English Ep. 2: "Abolitionist Intimacies", Within and Beyond the Prison Walls
With the Prison Correspondence Project
[00:00]
Alia: Last week in Montreal, at the annual protest against police brutality, the queer organization Pink Bloc, read a speech to reaffirm that the queer liberation struggle is necessarily in opposition to police and prisons.
Karl: [Translation from spoken French] They said: The P!nk Bloc is here today alongside our comrades to denounce the police institution as a whole and reaffirm our commitment to the fight for the abolition of police and prisons. As revolutionary queers, our resistance to the police is self-evident. The pink capitalists of the Gay Village may have forgotten that the police is (and always has been) the enemy of our communities, ranging from raiding gay bars to criminalizing our sex workers or houseless communities.
Alia: Solidarity between queer and the abolitionist movements is critical to address since queer, trans, and feminist anti-violence organizing has at times been deeply entangled with police and prisons as a (frequently failed) means to increase safety for survivors of misogynistic and homophobic violences.
Karl: [Translation from spoken French] This month, we are speaking with two organizers of the Prison Correspondence Project, a collective that works at the intersection of queer liberation and prison abolition to create a more inclusive and radical vision of safety and care for all.
Maggie: My name is Maggie.
Josh: My name is Josh.
Maggie: I've been involved with the Prisoner Correspondence Project for around eight years. I'm one of the core organizing collective members.
Josh: I’ve been involved in the Prisoner Correspondence Projects since it started, in various capacities, but on the organizing collective for almost all of that time.
The Prisoner Correspondence Project is a queer and trans support project for people in prison throughout Canada and the US.
Alia: At its core the prison correspondence project is invested in building relationships and networks of solidarity inside and outside the prison. In our conversation Maggie and Josh discuss why punishing, detaining, and isolating people from their communities does not address the violence that underpins homophobia and transphobia, or any violence. They highlight the ways the prison perpetuates these same violences, while also worsening the conditions that produce abuse and make us vulnerable to it.
Alia: The prison correspondence project is based in Canada and the US but it primarily engages with American prison infrastructure. So in hopes to bring the conversation a little closer to our own geographical context, throughout the interview I’m gonna read some fragments from the book Abolitionist Intimacies, by El Jones, an abolitionist, organizer, writer, poet, and professor.
[02:55]
Alia: You’re listening to Brûler/Bâtir, a podcast about reimagining collective safety!
Karl: Brûler (burn down)… because the police perpetuate violence and are a failed approach to safety.
Alia: Bâtir (build up)… because we can invest in, and amplify, systems of care, justice, and safety without policing.
Karl: Every month, we talk to people working to build real safety in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, and hear about how the police get in the way.
Alia: I’m Alia
Karl: I’m Karl.
Alia : And we’re gonna be your hosts.
[03:20]
Alia: So far on the show, we've been talking about abolition as this expansive political project, but I think it's worth highlighting for this interview that the contemporary abolition movement emerges from the prison abolition movement. When we talk about punitive systems, it's easy to let the prison fall out of sight because it's intentionally rendered invisible. However, it's also a site where the violences we've been talking about are the most pronounced. And these systems are sustained by the fact that the prison, both imagined and as a real institution, exists. I wanted to maybe just begin by asking you both how you first encountered the prison in your lives?
Maggie: I first became interested in prison activism very generally through my mom. She's an author, and she has written books that followed criminal trials and basically drew attention to the imbalances in how so-called justice is delivered. The first book she wrote was following a biker gang trial, and it became very obvious that it's just kind of doled out universally that some people are already presumed guilty by association, or because they're poor or whatever. So I was raised by someone who was critical of these systems and kind of took that with me. And then I became involved with PCP specifically, initially through a class at Concordia and then very quickly became interested in the project specifically and have stuck around since.
Josh: So my first encounter with prison as an institution... Well, I grew up in southern Alberta, outside of Lethbridge, and there was a prison on my road. So in terms of like a building, it was just what you drove past on the way into town, but in the way, as you said, that it gets sort of rendered invisible to a lot of things. It just, you know, it was just a building that you drove past. In terms of getting more engaged with prisons as a social issue, that only happened once I moved to Montreal and was getting involved in other forms of activism, and it was a friend of mine who was starting up the project and was looking for people to get involved.
Alia: Did the work you started to do later in your life make you reflect a bit differently on the geography where you grew up?
