Prisons are a central pillar of state power.
In addition to being veritable warehouses of human misery, they serve as a threat that
reverberates well beyond their walls, programming us from an early age into accepting a life
of economic, social and political subordination.
They’re an eternal warning to do what you’re told.
Or else.
This is an abnormal environment for a human being, certainly.
Y’know... these are essentially cages.
And to think that we stay in them 23 hours a day, come out for an hour a day...
it's taxing.
Prisons have existed in some form or another since the development of early states.
Yet for most of this time, they were primarily used to detain criminals as they awaited their
real punishment – usually some form of public torture, execution or indentured servitude.
This started to change in the mid-18th century, as the modern prison system began to take
shape amidst the rise of industrial capitalism.
Back then, major cities in Europe and North America were teeming sites of concentrated
squalor, desperation and inequality – which in turn, made them hot-beds of criminality.
Fuelled by ruling-class hysteria about the so-called “dangerous classes”, strict
laws were passed that turned relatively minor transgressions, such as stealing a pocket-watch,
into crimes punishable by public hanging.
Within this context, prison reform was proposed by progressive Christian groups, such as the
Quakers, as a more humane alternative to mass executions.
These early prison advocates argued that extended periods of isolation would provide ample opportunity
for sinners to reflect on their misdeeds and demonstrate their penitence to God.
Accordingly, they dubbed these new facilities penitentiaries.
It wasn’t long before those in power saw prison’s potential as a means for maintaining
social hierarchies under the rubric of public safety.
In the United States, prison construction experienced an early boom in the years following
the Civil War, as the state scrambled to reconstruct America’s white supremacist scaffolding,
which had been damaged by the formal abolition of slavery.
This racist system of mass incarceration was expanded again in the decades following the
defeat of the Black Power movement, and other liberation movements of the 1970s,
helping to give rise to its sprawling modern incarnation, the Prison-Industrial-Complex.
Over the next thirty minutes, we’ll talk to a number of individuals as they share their
own experience of dealing with this beast, and the intense challenges involved.
Along the way, we’ll discuss some of the organizing being carried out by prisoners
and abolitionists seeking to break down barriers of state-imposed isolation, rattle the cage...
and make a whole lotta trouble.
The panopticon was a prison design, designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s.
In the center of the building, there’s a watch tower.
And the prisoners are arranged in cells so the guard in the center can be watching any
of the cells at any given moment.
In disciplinary societies, the subject internalizes the feeling of being watched at all moments,
and engages in a practice of self-disciplining.
Because even the potential of being watched makes the subject begin to adapt their behaviours
to what they think are the expectations of the person who could be watching.
Prison is the state weaponizing the flow of time.
It’s a factory for the production of sadness and submission.
It’s a deeply hierarchical internal culture built on boredom and scrutiny.
It’s the deeply felt sense that no matter how bullshit our lives are, there’s still
something the state can take away from us.
Prison is like the permanent threat that holds up all relationships of exchange and domination.
So prison deeply affects all of us in every kind of routine interaction under capitalism.
Even if we never set foot inside of one.
I would talk about the Prison-Industrial-Complex as being something that has developed apart
from the idea of criminal justice.
It’s become a machine of its own.
For corporate profit.
For other motives that the complex serves, like demographic motives.
Politically, those who have the greatest motive for changing the way things are, are the people
people who get caught up in the system.
So it serves that kind of political motive.
It serves a demographic motive.
And it serves as a kind of tool for control.
The political economy of prisons is also tied to the history of de-industrialization.
In the United States, there have been waves of migration of predominantly African Americans
to urban centres like Chicago, Oakland, Philadelphia, Detroit.
And as jobs began moving to the suburbs, and moving abroad under globalization, this created
concentrated zones of urban poverty.
And so what happened is, basically prisons absorbed people who were shunted from the
labour market.
So, y’know... in places like Detroit or Chicago, people who are considered redundant
to the needs of capital are then round up in prisons.
It’s really about removing particular people from society.
Your race, your poverty, your history of colonization, mental illness, disability – these are all
things that intersect with the prison system.
And it becomes the place where we put those people that we don’t think of as hearty,
equal, useful citizens.
And so we dump them in a prison.
Immigration enforcement and detention involves a constellation of different agencies, including
the Canadian Border Services Agency, which has been compared to ICE.
People have been getting deported from Canada for a very long time.
For many decades that looked like people being held in a regular jail cell and then getting
shipped out of Canada.
