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In recent episodes of Rattling the Bars, TRNN’s weekly show on the violence and victims of the prison-industrial complex, legendary Black Panther and longtime political prisoner Eddie Conway and his guests have examined the 13th Amendment, the exploitation of prisoner slave labor in the US today, and the people who are fighting to put an end to this barbaric practice for good. As a crucial follow-up to this important coverage, Conway was recently interviewed by Robert Scheer on his syndicated podcast Scheer Intelligence, which features “thoughtful and provocative conversations with ‘American Originals’—people who, through a lifetime of engagement with political issues, offer unique and often surprising perspectives on the day’s most important issues.”

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Rattling the Bars

Rattling the Bars puts the voices of the people most harmed by our system of mass incarceration at the center of our reporting on the fight to end it. The show was founded by the late Black Panther and political prisoner Marshall “Eddie” Conway, and is now hosted by Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, who himself spent 48 years behind bars.

For this week’s installment of Rattling the Bars, we are sharing the full conversation between Conway and Scheer on the TRNN podcast feed, in which they discuss the role slave labor has played in constructing the modern capitalist economy, even up to our present day. (This conversation was originally published on Scheer Intelligence on August 13, 2021, and is republished here with permission.)