• Magazine

    Disability and the prison system

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

  • A prisoner at Guelph Correctional Centre flexes his bicep. He is prying apart jaws of steer skulls at work for Better Beef Ltd., a private company operating on prison grounds. He is inside the factory and wearing an apron and a hairnet.
    Magazine

    The case for a prisoners’ union

    Organizing prisoner workers is the first step toward abolishing prisons.

  • Three photos of unappetizing-looking food: a cheese sandwich made from untoasted bread and unmelted cheese; petrified scrambled eggs and a pale hash brown; and unidentifiable green and brown gruel.
    Magazine

    “We are fed the same way caged animals are”

    To understand what life is like along the “continuum of confinement,” three people living in prisons and long-term care homes share the food they have eaten and eat every day.

  • Online-only

    The dark side of prison food service

    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.

  • Online-only

    From the plantation to the prison

    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.

  • Magazine

    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?

  • Magazine

    One less prison to be torn down

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

  • Magazine

    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.

  • Magazine

    Healed people heal people

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

  • Magazine

    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.

  • Magazine

    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.

  • Magazine

    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.

  • Magazine

    Why choose to live?

    Surviving a COVID outbreak inside a federal prison

  • Magazine

    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

  • Magazine

    Death by a thousand cuts: Aging in Canadian prisons

    Elderly prisoners need health care, not incarceration.

  • Magazine

    On Therapeutic Community

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

  • Magazine

    Criminal code is the new buffalo

    On reverse onus and colonial justice

  • Magazine

    Prisons are built on our backs

    The colonial economics of incarceration

  • Magazine

    Fed up with being locked down

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

  • Magazine

    Evidence of an unjust justice system

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