If Canada is serious about confronting systemic racism, we must abolish prisons

July 6, 2020 

Segregation cells at Dorchester prison in New Brunswick. (Senate of Canada), CC BY-NC


Global uprisings in response to anti-Black police brutality have prompted demands to defund policing and reinvest in communities. Public health professionals recognize the connections between racism and community well-being. But it is not just policing agencies that have a systemic racism problem, Canadian prisons do too.

Prisons are densely packed. Social distancing and adequate hygiene is impossible. Advocates suggest depopulating carceral facilities to reduce harm and save lives.

The Ontario government recently announced it would funnel $500 million into corrections — despite anticipating a $20.5 billion deficit due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Saskatchewan government also recently announced it would spend $120 million to build a remand centre expansion at the Saskatoon Correctional Centre, while predicting a $2.4 billion deficit.

These developments are regressive. It is time to look at alternatives to imprisonment and set our sights towards prison abolition.

As soon as COVID-19 spread to North America, health professionals, scholars and activists expected widespread outbreaks in prisons. Advocates pleaded for governments to release prisoners.

One province, Nova Scotia, heeded this call.

A still from the documentary ‘Conviction’ (2019) depicting women prisoners in Nova Scotia. Author provided

Nova Scotia’s approach

In Nova Scotia, the judiciary, corrections, crown and defense counsel, along with community organizations, collaborated to cut the provincial prison population in half. As of June 16, Nova Scotia’s jail for women had only eight prisoners. This resulted in only one case of COVID-19 in Nova Scotia’s prison system.

Prisons that did not heed the warnings of experts — like those in Ontario, B.C. and Québec — saw widespread outbreaks.

We spoke with Coverdale Executive Director Ashley Avery, who reports the people they support are mostly arrested for public intoxication, homelessness and mental health crisis. These are areas where imprisonment should not be the answer.

Abolition is a creative project that replaces punishment, widely considered ineffective in reducing violence. Instead, transformative approaches prioritize health and well-being.

Decarceration is the effort to limit the numbers of people who are detained behind bars, either through minimizing who is sent to carceral facilities in the first place or through creating avenues to release people already in custody.

Every decarcerated person requires housing, adequate income and health services. In Nova Scotia, community groups (Coverdale Courtwork Society, Elizabeth Fry and John Howard) report it costs them $150 per person per day to keep a decarcerated person housed in a hotel with legal, health and other services. Compare this with $255 per day to keep someone in a provincial jail.

Port Cartier prison cell in Québec, the first prison in Canada to report cases of COVID-19. (Correctional Investigator of Canada)

Prison expansion is a step backward

The mass incarceration of racialized communities in Canada’s prisons reflects the country’s racial profiling and over-policing of Black and Indigenous people. Decarceration offers a direct way to address the systemic oppression Canada has imposed on Black and Indigenous peoples.

More than 30 per cent of Canadian prisoners are Indigenous (they are five per cent of the Canadian population), and 9.6 per cent are Black (they are 3.5 per cent of the population). Indigenous women account for 42 per cent of women in federal custody.

Black people are six times more likely to be street checked in Halifax, and more likely to be charged than white people for the same behaviour.

Indigenous confinement has been described as “a national travesty” by the Correctional Investigator of Canada and “the new residential schools” by criminologists. African American literary and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman calls it the “afterlife of slavery.”
Very few releases

Eight hundred people in the federal prison system tested positive for COVID-19. Several prisons had massive COVID-19 outbreaks, and two people have died.

While the federal government claimed it had released hundreds, in reality there is only evidence that it released one person.

Minimum security prisoners could have been released. Those close to parole could have had board appearances expedited. The elderly and unwell could have been released on compassionate grounds. Prisoners in Mother Child programs, where young children live with their imprisoned mothers, could have been relocated to their communities. None of this happened.

The recent announcements about Ontario and Saskatchewan investing more dollars into prisons come amid pressing need for investments in health. Despite its promise, Nova Scotia’s decarceration initiative is at risk of imminent defunding.

Protest outside of Ottawa Carleton prison. (Criminalization and Punishment Education Project)

Time for change

The federal Black Caucus called for public investments in non-carceral community justice strategies. Indigenous leaders in British Columbia called for the release of as many people as possible, with support plans for housing, financial aid and community safety. Sc’ianew First Nation (Beecher Bay) Chief Councillor Russ Chipps wants William Head prison closed and the land returned to First Nations.

Abolition may sound like a radical new idea, but people have been working toward it for decades. Black feminist theorists including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba helped put this vision into practice by providing language, organizations, initiatives and resources.

 I WOULD ADD POLITICAL PRISONER MUMIA ABU JAMAL AS WELL AS ANARCHIST AFRICAN AMERICAN FORMER POLITICAL PRISONER LORENZO KOM'BOA ERVIN

We can defund police and prisons instead of ticketing people for being outside, snitching on our neighbours, tearing down tents, criminalizing people in mental health and addictions crisis and profiling Black and Indigenous Peoples.

Prisons are too broken to reform. If Canada is serious about dealing with racism, then the abolition of both policing and prisons is the way forward. 

#FREEMUMIAABUJAMAL 

WHO IS MUMIA ABU-JAMAL? – Free Mumia

https://www.freemumia.com › who-is-mumia-abu-jamal

Mumia remains in prison under a sentence of life without parole. ... “Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer in 1982 ... in the city of Philadelphia in 1982 and the possible political influences that may have ...

Anarchism and the Black Revolution- Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

https://theanarchistlibrary.org › library › lorenzo-kom-boa-ervin-anarchis...

by LK Ervin - ‎ A Short Biography of Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin. 

Authors

1. Martha Paynter
   PhD Candidate in Nursing, Dalhousie University
2. Linda Mussell
   PhD Candidate, Political Studies, Queen's University, Ontario
3. Nataleah Hunter-Young
   PhD Candidate, Communication and Culture, Ryerson University

Disclosure statement

Martha Paynter receives funding from Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation and CIHR.

