Daily Archives: June 26, 2013

Jasiri X is a political MC from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has been making his music known all over the country independently for some time now. This former minister in the Nation of Islam has traded mics on songs or on panels wit’ Hip-Hop giants like M1 of dead prez, Wize Intelligent, The Grand Verbalizer, Brotha J and more.

Prisoners in the state of Washington will go on strike on July 8, 2013, refusing to work on that day. Some prisoners in Washington, including some in juvenile facilities, have vowed to join the nonviolent strike. The strike’s aim is two-fold: to show support for the hunger strikers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to join California prisoners in protesting long-term solitary confinement and other human rights abuses in U.S. prisons.

Lorenzo “Cat” Johnson’s story is an excruciatingly clear example of an innocent man caught in a corrupt process. The state has worked overtime to keep him locked up for life. Evidence was falsified by the police and prosecution. And when a federal appeals court ruled this so-called evidence was legally insufficient to convict, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and reinstated his conviction.

I was flown here to Texas on June 14. This is a bit more dire than the February ordeal, so it calls for at least as much sustained and broad help. (Rashid was abruptly transferred from Virginia, where he’d been held, mostly in solitary confinement, since 1990, to Oregon in February 2012, where he was placed in Oregon’s Orwellian Snake River Correctional Unit, an unvarnished behavior modification program.)