But right now it looks like people being incarcerated either in provincial jails, or in what are
called Immigration Detention Centres, or Immigration Prevention Centres – but are really just
jails that are specifically for migrants.
In Canada we have indefinite incarceration for immigration, meaning that you can be held
forever.
So we have people being held over eight years.
We have multiple deaths in immigration custody — many of which we don’t even know the
names or the numbers, because it’s not tracked.
So when people are looking across the border saying “oh Trump is incarcerating children,
and putting kids in cages”... we actually do the same thing.
We have children in immigration detention as well.
A lot of people obviously are aware that in Canada we have over-incarceration of Indigenous people
Close to 40% now, of federally incarcerated women are Indigenous women in Canada.
In Saskatchewan, 99% of incarcerated girls are Indigenous girls.
Over 50% of incarcerated youth in Canada are Indigenous.
And while it’s true that America by far outstrips everybody in the world in incarcerating
people and in Black incarceration, Canada also has a Black incarceration problem and
a mass incarceration problem.
It’s pretty clear that prison is invested, and the justice system is invested in maintaining
a kind of permanent class of people who do crimes, who can then get managed by the police
and by the prisons.
And one of the ways that they do that is by reproducing these kind of cycles of trauma
on people.
Almost everybody I meet inside of prison has just, like... horrible stories of fucked up
things that have happened to them, going back to the time they were a kid.
And then those kinds of trauma lead people into situations where those traumas get re-compounded.
And the prison pretty consciously plays on those things, right?
Like almost everybody has these kinds of histories of sexual violence.
And then prison goes ahead and then gives any guard the power to strip search you at
any time.
People get used to these things.
But the process of getting used to them, getting to the point where it actually doesn’t matter
how many times you get strip searched in a week involves a form of loss, and internalization
of hurt.
And like a letting go of control over yourself that ultimately makes people more vulnerable.
Life inside prison is a highly structured, daily routine.
This is true whether you find yourself in a low-security federal penitentiary, or in
the administrative segregation wing of a super max.
Prisons are ongoing social experiments in totalitarianism.
Get your hands behind your back!
We’ve sent inmates to the hospital.
Broken/fractured skulls, broken arms, broken ribs.
Torn ears.
Broken eye socket.
It happens.
They use intense regimentation, internal hierarchies, sensory deprivation and boredom as tools of
psychological conditioning.
This practice is aimed at wearing people down, limiting the need for direct corrective violence,
and ultimately convincing inmates to accept the authority of the institution.
My mental health diminished.
Slowly but surely.
It’ll do it to anybody.
I lasted a while... now I just say ‘fuck it.’
But there is nothing natural about being locked up in cages and held against your will.
And all the routine in the world can’t change that.
The days are all more or less the same.
Overhead florescent lights flick on as a substitute for dawn.
You leave your cell in the morning, and go into kinda like the big room.
You wait around for the meal cart to come on.
There’s kind of a brief flurry of people trading, like, juice crystals for coffee whitener
or something like that.
You’ve got about fifteen minutes to eat, typically, before the guards want to bring
the trays back in, because their breaks are timed around meal time.
Then you’re just out in the day room for the day.
There’s very little to do there... sometimes the TV will be turned on.
After three hours a lunch tray comes on.
Again it comes on in a cart, in little plastic trays.
Everybody does their trades.
And then after lunch you get locked down so that the guards can take their break.
If you’re lucky, you’re in a situation where there’s two to a cell.
For many provincial jails, you’re three.
So there’s one person whose bed is on the floor.
So there’s actually no space to walk around or move, apart from maybe just, like, a narrow
space to get to the toilet.
And then after maybe two or three hours you get let back out.
You’re back in the big room... still nothing happens.
Maybe you catch up with your buddies who you haven’t talked to since yesterday at this
time, and tell stories about all the nothing that happened to you.
You don’t really have a sense of what time it is, so you just kinda go by what TV shows
are on, you know?
So you get, like...
Maury-o’clock.
And then you have Dr. Phil-o’clock.
And then Ellen-o’clock means its dinner time, because you eat at four, in order to
line up with how long the guards’ shifts are.
After dinner you get locked back up again for another couple hours.
You and your cellies.
Maybe you’ve brought some books in with you this time... all the beat to shit paperbacks
that have been kicking around the jail forever, and just like, covered with blood and snot
and don’t really get replaced.
Then you get out for a couple of hours in the evening.
