Ten Things You Can Do to Free Mumia


In this August 6, 2024 webinar, presented by ALC, the speakers recap the status of Mumia’s legal proceedings, and discussed the international human rights-focused organizing around death by incarceration, as well as the commutation and compassionate release processes.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the world. ALC is co-counsel in Mumia’s case along with the Legal Defense Fund. 

In 2017, Mumia had a near-fatal hospitalization for renal failure due to untreated diabetic complications from reactions to steroids and untreated chronic Hepatitis C. He is still suffering from debilitating eczema. Public pressure and the legal work of Abolitionist Law Center amd Prison Radio won a 3rd Circuit preliminary injunction in Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes to provide Mumia and many others throughout the country the fast-acting antiviral treatment for Hepatitis C.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is running out of time. In March 2021, he had double-bypass heart surgery, but he is being denied proper food and exercise needed for cardiac rehabilitation. In December 2022, Mumia lost his wife of 41 years, Wadiya Jamal. His health is precarious. He is 70 years old and has served 42 years of a life sentence—29 years on Death Row in solitary confinement.

Join us to help find a collective path to freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Here are ten things you can do:

1) Join or start a Free Mumia group: Join a worldwide army of activists. Reach out to your communities: campus, faith groups, activists, friends: email Prison Radio for contacts in your area at: info@prisonradio.org.

2) Demand Adequate Food and Exercise for all prisoners: Contact Laurel Harry Secretary of Corrections.

    • Email: lharry@padoc.gov
    • Send letters: 1920 Technology Pkwy, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050
    • Call: 717-728-2573

Make sure Bernadette Mason, superintendent of SCI Mahanoy knows that you care about Mumia and demand that he be given the proper
diet and exercise.

    • Call: 570-773-2158
    • Send letters: 301 Greyline Rd, Frackville, PA 17931

3) Make Mumia Visible everywhere you go and on social media: wear something that says FREE MUMIA; make bumper stickers, postcards, bookmarks, etc. and short videos on your socials declaring your support.

4) Insist that Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner investigate the dirty cops in Mumia’s case — Alfonso Giordano and Gary Bell as well as ADA Joseph McGill. Demand truth, justice, and accountability for police and prosecutorial misconduct.

4) Pressure Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to free Pennsylvania’s elderly prisoners. Flood his phone, email, and mailbox.

5) Call your favorite DJ and ask them to play Mumia’s radio essays. Organize community film screenings of Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary

6) Get the new anthology Beneath the Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024), edited by Mumia Abu Jamal and Jennifer
Black. Buy a copy for a prisoner too!

7) Study In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (Divided Press) and New Bones Abolition (Common Notions), edited by Joy James; and Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling Corporate and State Funded Armies and Prisons, edited by Joy James and Kalonji Changa (Pluto Press).

8) Spread the word about the brilliant The Classroom and the Cell podcast with Marc Lamont Hill and Mumia Abu-Jamal as these two towering intellectuals explore critical community issues.

9) Donate to ALC by making a one-time or recurring gift here, or by emailing development@alcenter.org for help with other ways to give.

10) Write Mumia. Organize a letter-writing party.

Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335
SCI Mahanoy
c/o PO Box 33028
St Petersburg, FL 33733

More Info

Mumia’s Radio Essays on Prison Radio 

The Classroom and the Cell Podcast – Mumia Abu-Jamal & Marc Lamont Hill (YouTube)

Beneath the Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader, Ed. Mumia Abu-Jamal & Jennifer Black, featuring Robert Saleem Holbrook (City Lights, 2024)

Death by incarceration: Abolitionists at UN call for end to “the other death penalty” (Tag24, Oct. 2023)

UN Human Rights Committee Calls for Moratorium on Life Without Parole in U.S. (ScheerPost, Nov. 2023)

United Nations Human Rights Committee testimony by Robert Saleem Holbrook (YouTube)

Panelist Bios

Jennifer Black hails from a background in both activism and academia, her research focuses on high-risk activism, state sponsored terror against political insurgents, and the impact of mass incarceration on marginalized communities. Dr. Black teaches at Penn State Univ.  and is the co-editor with Mumia Abu-Jamal of Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024)

Bret Grote is the Legal Director of the Abolitionist Law Center. He is a 2013 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he was recognized as the Distinguished Public Interest Scholar for his graduating class. Bret was the Isabel and Alger Hiss Racial Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2012. He is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and a Lecturer of Law at the University of Penn Carey School of Law.

Saleem Holbrook is the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, a law project dedicated to ending race and class-based discrimination in the criminal punishment system and all forms of state violence. He is a co-founder of the Human Rights Coalition, an organization of family members of prisoners that advocate on behalf of the civil and human rights of prisoners, a co-founder of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration in Pennsylvania (CADBI), an advocacy group fighting to end Death by Incarceration Sentences, and a member of the advisory boards of Amistad Law Project and Youth Arts and Empowerment Project. While incarcerated, Saleem wrote extensively on prison abuse, social injustice, state violence, and juveniles charged and sentenced as adults. Saleem was released from prison in 2018 after spending over two decades incarcerated for an offense he was convicted of as a child offender.

Kempis “Ghani” Songster is the Campaign for Fair Sentencing for Youth’s (CFSY) Transformative Healing & Restorative Justice Manager.  He is a founding member of Right to Redemption, the Redemption Project, and the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), as well as a co-founder and director of Ubuntu Philadelphia. Since his release in 2017 after thirty years in prison – starting when he was 15 years old – Ghani has emerged as an outspoken voice and visionary in Philadelphia’s movement to end mass human caging and to create transformative and restorative responses to harm and violence.

Linn Washington is a Temple University Professor, Author. and expert on Philadelphia Politics and Race Relations.  Linn Washington worked alongside Mumia as a journalist in Philadelphia in the 70’s and early 80’s.  A graduate of Yale Law School, he worked for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Nix, Jr.  He is the author of  “Black Judges on Justice ” and he is a columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is an award-winning broadcast journalist, essayist, and author of fourteen books. Abu-Jamal has lived the last forty-three years in state prison, Twenty-nine of those years in solitary confinement on death row. He is currently serving life without parole at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pennsylvania. Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial and its resultant first-degree murder conviction have been criticized as unconstitutionally corrupt by legal and activist groups for decades, including Amnesty International, and by Nobel Laureates Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison, and Desmond Tutu. His demand for a new trial and for freedom is supported by the European Parliament, and he has been made an honorary citizen of Paris, France. Abu-Jamal earned his BA at Goddard College in 1996; his MA from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 1999; and an honorary Doctorate of Law from the New College of California in 1996. He is pursuing a Phd. at University of California, Santa Cruz.