Linda Mussell receives funding from Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation and SSHRC.

Nataleah Hunter-Young receives funding from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and SSHRC.

ABOLISH PRISONS
Hurricane Ian brings renewed focus to 'life and death' struggle for prisoners during a disaster

N'dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY
Mon, October 17, 2022 at 9:53 AM·8 min read

The day before Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida, attorney Rene Suarez was preparing to help his client get out of jail in downtown Fort Myers.

He had secured an offer for probation so that his client would be released after a hearing. But when Ian struck, the courts closed, leaving her and many others who haven't been convicted of a crime stuck in a facility in a mandatory evacuation zone.

Although Lee County officials issued an evacuation order Sept. 27, the sheriff's office decided not to evacuate its two jails before the storm made landfall the next day.

It wasn't until a week after the storm that Suarez, whose office near the jail flooded and lost internet access, was able to speak to his client, who described poor sanitary conditions in the downtown jail and a rationing of water that was so severe she had gotten a urinary tract infection.

But until the courts reopened, Suarez couldn't get her out of jail.

"There should be some kind of a mechanism to get people in front of judges that have offers on the table that would get them out of jail, but they don't. And it's not just her," Suarez said. His client asked to remain unnamed for fear of retaliation; USA TODAY confirmed her identity through jail records.

Another local criminal defense attorney, Danielle O’Halloran, told USA TODAY their clients also said that officials were rationing water and that the jail may have experienced flooding.

While multiple spokespeople for the jail denied those claims to USA TODAY, advocates say there has long been the need for better emergency planning for jails and prisons ahead of disasters.

"We need to proactively change these systems. It's literally a matter of life and death," said Jenipher Jones, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild's Mass Incarceration Committee.
What are prisons and jails required to do?

As high winds and rising waters knock out electricity and running water, people in jails and prisons can be left without clean drinking water, food, medication, functioning toilets and air conditioning for days after a storm, said Alex Smith, a volunteer with Fight Toxic Prisons, an organization that campaigned for evacuations, stockpiling and mass releases ahead of Hurricane Ian.

"All of these things can increase the spread of disease and can increase people succumbing to preexisting conditions," he said. "There are also many elderly people who are incarcerated. It's often disabled people, often poor people, often people of color who are incarcerated in the first place. All of those groups are more likely to see increased health risks, due to lack of medical care."

While states or counties may have standard practices, there is no national mandate to develop emergency plans, which leaves decisions about preparation and evacuation to corrections departments, sheriff's offices and other local officials.

During Hurricane Irene in 2011, for example, inmates were not evacuated at New York's Rikers Island, Mother Jones reported. Nor were they evacuated from a South Carolina state prison or three city jails in Virginia during Hurricane Florence in 2018, according to the outlet.

'WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?' The graying of America's prisons

Homes and businesses are devastated after Hurricane Ian on Sept. 30 in Fort Myers Beach, Fla.

Before Ian struck, about 2,500 inmates were evacuated from more than 20 facilities in Florida to other locations that were "better equipped to weather the impacts of the storm," the Florida Department of Corrections, which operates state prisons, said Sept. 28.

In Charlotte County north of Fort Myers, the jail saw some damage and flooding from Ian. Though it wasn't in an evacuation zone, the jail had problems with electricity, water and fan units that were ripped from the roof, officials said.

In Lee County, the Fort Myers jail was in the mandatory evacuation zone, but officials did not evacuate.

The Supreme Court ruled that under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, prisons cannot be deliberately indifferent to the safety and well-being of the people in their care, Jones said. The National Institute of Corrections, part of the Department of Justice, offers state and local correctional agencies a guide to emergency planning, which includes a checklist for assessing a prison's readiness to deal with natural disasters.

But because there is no federal requirement, there are few legal standards to hold those running prisons and jails responsible when things go wrong, said Wanda Bertram, communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative.

"Typically, that stuff has to happen via the court," Bertram said. "And, sadly, one of the trends over the last 20 years is that there's been a clamp down on states and the federal government allowing incarcerated people to sue based on neglectful treatment."
'Conflicting stories' after Hurricane Ian

According to Lee County's 2018 emergency management plan, if there is a 10% chance of a 6-foot storm surge, the areas in "Zone A" – which included the jail – should be evacuated. On Sept. 27, the storm surge for Lee County was predicted to be between 5 and 10 feet, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Inmates at the main jail were relocated to higher floors in preparation for the storm surge, said Julie Martin, a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff's Office, which runs the jail.

"The conflicting stories I've been getting from clients that are currently in custody is that they don't have water in the jail meaning they have toilets that flush, they don't have drinkable water," O’Halloran said last week. "Some of them even claimed that the first floor of the jail took on water."

MOST STATES DON'T HAVE UNIVERSAL AIR CONDITIONING IN PRISONS: Climate change, heat waves are making it 'torture'

When asked why the jail didn't evacuate, as advised in the county's plan, Anita Iriarte, another sheriff's office spokesperson, declined to comment specifically.

Iriarte, however, disputed the attorneys' claims and told USA TODAY that inmates were offered "an acceptable amount of water." While water pressure at the jail "became critically low," inmates were given water containers to flush toilets and some were later relocated to an inland facility after the storm, she said.

The downtown Fort Myers jail was not flooded or damaged, and there were no injuries, Martin said.
Disaster plans must be 'thoughtful and realistic'

When Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans in 2005, a lack of planning led to thousands of inmates being trapped for days without food, water and ventilation, some locked in cells with chest-high water contaminated with sewage in the Orleans Parish Prison, according to reports from the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch.

During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, more than 8,000 people were left behind in four Texas prisons, according to an estimate from The Nation.