The evening shows vary a lot more than the daytime shows, y’know, so like maybe its
like the show where celebrities lip sync.
And then you get locked back up for the night, starting at probably about 8 o’clock.
Lights are on for another two hours.
Again, you just kind of kill time.
After lights out, you’ve gotta try to be quiet.
No more flushing the toilet until morning, because they’re these like ultra-powerful
industrial vacuum toilets that make huge amounts of noise.
And then you wake up when the florescent light turns on, and the whole thing starts over
again.
When you go in, these people are going to be very caring to you and they’re going
to ask to see your paperwork just to make sure you have it with you.
And you’re going to go through a metal detector.
It’s not scary... you’re going to be fine.
I was sixteen when my brother was incarcerated.
My brother was seventeen and he was given a juvenile life without parole sentence — a
sentence that only exists in the United States.
Living with an incarcerated sibling, you become aware of how expensive it is to even just
exist in prison.
I’m continually having to upload money in my brother’s account so he can buy commissary
items.
All communication between prisoners and their loved ones and family members is mediated
by a company that price gouges for prisoners to use...
phones, for example.
There’s this move towards phasing out in-person visitations and replacing them with digital
visitations.
So there are, in the United States, two prison telecom companies that dominate the industry:
Global Tel Link and Securus Technologies.
What these companies will sometimes do is require, in their contracts, that the prison
they’re servicing phase out in-person visits and replace them with these digital visits.
And they’re basically exploiting prisoners’ need to stay socially connected to their families
and loved ones.
Burnside, or Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility, is the jail for the Halifax region.
There’s like, about 400 men maybe, and about 40 women... it depends on the day.
You can never really figure out capacity for these jails.
Because what they do is when they hit capacity, they just say that there can be more people.
Burnside is now at any one time between two-thirds and 80% remand, meaning people who haven’t
been convicted of any crimes at all.
They’re awaiting trial, or they’re on breach, or they haven’t got bail.
They’ve been struggling with lock-down.
So essentially since August, they have not really been out properly.
What we’re seeing, not only in Burnside, but really across the country is that these
things are becoming the new normal.
So lock-downs, they used to be quite rare.
Only when there was a search, only when there was an extremely violent incident.
And now it’s essentially become the new normal.
And so when I say on lock-down, I want to be clear here that what we’re talking about
is conditions of solitary confinement being extended to be the normal for the entire jail.
The old so-called ‘gangs’ that used to run everything—the Bloods, the Crips, Gangster
Disciples, Aryan Brotherhood—those are kind of like dinosaurs these days.
You have some younger groups that are organized a bit differently.
It’s less based on race than the old gangs used to be.
The lines are a little bit more blurred.
And if you come into prison and you’re not a gang member, they’re going to find some
affiliation to tag you anyway, because it increases the amount of money that they get.
So it’s... yeah, it’s definitely a cash cow.
I’ve done time in both men’s and women’s provincial prisons at this point.
It’s kind of a new phenomenon...
I wasn’t really expecting it.
The gender segregation aspect of prison is one of its most kind of poignant features,
in that it’s one of the sites where society most brutally segregates people and tells
them what their gender is, what that means.
These forms of gender segregation and differentiated control shape people’s behaviour pretty
profoundly.
Since people are spending, kind of months and years in these, like, extremely restrictive
conditions where people are very closely scrutinizing each other, and enforcing behaviours on each
each other.
This then spreads back out into the community, and it sort of becomes one of those ways that
prison is diffuse.
It’s not just the walls that, like, physically contain people.
It’s a whole set of institutions and forms of social control that, like, profoundly shape
behaviour.
It means the culture among prisoners—which is toxic and disgusting, and I don’t think
we should valorize it—then gets exported into these spaces as well.
And so those dynamics around violence and scrutiny get reproduced and favour people
returning to prison.
So over time, you do get these forms of, like a reproduction of a class of criminals.
Of, like, people whose role is to be permanently managed by the system.
The Attica Prison Uprising began on September 9, 1971, two weeks after imprisoned Black
revolutionary George Jackson was assassinated while attempting to escape San Quentin.
During the four-day uprising, nearly 1300 prisoners took over control of the prison
and held 43 guards hostage.
They issued a series of demands aimed at improving the inmate’s living conditions.
But rather than negotiate with the insurgent prisoners, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller
sent in an army of 550 state troopers and 74 Correctional Officers to storm the facility
and retake it by force.
