Tag: Abolition

It’s not a coincidence that so many prisoners are disabled – the system was designed that way.

From psychiatric facilities to youth detention centres, the prison keeps growing. To abolish prisons, organizers first need to map the system.

Members of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario’s Youth Action Council discuss the present and future of the disability justice movement.

In 2017, Alloura Wells went missing. When police refused to file a missing persons report, sex workers stepped up to search for their friend. This is the story of the search for Alloura, and sex workers’ calls to abolish the police.

Future worlds and survival in a changing present gripped by the Anthropocene are on everyone’s minds, and now is the time to dream and lean into what’s coming.

Nearly two years after the summer of 2020, donations and public support for Black police abolitionists on the Prairies have dried up. Meanwhile, police budgets keep growing.

We don’t need to confine elderly and disabled people to deadly and dehumanizing institutions. What if they lived in the community and received at-home care from a support worker?

In Ohio, where Aramark is contracted to provide food to state prisons, the corporation seems more interested in profit than the safety and health of prisoners.

At a recent city council meeting where Saskatoon approved millions more in funding for the Saskatoon Police Service, Erica Violet Lee was the only one who spoke against the increase. Rather than trying to convince those whose minds had already been made, she read a poem she had written in honour of Neil Stonechild, Kimberly Squirrel, and all the others whose lives have been stolen by colonial and carceral violence in Saskatoon.

Ohio’s reliance on for-profit prisons shows that slavery has never ended in America. Prisons have always been about herding, investing in, and marketing chattel for a profit.

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?

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.