The National Lawyers Guild collected reports of "unconstitutional conditions" from prisoners in Texas who described flooding, toilets not functioning, and inadequate food and water. The group outlined them in a letter to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which denied such claims in interviews with multiple media outlets.

Homes are surrounded by floodwaters caused by Hurricane Ian on Sept. 29, in Fort Myers, Fla. Climate change added at least 10% more rain to Hurricane Ian, a study prepared immediately after the storm shows.

"We had several people who were saying that they had water in their cell up to their knees," said Azzurra Crispino, co-founder of Prison Abolition Prisoner Support, which helped the National Lawyers Guild collect the reports. "And then even after the water receded, there were folks that were saying that the mold had gotten to the point where there were entire walls that were just covered in black."

Part of the problem with regulating disaster preparedness is that the prison system is not centralized, said Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU's National Prison Project. Federal and state governments could step in by tying funding to emergency response plans that include evacuation protocols, Kendrick said.

Kendrick said it's crucial that the plans are "thoughtful and realistic" and take into account the needs of the most vulnerable populations, including those who are older, have disabilities, or preexisting health conditions.

THERE ARE 'NO EASY FIXES' IN FLORIDA: But could Hurricane Ian's havoc bring a call for better planning?

"Research has shown that most prisons don't really have well-thought-out evacuation plans," she said. "Evacuation planning is a very complicated process and really needs to involve people who have expertise in dealing with natural hazards and emergency planning, and it can't just be something that like a prison or a jail just throws together at the last minute."

Kendrick also suggested including a provision in local plans to allow jails to release people who are awaiting trial until the disaster passes. Longer term, as climate change brings worse natural disasters, officials need to rethink where jails and prisons are located, Kendrick said, noting that prisons have been built near hazardous waste sites and areas at high risk for flooding.

"Those actions also kind of set these facilities up for even more problems when there's a natural disaster," she said.

Jones, of the National Lawyers Guild's Mass Incarceration Committee, suggested the United States adhere to international human rights standards concerning the treatment of imprisoned people, known as the Mandela rules that "would immediately elevate the standards and the conditions of prisons."

"Ultimately," she said, "a reexamination of how we incarcerate and whether we incarcerate at all is a core solution."

Contributing: The Associated Press

Contact Breaking News Reporter N'dea Yancey-Bragg at nyanceybra@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter @NdeaYanceyBragg

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hurricane Ian: What happens to jails and prisons during a disaster?

What If We Got Rid Of Prisons?
It's getting harder and harder to argue that the prison system is working. So why haven't we changed it?

 by Henry Goodwin
February 9, 2021
in News



If someone asked you why people are sent to prison, what would you say?

“Because it keeps us safe,” you might argue. Maybe you’ll say that offenders need to be punished, to be taught a lesson. Perhaps taking criminals off the streets represents justice for victims and their families. Or is it about reforming and rehabilitating people who have taken a wrong turn?

The problem is, whatever you role you think prison plays in modern Britain, it’s getting harder and harder to argue that it’s working. The prison population has risen by 70 per cent in the last 30 years. Few would claim society has got much safer.

As for teaching prisoners a lesson, 48 per cent of adults reoffend within a year of their release. For those serving sentences shorter than a year, that jumps to 65 per cent. What about rehabilitation? The proportion of prisoners involved in education or achieving qualifications is falling steadily.

On release, inmates – who may have lost jobs, homes and families for the sake of a weeks-long sentence – are handed a £46 stipend, which hasn’t increased since 1995. Less than half of those released in 2018-19 had settled accommodation to go to – and 16 per cent ended up sleeping rough.

That’s before factoring in the cost. The taxpayer spends more than £41,000 per year to keep a single prisoner behind bars – and there are nearly 80,000 people currently locked up in England and Wales.


Yet prisons remain an immovable reality, largely beyond reproach, subject to – at best – limited reform around the edges.

“If you had any public institution that was failing so badly, you would probably close it down and suggest we do things differently,” Deborah Coles, director of charity INQUEST, says. So why don’t we?

* 

‘Abolish prisons’ is a much more nuanced mission statement than it sounds. Just like ‘defund the police’ isn’t a call for the dissolution of any and all law enforcement, abolitionists do not want to tear down prisons, cross their fingers and hope for the best.

“What abolitionists have generally tried to avoid is a zero-sum argument that it’s either reform or revolution,” explains Professor David Scott of the Open University, an avowed abolitionist. ”It’s not about pulling down prison walls – it’s about positive change.

“The overall goal is to get to a point where our society can recognise that prisons are not very effective in reducing harm and wrongdoing, and are in fact more likely to perpetuate it.”

Image: PA

But, in 21st century Britain, that is a very difficult argument to make. “The problem with this country is that as soon as you start arguing on that terrain, then you’re immediately branded as pro-crime and anti-victim,” says Professor Joe Sim, a criminologist at Liverpool John Moores University.

Prisons, he argues, have been “ideologically constructed as a bulwark against crime and criminality”. In doing so, the criteria for what qualifies as criminality – and the role of the prison in protecting society from it – has been distorted.

“Some people see prison as a defence against dangerousness,” he says. “Well, how do you define dangerousness? Those people who put the cladding on Grenfell, should they be characterised as dangerous?”

The law and order ideology – deeply embedded in the UK’s flagship media institutions as well as its politicians – has not only made changing the penal system feel like some kind of utopian fantasy, it has put strict constraints on what qualifies as ‘acceptable’ discourse.

“The relationship between politicians and the media sets the parameters of what is legitimate knowledge and what we can talk about,” Scott says.

British public opinion on whether criminals can be rehabilitated is split down party lines. Nearly half of Labour or Liberal Democrat voters think a murderer can be reformed – but just 13 per cent of Conservative voters think a shoplifter is capable of changing their ways.

If you flip the ‘soft on crime’ debate to prisons, however, there is more unanimity. Fewer than one in ten people believe putting more people in prison is the most effective way to deal with crime. Early intervention, better parenting and better discipline in schools are all seen as more helpful responses.