43 people were killed during the resulting bloodbath, including 10 guards and 33 prisoners.
In the ensuing outcry, a number of reforms were passed to improve conditions in the
New York state prison system.
45 years later, on September 9, 2016, prisoners in twelve US states launched what has been
referred to as ‘the largest prison strike in history.’
Chief among their demands was the end of prison slavery – a reference to inmate’s hyper-exploitative
labour conditions, and a loophole in the 13th amendment to the US constitution, which formally
outlawed slavery ‘except as a punishment for crime’.
The US prisoner workforce consists of 800,000 inmates across the country.
The average minimum wage they’re paid for non-industry prison jobs is now 86 cents per
hour.
In Louisiana, prisoners earn four cents per hour.
And in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, prisoners are not paid at all.
A second coordinated prison strike, held over three weeks in 2018, saw protests, hunger
strikes and work stoppages by prisoners across seventeen US states, as well as inmates in
Burnside Prison, located in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
Both the 2016 and 2018 strikes were coordinated with the assistance of outside
supporters.
And while they have not yet achieved their demands, they have helped to galvanize a broader
discussion about the conditions of mass incarceration in the United States.
Inmates are using cellphones to get behind a common cause, pushing back against the system.
At Hayes, where inmates outnumber officers five to one, that's a serious threat.
If seventeen hundred inmates said 'I don't wanna be here no more' and just started walking
towards the fence, you think forty, fifty police is gonna be able to do something...
What the fuck are they gonna do about it?
The Burnside prison strike arose in tandem with the prison strike in the United States
so August 21st to September 9th, those dates were chosen because of very significant prison
uprisings that had taken place.
In the United States the prison strike really was a strike, it was based on withdrawing
prison labour.
We wanna get paid for working in these chain gangs for free!
Just know, we're tired of this shit, we're laying down man!
Y'all gonna have to earn your own check we're through with this shit!
Obviously in a provincial context, in a provincial jail there isn't as much labour but Burnside
wanted to join to address their conditions.
We were connected with the Incarcerated Worker's Organizing Committee and working with the
people that were working with the strikers in the states so there was that communication
back and forth.
We don't know kind of what the ripple effects of people being able to stand up for those
rights and take that lead in organizing is, but as time unfurls I think we're going to
see more and more on that.
I think there's a lot of hope in people on the outside organizing directly with prisoners
because what happens is when someone on the inside is caught engaging in organizing activity,
they'll often be subjected to really severe forms of repression.
When they accused us of being the leaders of the army of the twelve monkey rebellion
they engaged in full scale torture,.
You know, we were in freezing cold all winter long.
They would come by every fifteen minutes and rattle the doors in order to keep us awake
so that we wouldn't get any sleep.
When we left there after a year, we had both lost about thirty-five percent of our body
weight.
One of the ways that people do try to carve out space to have some kind of autonomy within
prison is to continue to find the ways in which they can't be quite as neatly surveilled.
So that just means that certain things only happen in the showers because, although any
guard can force you to rip your clothes off at any time, they don't film you in the showers
and they mostly don't film you in the cells unless you're on some sort of special regiment
like suicide watch or something like that.
So during the periods of time in the day when the cell doors aren't locked, that becomes
a place to have private conversations or to exchange things or to settle scores or whatever.
So understanding those spaces as a way that people take back some power over their ability
to do things on their own terms.
This building serves as a constant reminder of the eighteen hour siege in which inmates
overpowered corrections officers, taking three of them hostage, along with a councillor and
potentially other prisoners.
It was this incident which led to the death of lieutenant Steven Floyd.
So there's already a migrant prison in Laval, and it's falling apart and the building is
apparently full of asbestos, and the government should definitely close it but we shouldn't
let them open another one in its place.
There's two architectural firms that have been awarded the design contract, one is called
Lemay, which is in Montreal.
And one is called Group A, which is in Quebec City.
About a year ago there was a communique claiming an action that involved releasing crickets
into LeMay's headquarters.
In the fall of 2018 there were workshops that got started, info sessions and discussions
in and around Montreal about the prison and why people should stop it.
There was a poster campaign.
There's been a few zines released about the project.
Loiselle, one of the companies involved in the soil remediation, had their offices spray
painted and someone painted a slogan against the prison on their wall.
In February there was a demonstration in St-Henri where people went to Lemay's headquarters.
Also in February people went out to Laval to block a site visit for the prospective
general contractors, which was pretty successful.
