News from the Inside: Spotlight on The Tank & The Marshall Project
Plus a nice little news roundup.
The title of last Thursday’s Consider This episode caught my eye more so than a typical daily news podcast headline — A Texas Prison’s Radio Station Helps Incarcerated Men Build Community. When invoking the importance of local and nonprofit news outlets, we often talk about “community,” but we rarely conceive of those communities as being physically impacted by incarceration. I was eager to learn about how this prison radio program came to be and its impact on the prison’s community.
On the episode, Ailsa Chang spoke with Keri Blakinger, a staff writer with The Marshall Project and the organization’s first formerly incarcerated writer, who wrote the story “The Prison-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row.” The show at the center of the story is The Tank, and it is broadcast on 106.5 FM out of the Pulunsky Unit, a maximum-security prison in Livingston, TX. Most of the men on death row in the Pulunsky Unit are in solitary confinement, so The Tank is a lifeline and a bridge, making the prisoners feel connected and a part of something bigger than themselves.
Blakinger’s story on The Tank, published in partnership with The Guardian, is one of many engagingly written and thoroughly reported stories on criminal justice on The Marshall Project’s website. Criminal justice is the digital nonprofit outlet’s exclusive beat. The Marshall Project aims to increase fairness, effectiveness, transparency, and humanity in the US criminal justice system through its reporting.
This month’s donation from NPR Fangirl went to The Marshall Project, totaling $130. In addition to listening to the Consider This episode and reading Blakinger’s reporting on The Tank, I hope you’ll spend some time reading and supporting The Marshall Project’s work.
NPR Fangirl News Roundup
David Folkenflik reports on the departure of several journalists of color at NPR. In the most recent edition of NPR Fangirl, I touched on this unfortunate trend and its implications on NPR’s equity and inclusion efforts. NPR’s media correspondent responded to the call of digging deeper into this pattern and produced a thoughtful analysis.
Steve Inskeep finally gets to talk with Donald Trump, and it’s quite a conversation. The Up First / Morning Edition co-host has been requesting to speak with Trump since 2015. The two talked about the outcome of the 2020 election, which Trump still highly contests, and in a very Trumpish way, the conversation ended abruptly (7 minutes).
It’s carnival season! Learn about the history of king cakes from WWNO’s Louisiana Considered (25 minutes).
The Code Switch team re-aired the 2021 episode, “They came, they saw, they reckoned?” (35 minutes).
If memory serves, there’s also a radio station inside of Louisiana’s Angola state prison. And a group of inmates in NJ put out a record in the early 90’s. I think they were called The Lifers, but I’d have to look. We carried it at the music store I worked at.
To your point, I can only imagine how important this stations are to those on the inside; both working and as listeners.