Abolitionists believe that there’s a disconnect between the tough-on-crime rhetoric of some politicians and newspapers and what the public actually thinks. “The general public is nowhere near as punitive as politicians anticipate,” Scott suggests.

Coles, whose charity – INQUEST – focusses on deaths in state custody, agrees. “I think the public has travelled a bit more than politicians,” she says.

*

Many believe that the pandemic has provided an opportunity to rethink and remake core aspects of society – from the world of work to the layout of our urban spaces.

The prison system is seldom mentioned in the same breath. Yet, campaigners argue, coronavirus represented a rare opportunity to radically change the realities of the British penal system.

Last March – when there were just over 8,000 confirmed cases of the virus in the UK – Justice Secretary Robert Buckland unveiled an early release scheme, to ease the pressure put on prisons by the pandemic.

Despite as many as 4,000 prisoners being eligible for the scheme, including many pregnant women, just 275 were actually released by the time it was wound down last August. A total of 71 prisoners have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began – 24 of them in December alone.

For campaigners, ministers’ lukewarm embrace of the programme squandered a golden opportunity to show that offenders could serve out their sentences in the community without society imploding.

“It’s been a complete failure,” Kate Paradine – chief executive of charity Women in Prison (WIP) – said. “The government had an opportunity to radically reduce prison numbers. Yet, nearly a year into this crisis, we still have a situation where the majority of people in prison don’t need to be there.”

The row highlights a fundamental problem for prison abolitionists. Even if the circumstances are ripe to try something different, top-down commitment is still needed to push through change.

That stasis has been especially evident in the fight to abolish women’s prisons – which experts point to as an achievable and common-sense first step towards proving that incarceration is not the only answer.

“All the root causes of offending for women – domestic abuse, mental health issues, substance misuse – are better addressed in community settings,” says 

Less than five per cent of those in prison in the UK are women – yet that cohort accounts for more than 19 per cent of self-harm incidents, according to the Prison Reform Trust.

Those women are highly likely to be victims as well as offenders. Over half the women in prison report having suffered domestic abuse, and 53 per cent report experiencing emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child.

Prison separates an estimated 17,000 children from their mothers every year. “There are twelve women’s prisons across the country and, with women making up five per cent of the prison population, that means women are on average held much further away from home,” Paradine explains.

“In nine-out-of-ten cases, when a mother goes to prison, her children end up leaving their home – either to live in care, or to live with grandparents or other relatives. That’s where you really see the cruelty of the system.”

The solution, she argues, is to invest heavily in community rehabilitation centres and women’s centres.

“What we imagine is a system that starts with what brought people to the system in the first place. That would mean that the only people subject to any form of incarceration would be those who have committed offences that the public need to be protected from. For women, that is an extremely small number of people.”

That’s before factoring in the significant number of women dying behind bars. In December, 18-year-old Annelise Sanderson became the eighth woman to die in prison in 2020 – the fifth at HMP Styal, in Cheshire, in the last three years.

Sanderson was serving a year-long sentence for assaulting a member of the public, a paramedic and two police officers after being caught stealing a pair of trainers in Wigan. “The punishment of prison is so disproportionate,” Paradine reflects.

*

Fifteen years ago, Baroness Corston – a former MP and chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party under Tony Blair – was commissioned by the Home Office to conduct a report into vulnerable women in the criminal justice system.

The Corston Report, as it came to be known, outlined “the need for a radically different, visibly-led, strategic, proportionate, holistic, woman-centred, integrated approach” to the issue of women in prison.

“It was a real opportunity to do something different and to recognise that the majority of women in prison pose no risk to anybody,” Coles says. “Had the political will existed, we could have seen the end of women’s prisons.”

But that political consensus dissipated when Labour plunged out of power in 2010 – and the Corston Report fell by the wayside. Nonetheless, Paradine believes it still offers the blueprint for reimagining the position of women in prison – and, possibly, for a more general drift towards abolitionism.

“Baroness Corston imagined very small custodial centres that wouldn’t be like prisons at all – in terms of their size and their institutional nature. They would not be focussed, in inception and design, on punishment.

“That would mean that thousands more women would be provided with support in community settings, and not in prison settings. That’s why we’re focussed on establishing a network of women’s centres across the country, which provide a proven alternative to punishment in terms of enabling in women’s spaces to address holistically the problems that brought them into the criminal justice system in the first place.”

Doing so could provide a blueprint for elsewhere in the criminal justice system, she argues. “We can transform that corner of the prison system as a model for what could be done for men and for the children who are still left in prison.”
*

There is a mounting body of evidence, from Britain and overseas, that abolition-inspired alternatives to incarceration can be effective. Norway is the example cited by most. Take Bastøy, a prison island a couple of miles adrift of the coast in a fjord about 50 miles south-east of Oslo.

Inmates live in a village-style setting, tending to farm animals, playing tennis, cooking and playing cards. They have their own beach – and even operate the ferry which takes people to and from the island.

Even in maximum security prisons like Skien – an imposing concrete castle in south-east Norway where mass murderer Anders Breivik is serving his sentence – cells have televisions and ensuite showers. Prisoners are offered education and skills-based training.

Image: PA

British tabloids have labelled Norwegian prisons “cushy” – likening them to holiday camps, an accusation that made Bastøy’s ex-governor, Arne Nilsen, gristle when he was asked about it several years ago.

“You don’t change people by power,” he said. “Here I give prisoners respect; this way we teach them to respect others. It is important that when they are released they are less likely to commit more crimes. That is justice for society.”

There is no life sentence in Norway. Its maximum prison term is 21 years, which Breivik is serving. Everyone who serves time will eventually be released back into society – so there is an obvious incentive to help rehabilitate offenders.

