New Abolitionists Radio

25/09/2025

Glad he can smile. Smh

Maurice Hastings, who spent 38 years behind bars, was awarded $25 million in what his lawyers called the largest wrongful conviction settlement in state history.

Hastings, 72, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole in connection with the 1983 sexual assault and murder of a woman in Inglewood. In 2023, a judge ruled that Hastings was "factually innocent," which means the evidence proves conclusively that Hastings did not commit the crime. https://abc7.com/17873244/

19/09/2025

I wish the experts would stop saying slavery ended in 1865 but the rest of the history she shares is invaluable.

26/08/2025

orphaned children and juvenile offenders made up a large percentage of laborers for white planters in the South from 1865 to 1928. After the Civil War, still existed in the form of leasing. States in the south would lease prisoners to private railways, large plantations, and private railways. Many states profited but the prisoners earned no pay. Many of them were put in dangerous, inhumane, and deadly work conditions. It is believed that thousands of blacks were forced into what is now called “slavery by another name” until the 1930s.

There were no rules in place for treatment of the prisoners and ultimately, the convict lease system gave birth to the chain gang. Whipping was the accepted norm for punishment. Contractors whipped prisoners for insubordination and trying to escape, but they also used whipping to enforce labor discipline, prompting many to call the system a new form of slavery.

Slavery and involuntary servitude was prohibited under the 13th Amendment to the U.S Constitution ratified in 1865. However, it exempted people who had committed a crime. The Southern state legislature passed “Black Codes”- laws that prosecuted black people for simple things such as breaking curfew, not carrying proof of employment, loitering and many other offenses. The purpose of the codes was to return black people back to chains.

Economic shifts, industrialization, and political pressure ended widespread convict leasing by World War II, but the Thirteenth Amendment’s dangerous loophole still permits the enslavement of prisoners who continue to work without pay in various public and private industries. As recently as 2010, a federal court held that “prisoners have no enforceable right to be paid for their work under the Constitution.”
Source: https://blackthen.com/convict-leasing-black-prisoners-forced-to-work-in-slavery-conditions/

14/08/2025

Rubio’s Attack on Cuba’s Medical Missions Rings Hollow Given U.S. Forced Labor at Home

By Scotty Reid

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that the United States is revoking visas for Brazilian, African, and Caribbean officials linked to Cuba’s long-running overseas medical missions program. The move, Rubio claims, targets “forced labor” practices — an accusation the Cuban government vehemently denies.

Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a longtime critic of the Havana government, points to the Cuban model of sending doctors abroad as an exploitative system where the state retains a large portion of the salaries paid by host nations, and doctors face restrictions on movement and political expression. The State Department says its latest visa revocations apply to officials in Brazil, Grenada, African nations, and Cuba itself.

Cuba, for its part, frames the program as an act of solidarity that has delivered healthcare to underserved communities across the Global South since the 1960s. Johana Tablada, Cuba’s deputy director of U.S. affairs, blasted Rubio on X, accusing him of “financing Israel genocide on Palestine, torturing Cuba, [and] going after health care services for those who need them most.”

The “Forced Labor” Debate

While there is credible evidence that some Cuban doctors experience coercion — from restrictions on travel to reprisals for defecting — many also join voluntarily, seeing the missions as a way to earn more than they could at home and to practice medicine abroad. Human rights experts, including U.N. Special Rapporteurs, have noted that elements of the program could meet the definition of forced labor under international law if participation is not truly free.

But Rubio’s accusation comes with more than a hint of hypocrisy.

The U.S. Has Never Fully Abolished Slavery

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery except “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This exception clause has allowed a vast system of prison labor to flourish in the United States — one that meets many of the same international criteria for forced labor.

Today, over 800,000 incarcerated people work in U.S. prisons. Many are paid between $0 and $0.25 an hour for essential jobs, from producing license plates and furniture to staffing call centers and agricultural fields. In several states, refusal to work can lead to solitary confinement, loss of visitation, or other punishments.

This labor doesn’t just benefit state governments. Over the years, corporate suppliers to McDonald’s, Victoria’s Secret, and even U.S. military contractors have tapped prison labor — an arrangement many see as the modern continuation of slavery by another name.

The United States has faced international criticism over this practice, including from the very U.N. human rights offices it now cites to condemn Cuba.

Glass Houses and Stones

The point here isn’t to deny or dismiss the accounts of Cuban doctors who say they’ve been coerced into overseas postings. But for U.S. officials — especially one leading the State Department — to hold up Cuba as a moral villain while ignoring the exploitation within its own borders is a classic case of throwing stones from a glass house.

If the U.S. government truly wishes to lead on the issue of forced labor, it should start by confronting the legalized slavery embedded in its own Constitution, ending coercive prison labor, and holding American corporations accountable for profiting from it.

Until then, Rubio’s campaign against Cuba’s doctors will look less like a principled stand for human rights and more like a politically motivated attack rooted in Cold War grudges — a selective outrage that says more about U.S. foreign policy priorities than it does about the actual well-being of workers.

07/08/2025

BTR News – From Community Organizer to Imperial President: The Real Obama Legacy – BLACK TALK RADIO NETWORK™ https://www.blacktalkradionetwork.com/2025/08/07/btr-news-from-community-organizer-to-imperial-president-the-real-obama-legacy/

26/07/2025

From politics to economics, closing old or bad prisons is not always straightforward. Even some incarcerated people have mixed emotions.

19/07/2025

🗣️ Another Front in the Fight Against Prison Slavery: Oregon Public Defenders Sue Over Courthouse Racism

In Washington County, Oregon, two public defenders—Chloé Clay and Alyne Sanchez—have filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging racial discrimination by courthouse deputies and prosecutors. As two women of color fighting for the rights of the accused, they were denied basic professional access to secure court areas, harassed, and treated with hostility, while white attorneys faced no such barriers.

To some, this might look like just another workplace discrimination case. But to us at New Abolitionists Radio, it’s something deeper: this is about who gets to stand in the way of the prison slavery machine—and how the system responds when they do.

Public defenders are the last line of defense for millions of poor, mostly Black and Brown people pulled into a system designed to exploit them. Undermining defenders of color—especially those most likely to understand and challenge systemic injustice—greases the wheels of mass incarceration and keeps the prison labor engine running.

Let’s not forget: under the 13th Amendment, slavery is still legal “as a punishment for crime.” And the courtroom is where that process begins.

When BIPOC attorneys are blocked from doing their jobs, we should ask: Whose convictions become easier? Whose voices are silenced? Whose bodies fill the prisons that profit from their labor?

This case is not an isolated event—it’s a crack in the mask of “colorblind justice.” And it reminds us that abolition isn’t just about ending prison labor—it’s about dismantling every racist structure that upholds it, including the courthouses, the deputies, and the prosecutors who weaponize the law to preserve a modern-day slavery system.

✊🏾 We stand with these brave women. Their fight is our fight.

16/07/2025

15/07/2025

Two New York men imprisoned as teenagers have been exonerated in a 1994 killing. A judge scrapped Brian Boles and Charles Collins' convictions and the underlying charges on Thursday.