None of the bidders who showed up that day were able to reach the spot where they were
supposed to do the site visit and a lot of them turned around and went home.
All through March there was a call-in campaign against the potential contractors where people
were asked to call the companies and tell them not to bid on building the prison.
One rumour said that someone got a company on the phone who was like "why is our phone
number on the Internet?
Why do people keep calling us?
Stop calling us.
We're not going to bid on this prison".
There was a communique that came out that said people smashed the windows at the office
for a Lemay condo project and that they had sprayed paint all over two condo tower projects
that were also being overseen by Lemay.
If you have access to a community radio station, I highly advice setting up a kind of prison
radio show something that's just explicitly directed, where they can choose the music,
make sure they know it's happening.
Jail lines.
They advertise within the jail that they have a line and that it's open in the afternoons
and people can call them and that way you start building a relationship.
Just being able to talk with people, to connect, to have empathy and to understand each other.
To provide practical support around how to deal with legal shit, hooking each other up
with lawyers, helping relay calls through to people.
All of this becomes useful ways of subverting some of the alienation of prison.
In the months immediately following Donald Trump’s presidential election, the stocks
of the world’s two biggest private prison companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group both doubled
in price.
Investors had wagered that Trump’s strident anti-migrant, tough-on-crime campaign rhetoric
would translate into more profitable government contracts and the construction of new private
detention facilities.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.
They’re bringing drugs.
They’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists.
And once in office, Trump didn’t disappoint.
What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records..
we’re getting them out of our country or we’re going to incarcerate.
Millions of Americans have recoiled in horror from the barbarism of Trump’s policies.
This was particularly true in the wake of the widely-broadcast images of children being
ripped from their parents’ arms and thrown into specially-constructed detention facilities
grotesquely referred to as ‘baby jails’.
But while the images and details surrounding the so-called ‘zero tolerance policy’
were particularly rage-inducing, the phenomenon of forced family separation is certainly nothing
new.
It forms an integral, if often invisible component of the practice of mass incarceration.
Nonetheless, resistance to these images was swift.
ICE offices and detention facilities were targeted by occupations across the United
States, forcing several facilities to temporarily shut down.
And while the occupations were eventually cleared, and the outrage died down, it gave
us a small taste of what a more sustained and widespread movement against prisons might
look like.
Building a practice that opposes prison is one of the most important things that we can
do as anarchists.
I think in order to do that, we have to start by changing the way that we look at society,
in order to learn to see prison.
Because I think oftentimes prison, it produces silence, it produces invisibility by literally
locking people’s voices and bodies where you can’t see them.
So beginning by looking and just being like, “where are prisons in this area?”
Physically go to them, watch them, walk around them, do protests at them, set off fireworks.
And then after that, just look at the ways that prison affects your life, even if you’ve
never been there, and just ask yourself “in what ways am I afraid?
When am I afraid?
What kinds of interactions are relying on the authority and the violence of prisons
in order to carry them out?”
Talk about this with your friends, figure out if you can cultivate practices that allow
you to break some of that fear or recognize that you have more choices that you weren’t
aware of.
For instance, like, why do you pay rent?
Why do you listen to your boss?
Why do you pay for food when you need food?
Break this down.
Because standing behind all of those authority figures are walls and barbed wire and locked
doors.
I think learning to see can actually give us more power to resist it.
Almost worse than prison itself is the fear of prison, and that’s one of the main ways
that prison projects itself into society and controls our behaviour even if you’ve never
heard the kind of a clank of a door closing.
So I’d say that, as anarchists, as people who, like, love freedom and are prepared to
act on it, that we also need to be somewhat prepared to do some time.
Keep in mind, that what we imagine things to be, are probably worse than they really
are.
You’re gonna feel anxiety and you’re gonna feel scared.
It always helps to have people from the outside because, I've spent about 27 years locked
up now, and I've spent most of that with my head on the other side of the fence.
It’s good not to get pulled into a place like this.
Once your head is on the inside of this and you’re thinking about the internal politics
of what’s going on in here, that can really wear you down.
So if you can keep your head, to the extent possible, on the other side of the fence that’s
always good.
And also, something that I’ve lived by in terms of a principle...
I like to continue being who I am in the here and now.
Because the here and now is really all that we have.
You can find ways... if you have some imagination, you can find ways to make the time you’re
doing now count.
You can come up with projects that matter.
And you can continue changing the world right from wherever you are.
What would you do if you was in my shoes?
