Welcome to Beyond Prisons: a new podcast examining incarceration in America through an abolitionist lens.  In our first episode, hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein introduce the idea behind the podcast, dissect and critique the current conversation around prison reform, and discuss the need for a broader vision for justice that should guide those efforts. What is prison abolition and what would it mean to live in a world without prisons? What's missing from current efforts to reform the criminal justice system? What kind of topics will this podcast cover? We tackle these questions and more in our first episode. Going forward, we will conduct interviews and delve much deeper into the various issues we touch upon in this first episode. So, stay tuned! -- Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Music & Production: Jared Ware -- Transcript Brian: Hello everybody and welcome to the first episode of Beyond Prisons. I am one of your hosts Brian Sonenstein and I’m joined by my co-host Kim Wilson. How ya doing, Kim? Kim: I’m doing well. Hi Brian, how’s it going? Brian: It’s going alright. I’m excited to be here. I’m glad we’re getting this off the ground. Kim: Yeah, me too. Brian: So what Kim and I are trying to do is something a little bit different. Oh, my dogs are barking in the background. (laughs) Kim: We’re gonna have dogs, we’re gonna have cats. We might have you know, who knows what else is going to show up so I say let’s just roll with it. Brian: I know, it’s fine. Kim and I decided to start this podcast to talk about the issue of prison reform and mass incarceration, and offer some different perspectives than a lot of the things you hear going on in the news right now. So I thought we could introduce ourselves a little bit. Kim, why don’t you go first? Kim: Ok, well, I’ll tell you a little bit about what my motivations were, and I think that will be a nice segway into my intro. But the motivating factor behind me getting on board with this podcast really stems from a place of frustration. I’m frustrated with the policy choices around mass incarceration, around prison specifically, and I’m seeing so many things that are impacting communities that I care about and that many people that I know live in, and I feel like we could be doing something better and so I’m coming at it from that perspective. That said, on a personal level, I’m the mother of two incarcerated men who are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole or at least that was their sentence. My professional and academic interests in incarceration began long before either of them had any encounter with the criminal justice system and I’m thinking of that in a broad sense particularly when we talk about schools and school to prison pipeline, which I’m sure we’re gonna spend quite a bit of time talking about in later episodes. And then I’m also coming at this as an activist who started out very much on board with prison reform and the prison reform movement if you want to call it that, and quickly evolved from that perspective to one of being strongly committed to prison abolition. So that’s a little bit about me, where I’m coming from, and what I’m hoping that this podcast is going to be about. What about you, Brian? Brian: Well, so I am a journalist. I’ve been writing about incarceration and the criminal justice system for about five years now. My work has primarily been to address these issues from the perspective of the people who are most directly impacted by it and that’s how I actually got to know you Kim. I’m also deeply interested in the issue of prison abolition after having been an activist myself for a number of years on a number of issues from drug policy to whistleblowing. I’ve seen a lot of people have interactions with the system and none of them have been good, including friends of mine. I grew up in sort of a blue collar, very small town in New England and saw a lot of people who fell into drugs and other probl