September/October 2021 cover

The Prison Abolition Issue

In our special Prison Abolition Issue, we asked prisoners across Canada and the U.S. to reflect on the question, "Can you imagine a world without prisons?" They write about surviving COVID outbreaks; unequal treatment of women and men inside; prisons as a tool of colonialism; the war on drugs and coercive drug treatment programs; what it would take to heal intergenerational trauma; participating in hunger strikes and prisoners' committees; and fighting to abolish prisons from inside them. 

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    How the Prison Abolition Issue came to be

    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.

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    Evidence of an unjust justice system

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

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    Fed up with being locked down

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

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    Prisons are built on our backs

    The colonial economics of incarceration

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    Criminal code is the new buffalo

    On reverse onus and colonial justice

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    On Therapeutic Community

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

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    Death by a thousand cuts: Aging in Canadian prisons

    Elderly prisoners need health care, not incarceration.

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    Two poems from prison

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

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    Why choose to live?

    Surviving a COVID outbreak inside a federal prison

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    Guilty until proven innocent

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

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    Abuse of authority

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

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    COVID and sexism in a women’s prison

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

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    Healed people heal people

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

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    Cosmetic change is not prison reform

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

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    One less prison to be torn down

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

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    What does freedom feel like?

    In unnaturally small prison cells, it’s common for prisoners’ eyesight to degrade due to a lack of stimulation, distance, and depth. It begs the question: which other senses does confinement diminish? To what degree? Do they come back?