Part Three – The Colour of Violence – Women of Colour & the Prison Industrial Complex in the UK
Women of colour are the fastest growing prison population worldwide[1]. You can find the post here that shares more detail about women in prison, their backgrounds and the violence they…
Part Two – Our Sisters Inside
This blog post intends to explore the issues of women’s imprisonment in England, Wales and Scotland. It is written by an ex-prisoner who identifies as a woman. It is part…
Part One – For everyone sick of prison visits – a Call Out for the Women & Trans* Week of Action against the Prison Industrial complex
This April, a Week of Action is taking place across England, Wales and Scotland to confront the prison industrial complex; the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance,…
The Corporate Greed of Strangers
Source: http://www.irr.org.uk/news/the-corporate-greed-of-strangers/ Written by John Grayson John Grayson reveals the spread of corporate involvement in the provision of asylum housing in the UK and northern Europe, and how outsourcing and private…
Female prisoners more likely to self-harm than male counterparts
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2016/jan/29/female-prisoners-more-likely-self-harm-statistics New statistics reveal the challenges women face in criminal justice system HMP Holloway. The proportion of women in prisons has decreased since the beginning of the 20th century….
Why fight the Wrexham Mega-Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex?
Article from Radical Wales: http://www.radicalwales.org/2015/11/why-fight-wrexham-mega-prison-prison.html A new prison has been on the cards for north Wales for quite some time. Prisoners from Welsh speaking areas are incarcerated in England where…
Community Action on Prison Expansion’s response to the 9 new prisons announced yesterday
Yesterday came the announcement that the British Government plan to build 9 new prisons. Five of these are to be built by 2020 and several ‘Victorian’ prisons are to close….
Spending review: Nine new prisons to replace ‘Victorian’ jails
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34763339 Image caption More than 3,000 new homes could be built on the city centre sites of old prisons Nine new prisons will open in England and Wales –…
Working Toward Abolition…
by Bianca Diaz In 2015, it is hard to imagine an institution more harmful than a prison. With daily reports of sexual assaults by correctional staff, hunger strikes by those…
Calais: 200 people storm the channel tunnel
UPDATE 6 OCTOBER: Calais Migrant Solidarity reports that all people arrested in the action have now been released. From Calais Migrant Solidarity Last night (Friday 2nd October) after midnight over…
David Cameron’s Jamaican Prison: A Show of Ignorance, Cruelty and Historical Amnesia
On his visit to Jamaica this week, instead of addressing widening calls for historical reparations, David Cameron announced plans for a UK-funded prison on the island to transfer Jamaican offenders…
UK to build £25m Jamaican prison
Image copyright AFP/Getty Images The UK is to spend £25m on building a prison in Jamaica so that foreign criminals in the UK can be sent home to serve sentences…
Prisons and the struggles against them
Source: http://anarchistnews.org/content/prisons-and-struggles-against-them-2013-2015-ongoing-timeline This page will be subject to regular updates, most notably in the chronology , but also in giving references to interesting texts. So far (22/8/15), in addition to…
Prisons, Ecology and the Birth of an Empire
Source: http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2015/07/25/prisons-ecology-and-the-birth-of-an-empire/ Depiction of Osceola in at Castillo de San Marcos/Fort Marion, St. Augustine, FL by Panagioti / Earth First! Newswire Strange sometimes how worlds collide. Nine years ago I…
Wildfire: An Anarchist Prison Newsletter #2
From Wildfire: [Download Issue #2] (Prints 8.5×11) The past months have seen a continuation of prison struggle in its many forms, as well as a blanket of repression from state…
Anarchist Perspective on Mass Prisoner Resistance Movements
Source: http://anarchistnews.org/content/anarchist-perspective-mass-prisoner-resistance-movements There is a widespread, growing and committed resistance movement happening in US prisons across the nation. This movement is not going away, and with more outside support and…
Rape culture: would prison abolition help women?
Movement for Justice protest against the incarceration of women at Yarl’s Wood detention centre. Credit: Demotix/Guy Corbishley. By Josh Kitto 24 February 2015 Source: https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/josh-kitto/rape-culture-would-prison-abolition-help-women The UK police, courts, the…
Brussels: The struggle against the construction of a maxi-prison
Source: http://rabble.org.uk/brussels-the-struggle-against-the-construction-of-a-maxi-prison/ This analysis was originally published in “Ricochets” n° 1 in November 2014, a newsletter in French on the struggle against the construction of the maxi-prison in Haren, Brussels….
New article – Prison Abolition
We have recently had a feature spread in the Occupied Times. This article introduces prison abolition: When the Empty Cages Collective facilitates workshops on prison abolition we ask participants to…
New Article – The Prison-Industrial Complex in the Occupied Times
We have recently had a feature spread in the Occupied Times. This article is about the prison industrial complex in the UK: Right now over 90,000 people across the UK are…
New Article – Resisting Prison Expansion in the UK
We have recently had a feature spread in the Occupied Times. This article is about prison expansion in the UK: The United Kingdom is facing an unprecedented expansion of the…
Everyday Abolition: Working Towards Non-Punitive Accountability
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-adkins/everyday-abolition-workin_b_6972198.html This is part two of train of thought that includes more questions than answers, but I hope it starts conversations on how we can find alternatives in our…
Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry
Source: www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/02/poor-for-profit-probation-prison-georgia Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry Many poor Americans face jail when they can’t pay steep fines for nonviolent crimes, like $1,000 for…
Everyday Abolition: We Are Responsible for the Prison Industrial Complex
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-adkins/everyday-abolition-we-are-responsible-for-the-prison-industrial-complex_b_6952198.html I have been thinking a lot about violence at the hands of the state — the police state we have become — and the prison industrial complex (PIC)…
Reframing the ‘Prison Works’ debate. For whom and in what ways does prison work?
Source: https://downsizingcriminaljustice.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/reframing-the-prison-works-debate-for-whom-and-in-what-ways-does-prison-work/ JM Moore argues that prison works very well in maintaining an unjust society and deflecting attention from wider harms. Debates around the question ‘does prison work?’ tend to focus on…