3 Positions Against Prison

Text from back cover:

“One and a half centuries ago, slavery was abolished by the United States government. This followed an enormous social struggle over abolition–wars were fought between pro-slavery elements and abolitionist elements. There were slave revolts and armed uprisings. The government intervened. And the Thirteenth Amendment ever-so-neatly includes a loophole allowing for the enslavement of prisoners (“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”). Moreover, the economic system of chattel slavery was replaced with indentured servitude and industrial wage labor–which the Northern capitalists were struggling to proliferate. So today, we have slavery, although slavery has been abolished. The structures of society that required slaves have remained intact. And in one hundred years, prisons may be abolished, but we will still have prisons as long as capitalism remains intact.”

3 Positions Against Prison pdf

Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex


“Since the early 1990s, increases in the prison population in England and Wales have sparked a boom in prison construction, leading commentators to comment on ‘the largest prison building program since the middle of the 19th century’ (Morgan, 1999: 110). While women make up a small proportion of those incarcerated, their rates of imprisonment have multiplied faster than men’s, causing feminist activists to call for drastic measures to counter ‘the crisis in women’s prisons’. 4 Between 1985 and 1998, for example, the number of women in prison more than doubled, from 1,532 to 3,260 (Prison Reform Trust, 2000). The prison service has responded by contracting with private corporations to built and operate new prisons, and by rerolling men’s prisons for women. Recent government initiatives designed to slow the increase in the use of incarceration, such as Home Detention Curfews, have had little impact on the number of women sentenced to prison which continued to grow during the year to 2001 by 9%, compared to 2% for men.”

celling black bodies pdf

Locked Up

Text from back cover:

“Prison is the most direct, brutal expression of power, and like power it must be destroyed, it cannot be abolished progressively. Anyone who thinks they can improve it now in order to destroy it in the future will forever be a captive of it. The revolutionary project of anarchists is to struggle along with the exploited and push them to rebel against all abuse and repression, so also against prison. What moves them is the desire for a better world, a better life with dignity and ethic, where economy and politics have been destroyed. There can be no place for prison in that world.”

locked up pdf

Survival in Solitary: A manual written by & for people living in control units

Text from back cover:

“The federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, went on permanent lock down in 1983. This created the first “control unit”. Now, in addition to the federal government, some forty states have built these “maxi-maxi” prisons — representations of the angry and cruel repression that grips our country today. Human beings are put alone in a small cell with double steel doors and no window for 23 hours a day. No program, no work, no education, meals alone, and maybe one hour by oneself in a bare dog-run outside. A religious task force calls such conditions psychological pain and agony tantamount to torture. It is torture. Here, now, in the following pages, people who are captives in these cells write about what goes on and how you can survive…”

Survival In Solitary pdf

Writing to Prisoners FAQ

An informational guide to writing and supporting prisoners.

writing_to_prisoners_FAQ pdf

Anarchic Practices in the Territory Dominated by the Chilean State

This zine details insurrectionary attacks, prisoners and a relentless fight for total freedom in Chile.

Anarchic Practices in the Territory Dominated by the Chilean State pdf

Descending into Madness: An Anarchist-Nihilist Diary of Anti-Psychiatry

From back cover:

“Like all governments, presidents, and authority, psychiatry never gave me freedom. Assigned psychiatric labels didn’t help me – they only filled me with an internalized sense of victimhood and inferiority. Medication didn’t ‘cure’ or ‘fix’ me – only damaged me, numbing me to my own senses in order to create an emotional void between me and the fuckery of civilized life. So instead, with nihilist celebration I descend into madness, taking aim at social order and civilization. With armed animalism I realize now that there was nothing to fix ­ my natural contempt for domestication and social control reminds me that I was never ‘broken’ to begin with.”

Descending into Madness_An Anarchist-Nihilist Diary of Anti-Psychiatry pdf

Mapping the Fire: International Words of Solidarity with the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

Text from the zine:

“The following texts were translated and edited by the imprisoned members of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and by the comrades of Contra Info. We warmly thank them therefore, as well as the comrades A,M and E who contributed decisively in the handling of this attempt. Finally we greet the Chilean comrades from Entropia Ediciones for the version in Chile, and the comrades of Actforfreedomnow, boubour(A)s and 325 for the version in English.”

“They might have imprisoned our bodies but not our ideas, beliefs and values, which will continue to escape through various projects of insubordination. One of these projects is the creation of “Black International” editions, which are supported by us, the imprisoned members of the Anarchist Revolutionary Organization Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, and from certain comrades who every day, every moment, embody practically the value of SOLIDARITY.”

mapping-the-fire_black-international pdf