Thoughts of suicide, but for my kids I choose
to survive hell on earth, cuz this is hell, I curse
whoever created it.
They shoulda laid in it first!
So they can feel how they own shit work.
Spitefulness is bad.
Ignorance is worse.
There’s no barbed wire, lots of greenery and striking contemporary art.
Inmates even have pretty great views out of their cell windows.
It’s all part of a plan to make prisons more humane.
Ask yourself in what way in your area, prison is changing.
How are these things developing?
So, like in the area that we’re in, here, there is this push away from using segregation
towards various forms of kind of sentence in the community.
Studying the history of prisons, you see that reformers are actually the ones who are kind
of planting the seeds for the next regime of social control.
And I think that no matter what those changes are you should always oppose them.
Whether it’s as obvious as building a new institution, or whether it looks like changing
laws to allow for more supervised sentences, rather than periods of incarceration.
The more that you can get involved with prisoners in here, and the more disruptive that your
activity with those prisoners can become to the larger complex, the more you liberate
not just prisoners from the prison complex, but the more liberation you’re spreading
in free space out there.
With as many people as you have locked up, you have a variety of people that want to
do a variety of things.
You have to begin with a relationship of trust, and you have to build that over time.
I find that most of the things that we’ve worked on have come because of that relationship.
We’re just, on a daily basis, communicating with people inside, and filling basic needs.
So that may be putting money on the phone, putting money on cantine, driving up someone’s
mom to visit.
A very important thing to organize and rally around is the right for prisoners to stay
in touch with their loved ones through physical contact and also through free modes of communication.
Out of that you’re going to hear a lot of the issues.
So as I said, the prison strike arose kind of spontaneously from us speaking on the radio,
and then getting a phone call about the conditions.
Everywhere they try to build a prison of any kind, we should try to stop it.
Let’s not let the state provide itself with more infrastructure to enforce the repression
of us and our communities.
I would recommend that people check out things written by other folks who’ve been through
this already.
That includes groups like Critical Resistance in California, anarchists in Brussels, there
was also a group called End he Prison Industrial Complex in Kingston, Ontario that was fighting
against the expansion of a prison in their city.
And those groups have all written reflections about their struggles on the Internet that
people could find.
There’s lots of people who’ve been fighting prison construction over the years, and I
would go check out all of their reflections.
Prison affects all of us even if we’ve never been there.
This is everyone’s fight.
So find your stake in it and be prepared to pick sides.
Prison fixes no problems.
It doesn’t make anything better... it only makes situations worse.
When people stick up for prisons in my life, I can say without any exaggeration that if
prison was gotten rid of tomorrow, that if all the guards were fired, all the P.O’s
were fired, the buildings were turned over to the pigeons and rain, that it would actually
just immediately make the world a better place.
There are more people incarcerated today than at any other period in human history.
One recent estimate put the number at over 11 million worldwide.
And given current trends towards accelerating rates of female incarceration, massive spikes
in Central and South America prison populations, surging levels of global migration and a worldwide
shift towards more authoritarian and nationalist governments... unfortunately, this pattern
looks poised to continue.
As we continue to slide towards more entrenched levels of social conflict and state repression,
it is vitally important that our movements develop stronger ties with those comrades
who’ve been captured and kidnapped by the state.
Not just for the benefit of those trapped behind bars, as important as that is, but
also as a way of demystifying prisons for those of us on the outside, in order to hone
our capacity to resist.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched in
groups, and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Are you interested in starting a regular letter-writing night for political prisoners, providing material
support to those organizing on the inside or fighting against the construction of a
new detention facility in your town?
Consider getting together with some comrades, organizing a screening of this film, and discussing
where to get started.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble at your campus, infoshop, community
center, or even just at home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For ten bucks a month, we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show, and a screening
kit featuring additional resources and some questions you can use to get a discussion
going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch, drop us a line
at trouble@sub.media.
Just a note that shortly after being interviewed for this film, Sean Swain was transferred
across state lines from Ohio State Penitentiary to the Nottoway Correctional Center, in Virginia.
You can write him at his new address:
For additional resources on writing to political prisoners, check out the screening kit for
this episode, available on our website.
This episode would not have been possible without the generous support of Bursts and
iZrEAL Media Arts.
We’re going to be taking a month off to work on another project... but after that
be sure stay tuned for Trouble #21, where we’ll take a closer look at anarchist approaches
to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles.
Now get out there…. and make some trouble!