That is true of Britain, too. Although the numbers of people given life sentences has steadily increased in recent years, just a handful of people who go to prison will stay there forever. “What people forget is that people who go in come out,” Coles says.

That, perhaps, offers the most powerful rebuttal to a question often asked of abolitionists: what do you propose to do with mass murderers? Incarceration is expensive. But if the only people locked up, in the traditional sense, were the 60-or-so men who are currently slated to spend the rest of their lives behind bars in the UK, that’s a lot of money left over.

“Can you imagine,” Coles asks, “what we could do if we reinvested the money we pump into the prison system into hospitals and mental health services?”

*

Reconfiguring the prison estate has worked in Norway.

The number of prisoners per 100,000 of the national population hovers around 50, compared to roughly 150 in England and Wales, and its crime rate is about half as high. “If prison was so good at preventing crime, America would be the safest country in the world – and Norway would be the most dangerous,” Sims says.

The prospect of the UK pivoting to a Bastøy-type model of incarceration is far-fetched. But there have been concrete efforts to change the status quo here which, their proponents claim, have proven successful.

Among them is Barlinnie Special Unit, established in Glasgow in the 1970s, which was home to some of Scotland’s most violent offenders and had an explicit focus on therapy and drug counselling.

An art therapist was brought in to encourage the men to express themselves through drawing, painting or sculpture and one inmate – convicted murderer Jimmy Boyle – went on to become a world-renowned sculptor. He has since set up a school for local children in Morocco.

HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire, which operates entirely as a therapeutic community, has trodden a similar path. Inmates volunteer to go there, are given control over their day-to-day lives and can be voted out of the community at any point.

HMP Grendon. Image: Andy Gryce

On his most recent visit to Grendon, in 2017, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, wrote that “the values, principles and practice seen at Grendon could provide positive lessons and inspiration for other prisons.” The Prison and Probation service, he added, “should ensure this example is shared more widely for the benefit of others”.

Grendon’s reoffending rate is consistently lower than other prisons in England and Wales. So why hasn’t its blueprint been developed and replicated across the country?

“The answer, I think, is because they hold up a mirror to our society and show us that there are abolitionist alternatives,” Sims reflects. “These places actually do something about serious crime – and show that ‘animals’ can change.”

*

The American abolitionist Angela Davis wrote that the ideological function of a prison is as an “abstract site” into which “undesirables are deposited”.

Doing so, she argued, “[relieves] us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society – especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

Seen that way, the prison system is ‘out of sight, out of mind’ wrought physical. Or, as Davis put it, “a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited”.

Abolitionists are divided over whether this system – so deeply enmeshed with the functioning of the modern state – can ever be changed without fundamentally reconstituting the state itself.

But what is clear is that neither reform nor revolution is possible without overcoming the disconnect that currently exists between prisons and public – and dispelling the notion that prisons are the reserve of “evildoers”, in George W. Bush’s words.

“We have to educate, educate, educate and generate a rational debate and understanding about what prison is,” Scott says.

Coles adds: “There’s nothing that brings that into more stark relief than looking at the human stories of those who die in state custody. Follow their journeys, and you see that – so often – those who die in prisons have been lamentably failed by another state agency before they’ve entered the criminal justice system.”

Highlighting the endemic perniciousness of that system could go a long way to loosening the law and order ideology’s grip and force the public to think differently about criminality.

“Why is there always a prison place but not, say, a refuge space for women with mental ill health or a backstory filled with domestic violence and trauma,” Coles says. “Why are there no youth clubs, but we pump billions into a system which only really fails?”

Those difficult questions are yet to seriously penetrate the mainstream. But, thanks to prison abolitionists, they soon might.

ABOLISH PRISONS

UK Prisons ‘sleepwalking into crisis’ as inmates forced to share single cells

Yohannes Lowe

THE GUARDIAN
Sun, 5 May 2024 

Around three in every five prisons in England and Wales are now overcrowded.Photograph: Andrew Aitchison/Corbis/Getty Images

The scale of the prison overcrowding crisis has been laid bare by figures revealing that a quarter of prisoners in England and Wales have been sharing cells designed for one person with at least one other inmate.

According to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), 11,018 cells intended for single use were being shared by two prisoners, with a further 18 such cells shared by three inmates. The overall prison population – which has ballooned over recent decades because of longer sentences and court backlogs – stood at about 88,000 when the statistics were originally compiled in late February.

Steve Gillan, the head of the Prison Officers Association, said sharing cells designed for one person creates tension among inmates, making the jobs of overworked prison staff even more difficult: “It is no wonder that the prison service is struggling to retain prison officers and operational support grades in England and Wales. The pressure on staff is intolerable and dangerous.”

He warned that the government was “sleepwalking into another crisis” after it “learned nothing” from the landmark Woolf report into the 1990 Strangeways riots, in which two people died. Among the report’s recommendations was that no prison should hold more inmates than is provided for in its certified accommodation level – which represents the “good, decent standard of accommodation” that the Prison Service says it aspires to provide to all inmates.

But three in five prisons are now overcrowded, with the problem most acute in inner-city Victorian reception jails such as Leeds, Bristol and Bedford, according to Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons.

Taylor said a lot of maintenance work is deferred in order to keep cells in use, and that too many prisoners have poor access to education and employment – activities that can reduce the chance of reoffending on release.

He believes that sharing is not inherently problematic, and can be a “protective factor against self-harm”, but is critical of the length of time many inmates are continuing to be confined in their cells, as they were during the pandemic. “The key issue is the conditions in which people are sharing cells,” Taylor said. “If prisoners were out of their cells spending the majority of their day in education and employment, then cramped conditions, while not ideal, would be less concerning. But the reality in many jails is two men spending up to 23 hours a day penned into a very small cell that was designed for one person, often in a poor state of repair and with an unscreened toilet. When you consider that, it is hardly surprising that levels of violence are rising and that we are seeing a worrying rise in the use of drugs,” said Taylor.

