Tag: Abolition

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.

As Lorna Poplak’s new book “The Don: The Story of Toronto’s Infamous Jail” shows, it’s impossible for a history of a prison to disappear the continuity between one institution and the carceral whole.

In Saskatchewan, what resources exist to help defendants navigate – and avoid getting trapped in – our complex and high-stakes court system?

Amid calls to defund and ultimately abolish the police, we spoke to the people who are already working on replacing the police with crisis workers in Canada.

How a public-sector union became the leading advocate of jail-building in Manitoba – and laid the foundation for the province’s incarceration disaster.

To avoid police and prisons, more leftists are turning to accountability processes to repair harm. But fractious accountability processes are tearing communities apart. How might returning to transformative justice’s Black feminist roots help break the cycle?

It’s a demand that’s easy to understand and easy to fight for, which is important because we’ll need a lot of people to help us win it.

Toward an abolitionist approach to decent work for all

When you factor in the long history of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour using guns to defend their communities against police, the military, and white supremacists, gun regulation takes on a different meaning.

Prisoners are locked in their cells 24 hours a day, with no running water and guards who refuse to wear PPE. Some are comparing federal prisons, where populations are older, to long-term care homes, the site of the province’s most severe outbreaks.

Activists are determined to halt the construction of a new migrant detention centre in Laval.

The right of trans prisoners in Canada to self-identify their gender is an important win. How can it be used to fuel – and not drain – our efforts towards a future without prisons?

In 2016, Nicholas Dinardo was arrested and sent to remand at the Regina Correctional Centre. After remaining in segregation for most of the last year, he wrote this poem.

The Prisoner Correspondence Project connects LGBTQ2S inmates with pen pals on the outside. The relationships of care and empathy developed over years of exchanging letters are a form of radical solidarity that upends the control, surveillance, isolation, and erasure enforced by prisons.