Holler to the Hood
Holler to the Hood is a multi-media human rights project initiated in response to the growing prison boom in the economically distressed Central Appalachian coalfields. The project has just completed a documentary film and works as well in radio and theater.
Holler to the Hood began as a weekly radio show on Appalshop’s community radio station WMMT, offering the only hiphop music available in the broadcast area. The show quickly drew an audience from among nearby prisons. “We were getting piles of letters from prisoners, and a quick education about the U.S. criminal justice system, " says Nick Szuberla, a co-founder of the group. Appalachian communities experienced a dramatic influx of prisoners in 1999 with the building of two supermax prisons in southern Virginia. "Our new prisons were soon filled with young men from cities. Their letters to WMMT-FM radio told of physical abuse, and volunteers responded with programming to make their plight public and to put a little pressure on the Virginia Department of Corrections."
An outgrowth of the weekly broadcast is the annual Calls From Home, a Christmastime program in its sixth year of broadcast, in which families of prisoners call into the radio station to broadcast holiday greetings to their loved ones. The program has been carried by over 150 radio stations across the country.
The one-hour documentary Up the Ridge: A U.S. Prison Story premiered in March 2006. Focusing on Wallens Ridge State Prison in Wise County, Virginia, the film offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving inner-city minority offenders to distant prisons in rural communities. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policies with human rights violations, and the political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences.
The Thousand Kites theater project seeks to address the issue of the invisibility of a growing U.S. prison population and the hidden impacts of the prison industry on poor urban communities and the poor rural communities where a disproportionate number of the prisons are sited. The project will work in both urban and rural communities and will help create a play script using a community story-circle process that will be mirrored in virtual space to provide access for all voices to participate. The play will premiere simultaneously in 10-20 prisons and prison communities nationally, and a special sampling will be broadcast nationally on 100 public radio stations and simulcast on the Web.
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