Prison Service rules require that cells are only shared where a prison group director has assessed them to be of an adequate size, condition and safety. Risk assessments are carried out on prisoners before deciding whether it is safe for them to share cells in closed conditions. Even a small oversight can lead to a vulnerable inmate being trapped with a potentially violent prisoner.

“We do complete risk assessments in custody but sadly on occasions there are times where people don’t get on. We would identify vulnerability, and those people get marked up to a single cell,” Mark Icke, the vice-president of the Prison Governors’ Association, said.

With many prisons at breaking point, the government has adopted emergency measures, including allowing some offenders to be released early, to try to tackle the overcrowding crisis. But the prison population is still projected to increase to between 94,600 and 114,800 by March 2028, in part because of a growth in police charging and changes in policy to keep the most serious offenders locked up for longer.

Andrea Coomber KC, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform charity, said sentencing reform is vital to create a more humane and sustainable justice system. “The government needs to take a serious look at other options and fundamentally reconsider sentencing regimes, which have meant sentences have gotten longer and longer over the last 20 years,” she said. “Nearly 40% of prisoners are there for non-violent offences. As a starting point, we need to think if any of those people need to be in prison at all.”

An MoJ spokesperson said: “We are delivering the biggest prison expansion since the Victorian era – including two prisons in two years – to help rehabilitate offenders and keep our streets safe. We will always ensure there is enough capacity to serve the outcome of the courts and keep dangerous offenders behind bars, and cells are only doubled up where it is safe to do so.

“Our sentencing bill will help reduce reoffending through greater use of tougher community sentences.”

ABOLISH PRISONS

A seventh inmate dies at Wales' troubled Parc Prison

Wayne Hay is the seventh prisoner to have died in the jail in just over two months


Conor Gogarty

1 MAY 2024

Parc Prison (Image: Wales News Service)

An inmate has died at a troubled Welsh prison. Wayne Hay, 47, is the seventh prisoner to have died at Bridgend's HMP Parc in just over two months.

A spokeswoman for G4S, the private firm that runs Parc, said Mr Hay died on Tuesday. "His next of kin have been informed and our thoughts are with his family and friends," she added. "As with all deaths in prison, this will be investigated by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman and the cause of death is for the coroner to determine."

WalesOnline has asked G4S and South Wales Police whether the death is being treated as suspicious. The force previously said it was treating two of the six Parc inmate deaths between February 27 and March 19 as non-suspicious, but believed the other four to be drug-related. Detective Steve Jones said in March that "a fast-track process has been undertaken and identified the presence of nitazene-based substances in connection with all four deaths". The psychoactive substance spice was identified in connection with two of the four deaths.

We recently revealed allegations from former Parc prisoners and staff of severe violence, drug dealing and corruption in the jail. 

You can read more about the crisis at Parc here.

Imprisoned Workers Bring State Lawsuit to Abolish Involuntary Servitude in Alabama’s Prisons

On International Workers’ Day, suit challenges constitutionality of government actions to punish resistance to forced labor among majority-Black prison population

May 1, 2024, Montgomery, AL – On International Workers’ Day, six incarcerated people are bringing a state court lawsuit against Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) Commissioner John Hamm with the goal of abolishing involuntary servitude in the state’s prisons. They are asking a state court to declare that recently enacted state laws and policies violate the state constitution, which, as of only two years ago, makes slavery and involuntary servitude illegal in prison.

A notorious prison system, Alabama’s is the most overcrowded in the country, operating at over 168 percent capacity, and, while Black people make up 26 percent of the state population, they account for 53 percent of the prison population. Until the fall of 2022, Alabama still permitted slavery and involuntary servitude in prisons, exploiting an infamous loophole in the Alabama Constitution and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But following a successful labor strike by incarcerated workers, Alabama voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that expanded the ban on slavery and involuntary servitude to prison. With their state court lawsuit – the first of its kind – the plaintiffs seek enforcement of the amendment.

In response to the labor strike, the state implemented three laws that authorize punishment for incarcerated people who resist forced labor: Governor Ivey’s Executive Order No. 725, ADOC Revised Administrative Regulation 403, and revisions to Section 14-9-41 of the Alabama Code. This lawsuit challenges those two executive actions and Section 14-9-41—all of which prohibit incarcerated workers from refusing to work and authorize punishment for such refusal. People incarcerated by ADOC are routinely punished, or threatened with punishment, for declining to work; such punishment can include loss of earned good time credit, solitary confinement, transfer to a higher-security (and more violent) prison, and loss of contact with loved ones.

“We chose to file this case on May 1, in solidarity with workers around the world, because ending forced prison labor in ADOC isn’t just about stopping the State’s extractive profiteering from the labor of Black people – both inside and outside of prisons. It’s also about eliminating the control that forced prison labor enables the State to exercise over Black people – an extension of the control exerted by the State through slavery, the Black Codes, convict leasing, and Jim Crow,” said CJ Sandley, Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the workers through its Southern Regional Office.

The six plaintiffs –Trayveka Stanley, Reginald Burrell, Dexter Avery, Charlie Gray, Melvin Pringle, and Ranquel Smith – have all been punished or threatened with punishment for resisting forced work. The lawsuit requests a court order to stop the defendants and their agents from subjecting them to forced prison labor and involuntary servitude, or threats of forced prison labor and involuntary servitude, for not working or refusing to work, and to declare certain state legal measures authorizing such actions unconstitutional. Their suit also asks the court to expunge from their records any relevant disciplinary reports and behavior citations issued after November 28, 2022, when the new constitution was ratified.

“I am motivated by my passion to fight for an end to all injustice. That passion burns brighter than my fears. We must stand for something or we will fall for anything. This lawsuit is about the unpaid, overbearing state jobs that I, as well as my fellow inmates, are being forced to work against our will. According to Article I, Section 32, this is against the law,” says Plaintiff Trayveka Stanley, currently incarcerated at Montgomery Women’s Facility in Montgomery, Alabama.

