November Coalition's Local Activities
to End Drug War Injustice

Film Screening & Public Discussion Up The Ridge: A U.S. Prison Story A Shocking Look Inside The Incarceration Industry Thursday, March 11, 2008 At the Magic Lantern Theater, Spokane, WA Sponsored by November Coalition Foundation and The Thousand Kites Project

Chuck Armsbury & Nora Callahan of the November Coalition moderate the post-film discussion period. Over 50 people showed up for the screening & discussion, including many old friends, and a representative from the architectural firm hoping to build a new jail facility for Spokane.

Up the Ridge is a one-hour documentary produced by Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby. In 1999 Szuberla and Kirby were volunteer DJ's for the Appalachian region's only hip-hop radio program in Whitesburg, KY when they received hundreds of letters from inmates transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, the region's newest prison built to prop up the shrinking coal economy. The letters described human rights violations and racial tension between staff and inmates.

Filming began that year and, though the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the program offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and physical and sexual abuse recorded in American prisons.

Learn More about Up The Ridge

Tabling in the theater lobby. For more info on this display: The Drug War: It's Prisons, Poisons and Environmental Racism

On the Saturday prior to the screening, Nora Callahan was interviewed on the KYRS-FM community radio show Zombie Nation -- You can download or listen to the show here (mP3, 13 mB).

The film showing also helped spark a lively discussion on the merits of the drug war on the blog of the local daily newspaper, The Spokane Spokesman-Review. You can follow the thread here.

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