Briarpatch Articles

How prisoners helped stop the construction of a new prison camp in Kentucky

“Prison reform” is an empty promise from politicians and corrections departments who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

In a world without prisons, we could break the vicious cycle of generational poverty, trauma, and incarceration.

Women have struggled to get what little we have in prison – but the COVID pandemic has stripped even that away.

Correctional officers don’t help “correct” prisoners – most of them simply create an environment that’s toxic for both prisoners and other staff.

Living on remand, it’s important to know how to fight for your rights when the justice system breaks its own rules.

Surviving a COVID outbreak inside a federal prison

No bullet, no sword, nor anything formed, / nothing short of a category 4 storm, / Could ever kill an Indian that’s immortal

Elderly prisoners need health care, not incarceration.

Why punitive, coercive, and obedience-based drug treatment programs in prison don’t work.

On reverse onus and colonial justice

The colonial economics of incarceration

Prisons cause irreparable harm to the people inside them. Destroy the system before it can destroy more lives.

Governments criminalize poor people, and then allow companies to exploit prisoners’ basic needs for profit.

Roughly 10 members of the editorial collective – comprised of Inreach and Free Lands Free Peoples members, and Briarpatch staff – have met every two weeks since April to shape this special issue.

Since September 2020, tens of thousands of farmers and farm labourers and over 40 unions have been waging resistance to three agricultural farm bills in India. The protest’s sustained presence, immense scale, and diverse solidarities have shaken the legitimacy of Prime Minister Modi, and provided us all with a renewed ethical orientation and political vision for a new world.

Five Tamil artists in Toronto respond to “A Feller and The Tree,” a short film about the 26-year-long armed conflict in Sri Lanka and its fallout.

Mutual aid is rooted in Black and Indigenous resistance to state violence. We cannot allow white organizers, non-profits, and philanthropists to co-opt our teachings in a time of panic.

A Montreal homeless shelter recently laid off its front-line workers and replaced them with security guards. Service users and front-line workers in Montreal discuss what happens when social services focus on control, not care.

In rural Saskatchewan, a network of settler landholders and Indigenous people are finding a new way to share land.