According to Plaintiff Reginald Burrell, who is incarcerated at Decatur Work Release in Decatur, Alabama:“The most influential public officials in the State of Alabama today remain loyal to and act in unity with their racist slave legacy from the Confederacy and the Jim Crow era, continuing to deliberately make, enforce, and defend bad policy decisions and practices, knowing it results in the demise, disadvantages, and disenfranchisement of poor whites and African-Americans, perpetuating hopelessness, despair, and excessive suffering in our lives today, and knowing it induces, in many circumstances, desperate choices under duress, to give themselves reason to enslave us through incarceration by the Alabama Department of Corrections for the sole purpose of continuing forced labor, slavery, and involuntary servitude in this state.”

Currently incarcerated at Elmore Correctional Facility, Plaintiff Ranquel Smith said of ADOC’s system of forced labor, "Being at work release can get stressful sometimes. I fully understand that at work release you get a little freedom, such as working a free world job, taking home passes, and much more, but all that can be taken away so fast by refusing to work a job that's not fit for you or not in your best interest. You will receive a disciplinary write-up and/or have good time taken away. To me, that's not being treated fairly at all.”

Alabama is one of several states to join the growing movement to abolish prison slavery and involuntary servitude at the state and federal level. Voters in Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont have approved similar changes to their states' constitutions to remove the loophole permitting slavery as a form of punishment for incarcerated people.

With a strategic Southern Regional Office centered in Jackson, Mississippi, the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Southern Justice Rising initiative represents our deepened, renewed institutional commitment to liberatory movements in the Southern states like Alabama. We have worked closely with generations of Southern freedom fighters and continue that historical work by partnering with Southern grassroots movements, human rights defenders, and community organizations fighting to transform material conditions, dismantle systems of oppression, and advance visions of collective liberation today.

The Center for Constitutional Rights works with communities under threat to fight for justice and liberation through litigation, advocacy, and strategic communications. Since 1966, the Center for Constitutional Rights has taken on oppressive systems of power, including structural racism, gender oppression, economic inequity, and governmental overreach. Learn more at ccrjustice.org.

 

Police and Prisons Belong in Museums

by David Swanson / March 27th, 2025

I want to recommend three new books about abolishing police and prisons. And I want to recommend multi-issue abolitionism beyond those two institutions.

What else would I abolish? Well, a list might start with war, fossil fuels, militaries, prisons, nuclear energy, police, nuclear weaponry, campaign bribery, health insurance companies, the death penalty, the livestock industry, Wall Street, borders, poverty, the NSA, the CIA, the United States Senate, Fox News, MSNBC, the Star Spangled Banner, the cyber truck. I could go on. Lists will vary around the world.

By abolitionism I mean,  primarily, persuading masses of people of the superiority of a new way of doing things, and effecting the political changes to create that new way of doing things. You can’t get rid of police or prisons or wars or Fox News by blowing up a building or zeroing out a budget, if people are all left believing that they need or want those institutions. The darn things will quickly be back stronger than before.

Persuading people that there is a better way than police or nukes or oil is a major project. Persuading them of several of these things at once may sound dramatically and senselessly more difficult. On the other hand, many of the same arguments that apply to one topic apply to several others. The survival of life on Earth actually requires a sort of panabolitionism. And if we were ever to combine the energies of all the people who each want one destructive, counterproductive institution abolished, together we’d have a lot of power.

The new books I have in mind are Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible by Sonali Kolhatkar; Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City by Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti; and No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement by Micah Herskind, Mariah Parker, and Kamau Franklin. These books are not the persuasive case for abolition, so much as accounts of the struggles of activists who work for abolition or for steps toward abolition. There are such things as partial steps toward abolition, just as there are such things as false steps that do not lead in that direction (even if they pretend to).

In Talking About Abolition, Cat Brooks is quoted as saying that “the data and the logic” establish that housing, mental health support, living-wage jobs, healthcare, and education reduce violent crime more than police and prisons do. But of course that doesn’t strike some people as “logic” at all. So the data becomes very important, including international and regional comparisons. One good source of data — here — establishes overwhelmingly that moving at least part of what gets spent on prisons and police into other programs would accomplish more, not less, of what prisons and police claim to be for, namely reducing violent crime — programs such as trauma assistance, hospital case workers, mentoring, training, jobs, courses on preventing sexual violence, and such as summer jobs, financial support, sports, positive parenting, early childcare, etc. The reason why it’s “logical” that general investment in better lives reduces crime more than police and prisons do, is in part because so many crimes arise out of misery, and in part because places that have made those investments tend to have less violent crime than places that have invested instead in police and prisons.

This is not a new discovery, or a truth that simply sets us free. There are a couple of major longstanding hurdles. First, U.S. city budgets often devote a huge percentage to police, and the primary reason seems to be antidemocratic corruption by profiteers, moneyed interests, and police unions. All of this is, of course, a perfect parallel to a national government’s war spending and its causes.

Second, just as when someone hears about war abolition they want to know what to do when Hitler comes to get them, when someone hears about police abolition, they want to know whom they should call in an emergency. Cat Brooks’ answer that you should deal with it yourself or “hush” is not likely to persuade everyone.

As with war, so with police, a major part of the answer will strike the skeptic as evasive. If you demilitarize the world, if you establish the rule of law, if you create nonviolent conflict resolution mechanisms, if you set up populations with training in unarmed civilian defense, if you get rid of the weapons, etc., life on Earth might survive and even prosper with the redirection of resources, and Hitler (long since dead, by the way) won’t get you. If you eliminate poverty, create universal public healthcare, provide free quality education from preschool to college, and ensure safe and stable lives for all, not to mention — and, surprisingly, it is hardly ever mentioned in abolish-police books — getting rid of the hundreds of millions of guns in the United States alone, the kind of emergency in which you’d want to call the police won’t come up.

