner cities when the manufacturing jobs went away, but nobody in the world does it like this. We incarcerate- 1 people out of 99 are currently in prison. That has never been done in the history of the planet, and so we have to roll back, we have to abolish prisons, we have to invest in schools. So really, that’s what abolition is about. Abolition is about is returning, understanding, creating, and believing in a system that works for us—and that is not carceral. It doesn’t incarcerate our family members, and that- it has the promise of a society that safe, and honestly, the police do not create safety. They just don’t. It’s a myth. It’s a huge inculcated myth, just like that Philadelphia is the birthplace of liberty. A myth! Comforting, I guess, but a myth.

Tanya Horlick
You know, as one of your media partners, we are just so grateful that Prison Radio is regularly bringing out these voices, bringing out this true experience from the inside so that we don’t just have an official perspective, but also a true on the ground perspective of what is it to be incarcerated.

Noelle Hanrahan
There’s things that are super important. One is the First Amendment does not die at prison gates. And so the only way that they can control what people prisoners say, is through security concerns, and so we can liberate those voices, and it’s really important if our public tax dollars are being spent on these prisons that we hear from people inside and that we understand and that we are- take those walls down as much as we can. That’s one thing. The second thing is, prison walls do not prevent the things that happen inside prisons from spilling over into the community, and so the violence that happens inside happens to the whole community, the epidemic of police brutality, and police domestic violence, and guard domestic violence is very high because of the violence, so we need to be really clear about that, the choices we’re making, the carceral state, the kinds of expansions that were done, [inaudible] outside, they affect us, they affect everybody.

Audio Collage
This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. A few words in support of the efforts of Prison Radio, to raise funds to keep the wolf from the door. Prison Radio has brought you the voices of those behind the walls, the fastest growing public housing development in America … Prison Radio is important to me because it lets us have the freedom of expression that we don’t normally get in prison … I came in at 16 years old and had the girls in prison. All my life, I didn’t have a voice. But doing Prison Radio has saved my life … I appreciate Prison Radio because they actually get to get the message and the word out and give people the opportunity to understand what is going on.For this and its other works, it deserves your generous financial support.

Tanya Horlick
If you’d like this Giving Tuesday and beyond, you can donate to Prison Radio at prisonradio.org or call them at 415-648-4505. On behalf of Redwood Community Radio, in gratitude and support of all nonprofits across the world, signing off, this is Tanya Horlick.