Josh: I mean, it's interesting. I have a friend who is doing academic work around prison construction in Alberta. And so this past summer, I went on a road trip with him around Alberta, and we went back and drove by the prison and looked around, well, looked around the outside of the prison. And yeah, just learning about the history of that. It definitely reframed some things, the way that it was all rebuilt in the 80s, and where the money came from.
Alia: Would you both like to maybe say a little bit about what you actually do as part of this project? What's the practical kind of work?
Maggie: So the Prisoner Correspondence Project has, I would say, three main prongs. There's a pen pal program that we run, so basically, we're facilitating one-on-one pen pal relationships between people on the outside with queer and trans people on the inside. We have a resource library which has scenes and resources that we send to people inside free of charge. And we have a newsletter that we try to publish twice a year, composed of writing by people inside. So it's kind of a way of connecting people to each other indirectly as well as staying abreast of what's happening in prisons as much as possible. On the organizing collective, we are facilitating all those things as well as hosting workshops, trying to secure funding, which is an everlasting struggle.
Josh: The nature of the project is that it's almost entirely mail-based, right between the penpal project, the newsletters, and mailing in these resources. So in terms of the day-to-day work of the project, a lot of that means opening dozens and dozens and dozens of letters a week, figuring out how they should be classified, responding to them on an individual basis, and then that's also the bulk of what the money goes towards as well: mail costs and printing. In terms of the structure, we've got the organizing collective that we've talked about. That's generally anywhere from 6 to 10 people here in Montreal. And then we have what we call the Inside Collective as well. So that is anywhere from 10 to 20 members who are in prison who receive the minutes of our meetings every month and participate in those discussions. And then the organization is larger than that, the mailing list I think is now around 5000 people in prison and then people outside who write. But I think also what we see is that these kinds of networks of support or mutual aid exist within prisons already. Often, we'll get an envelope and you'll open it up and there'll be four letters inside from different people who told their friend in the prison, and they're all sending it together to save on postage. Or you'll send a resource guide and you'll see as it gets passed around the prison and requests come in from the different units on the prison.
Alia: You're saying how there's like an inside collective. What does that look like trying to sustain your collective inside and outside? What does them reading the minutes and participating kind of look like?
Josh: So when we first started the project, it was very intentionally structured in a way so that if the central organizing committee fell apart because there was, you know, it was like 4 people meeting in a backroom at QPIRG that these relationships would still exist and could continue on and that everything wasn't coming through this sort of central hub.
Maggie: It’s complicated. Our inside collective, like all of our membership, is scattered across mostly the US, and so it requires us to get things mailed out really quickly, which is basically impossible. So often what happens is people will be responding to like, time-sensitive matters two or three months after the thing happens, just because of the nature of the prison mail system. We're also, I think, always trying to engage with the question of how to work with the inside collective instead of just reporting back to them and telling them, this is what we've been up to.
Josh: I think it also really requires relearning or reconceptualizing how you understand timelines or what's an urgent issue, because as Maggie was saying, we might mail out the minutes and then, you know, we have our collective meetings monthly. But if someone doesn't get the minutes for that month in time and so their response doesn't show up in the next month's minutes, it only shows up in two months' minutes and then people are responding to that. So I think some of the more productive conversations that we've had collaborating with inside collective members, you know it's taken a year and a half to get everyone to be heard in that discussion process and respond to each other and to come up with what actually seems like some kind of consensus out of the process.
Alia: Yeah, I think there's something maybe about the slowness of this type of relationship that I think is compelling in regards to struggle more broadly. I think often when you're confronting any sort of system that is radically violent, that is structurally very expansive. You're like, how are we going to defund the police? It's going to take years and years and generations, and I'm not going to see the end of it. And I think often, especially for people who are incarcerated in the United States, you're going to have these relationships that are going to be decades-long. And the sort of resilience required it’s kind of like a one-on-one example of the sort of resilience and long-term labor, and like pain, that is involved in these sort of struggles more broadly.
Well, I should say Karl and I, for literally only 15 minutes. They do blitzes on Tuesday, so anyone can just drop in. What we did is just we opened letters from incarcerated people and we read them and then basically gave them the newsletter or the information to be involved in the project. But I mean, only reading a few letters, it was very moving.
