Freedom is possible: the imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and Prison Radio

For 44 years, Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent his life in prison – 28 of them on death row – for a murder he did not commit. A radical and gifted radio journalist and one of the “Interesting People to Watch” in Philadelphia in 1980, his career and freedom came to an end when he was arrested in December 1981 and found guilty in a scandalously unfair trial in the summer of 1982. Since 1992, the grassroots project Prison Radio has helped him not only to find his voice again, but also to make it heard by the world.

For 33 years, Noel Hanrahan’s Prison Radio has been connecting prisoners in the US with the outside world, making their voices heard, dissecting prison conditions, endemic racism and unjust sentences, supporting many of them in their fight for freedom. The list of correspondents from “inside the beast” is long, broadcasting from a large number of states. Noel Hanrahan is a lawyer, investigator and founder of the radio station. She has also been on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s legal team for some time.

Robert Saleem Holbroock was wrongly imprisonedfor 27 years, many of them in isolation, until he was finally released in 2018. He was sentenced to life without parole at the age of 16. Since then, he has been fighting against long-term imprisonment, which aims to lock over 80,000 prisoners in the USA behind bars forever – “death by imprisonment”. His release was only possible because the US Supreme Court finally ruled that minors should not be condemned to this form of punishment. The ruling led to over 2,000 releases from prison, the oldest of whom was 81 years old and had spent 68 years behind concrete and steel. Holbroock is the founder of the Abolitionist Law Center.

Jennifer Black has been visiting Mumia Abu-Jamal in prisonfor over 15 years. Having grown up in Pennsylvania, just a few miles away from “his” prison, she only found out about him when a relative traveled to Germany – at an event in Berlin about his scandalous case. She has been visiting him ever since – and two years ago the two of them successfully completed a joint book project that has become an extremely exciting collection on the prison system in the United States: Beneath the Mountain – an Anti Prison Reader. She has a PhD in Comparative Social Science and taught at Ohio University for 12 years.

The event will be moderated by Annette Schiffmann and Dr. Michael Schiffmann, who have supported Mumia Abu-Jamal for many years and last visited him in prison in October 2025.