But what if it does? Even if it’s as rare as lightning? What if it does and I have nightmares about it until it does? That’s where unarmed civilian defense, and nonviolent interrupters and de-escalators come in. There are, in fact, other ways to non-destructively prepare to confront that which may no longer need confronting. And these other methods will become both more understandable and less needed as partial steps toward abolition are taken.

In fact, one of the successes underway by police abolitionists is the establishment — already achieved in a number of U.S. cities — of alternative numbers to dial in emergencies, at which you can reach skilled providers of assistance with mental health, de-escalation, and other needs, and to which you can specify what kind of assistance you do or do not want. Other paths to success would seem clear if we had democracy. As with the federal budget and the Pentagon, so with local budgets and the police: when you show people what budgets look like, the majority of people want to move money out of the police and the Pentagon into useful things. The trick lies in building the power to make that majority will into governmental action.

While Talking About Abolition provides inciteful interviews with a dozen remarkable activists and academics, Skyscraper Jails and No Cop City each focuses on a particular campaign, respectively the efforts to close the jail on Rikers Island in New York City and to prevent the construction of the Cop City militarized police training facility outside Atlanta. The two campaigns have faced fierce opposition. To grossly oversimplify, the New York opposition has been slicker, slimier, more dishonest, and more successful. An astroturf campaign has been created in New York, not to oppose prison closures or abolition, but to claim the title of Abolitionist, even while pushing for new multi-billion-dollar jails in skyscrapers to “replace” Rikers, even while not closing Rikers at all, even while maintaining that these are all steps toward eliminating prisons. As you might have guessed, not everyone has fallen for that sales pitch, and a good deal of corrupt anti-democratic action has been required as well.

Nonetheless, the project of building a New York skyline of humans in animal cages stacked into the clouds has generally operated under the banner of “Close Rikers,” generating — it is my impression — less indignation around the country and world than has been merited and than has been gained by the resistance of the forest defenders opposing the creation of Cop City.

False steps that lead not toward abolition but often toward the strengthening of a destructive institution sometimes rely on distinguishing good prisons or wars or whatever from bad. In the case of wars this habit is strong even among passionate opponents of wars.

The problem with Rikers is not that it is an improper prison — though who wouldn’t choose a prison in Scandinavia if they had a choice? — just as the problem with Gaza is not that it is an improper war — though you might take your chances in Yemen if forced to pick. The problem with Rikers is not that it’s on an island or that it lacks some new technology. The problem is that Rikers puts people, some convicted of crimes and many (83% in 2023) not, in cages to dehumanize and brutalize them to no useful purpose. As Rikers began as a humane reform of an older prison, skyscraper prisons are now marketed as a humane reform of Rikers. But the whole system is incapable of humaneness.

One of the best features of Skyscraper Jails is that it quotes some of the powerful comments residents of New York City submitted to public officials who were required to pretend to seek public input but listened not a bit. Now we can listen for them.

One of the worst features of Skyscraper Jails is near the end of the book, where the authors claim that “there will be no peaceful transition” and “strife” will be required “equaling at least that of the French Revolution, guillotines and all — just as the abolition of slavery and realization of formal equality for Black people required a great, bloody, civil war.”

Fun times ahead, folks! At least for propagandistic nonsense. Some three-quarters of the world rid itself of slavery and serfdom within a century, much of it without a “great, bloody, civil war” which most certainly did not bring the degree of formal or informal equality brought by the Civil Rights movement. We should look to the wisdom and coherence of Ray Acheson’s book Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages, in which war is one of the institutions to be abolished.

It’s disconcerting to read that what needs opposing is “organized violence” but not war, or to see incarceration defined as “warfare,” but, you know, warfare not opposed as warfare. This pattern may provide a clue to the absence of the guns from these books. No Cop City, No Cop World is explicit about its support for property destruction, while hinting at openness to supporting serious violence, but never bringing up guillotines or civil wars. This topic, which I suggest is critically important, is, however a very small part of these excellent books. One of the reasons it is important is the need to build larger movements through bringing in large numbers of people who are mostly opposed to violence. Another reason is the need to grow stronger by combining the movements that oppose wars, prisons, police, etc. They have much to learn from each other in addition to creating larger numbers through joining together.

No Cop City gives us a rich understanding of the history, context, and players in the struggle in and outside Atlanta, as well as lessons that could prove very valuable for similar struggles in numerous other places. Cop City is not a national project but a model for a militarized war rehearsal ground coming soon to a metropolitan area near you. The book also makes clear the connections to war, the training of police by the Israeli military, the military equipment and language and thinking. Atlanta is our most unequal and most surveilled U.S. city with one of the deepest traditions of racism. But as it does, so others will follow.

And as the inspiring opponents of Cop City go, others should follow as well. While I question acceptance of all tactics, no matter how counterproductive, as the supreme activist value, I cannot help but marvel at the tremendously broad coalition (lawyers and children and campers and voters and protesters and saboteurs and a native American nation and environmentalists and peace activists and Central Americans, etc.) and variety of approaches that have taken on Cop City and at least partially and temporarily stopped it in its tank tracks. This is a movement — in the tradition of Occupy — with direct democracy, consensus, and a modeling of a better society on a smaller scale — a life-changing experience in multiple senses.

Imagine a world of growing numbers of encampments dedicated to creating a life without poverty, cruelty, or violence — with no exceptions, no exceptions for certain types of victims, no exceptions for violence on a large enough scale, no exceptions for structural violence hidden in systems of denial of healthcare or a safe environment, no exceptions for people labeled “felon” or “enemy” or “foreigner.” Does abolition sound like a “negative” idea? Think of the world it could give birth too and just try not to smile.

First published at World BEYOND War.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and War Is a Crime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. Read other articles by David.