Maggie: Yeah, like whenever you first step into this space and start working with letters, it's very jarring. Like how intimate the process is, like, reading the handwriting of a stranger, someone who's often in their introductory letter is, right off the bat, willing to tell you, their whole life story by way of introduction. Some people have, like, this beautiful penmanship, some people have weird handwriting things like the dots over their i’s are hearts or, you know, little like winky faces and whatever some people like you can tell from their handwriting that their mobility is declining. It's like having these very brief connections with people, but it's very deeply intimate.
Alia: Speaking about intimacy and vulnerability. I feel like that seems to be really centered in your project and also in most prison justice organizing. I was just reading this book by El Jones called Abolitionist Intimacies. I've been reading it this week and just been very moved by it. She talks about intimacy as being her subject and also her method and the book's kind of an exploration of her relationship with people on the inside. She says that she's talking about the ongoing loving sharing of lives and experiences between those inside and me on the inside. Can you speak a little bit more about the role of intimacy and prison justice organizing? And then also maybe about the barriers that you face in establishing and maintaining intimacy in prisons and how intimacy is policed and controlled?
Maggie: Yeah, I think like obviously the nature of our project is facilitating intimacy. The fact that we set up one-on-one penpal relationships means that we have all these people who are involved in the Prisoner Correspondence Project, who really have nothing to do with us or are not even necessarily abolitionists, are not necessarily similar to us in any way, but who are still participating in the project just by talking about their days with people.
Josh: One of the ways that we've talked about it as well is how a lot of the framework or the method of the project is rooted in this sort of gay liberationist ideal of those kinds of personal relationships having the capacity to be politically transformative and drawing on that to really try to build a movement.
Maggie: Yet with regards to barriers to intimacy, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for me because we've been dealing with it so much lately, and because it's a new and infuriating problem. A lot of states in the US right now their prison systems are switching over to the centralized mail processing center, where rather than sending mail directly to a prison so that the person can receive the letter and hold it in their hands, you have to send the mail to some processing center in Dallas, TX where they scan and photocopy the mail and then send the photocopy to the person in prison or send like a scan to like some states have like iPads, so you can't even hold a tangible thing you have to look at it on a screen. It adds to the issue of mail delays. I violently removes this level of connection that people have with the outside, where it's just like I'm touching this thing that my loved one or my friend or my kid touched, which drives me crazy!
[15:18]
Excerpt from: Jones, El. Abolitionist Intimacies. Fernwood Publishing, 2022, p. 11.
On Connectivity
A.'s mother gets her phone number blocked for doing a three-way to his father. Then they block her new number because she clicked over to the other line during the call.
Calls from Burnside are $1.20 per minute plus service fees, so $25.00 of calls cost $32.00. From Cape Breton and Pictou, it's $7.00. Most people don't have that kind of money.
People are always asking me to send texts. Most of the texts are, can you put money on his phone. Sometimes girlfriends text me, I missed his call. Once in a while women text me, tell him don't ever contact me again.
Prisoners can send mail, but it costs money for envelopes, papers, pens. The pens are designed so people can't make weapons out of them. Everyone complains they don't write properly and run out of ink if you don't hold them up, right.
[16:14]
Josh: Another element that I think speaks to this intimacy question, that's sort of a long, perpetual discussion that we're having, is around the nature of political solidarity work when it's this very one-on-one interaction and what both sides expect from each other, what both sides feel is owed to each other, what both sides, I guess, want out of this relationship. So often people come into the project with an abstracted understanding of what political solidarity means in this case and then what it means in that kind of one-on-one letter-writing relationship that develops.
Alia: Do you mean that often people go in and they recognize that, like, the intimacy requires more of them than they thought? Or that they're confronted by sort of the conditions that people are forced to live with?
Josh: I think there's a few different sides to it. I think there is what you said when people are confronted with that it's asking something different of them than maybe they originally thought, in good and bad ways. Also, you were talking about what's the nature of these sort of mutually dependent relationships. I mean, one of the elements that we also have to confront is that often in these power relationships, it's not mutually dependent. It's a lopsided relationship as it’s bound to be in this kind of setting. But I think what we've also sort of had to confront along the way is that while there's the power in this kind of individual one-on-one relationship, there are also problems with that kind of individual one-on-one relationship, right? And so that's why there are generations of queer critiques of monogamy and marriage, and all of these very individualized, dependent relationships. And so thinking also now about how can you still draw on the power of those individual relationships but also try to collectivize it a bit more. So thinking through if there are alternative ways that we can structure a pen pal relationship. You know, maybe it’s a small group of people writing to someone in prison, and so the responsibilities and the weights of that don't all fall on one person, and there are also mechanisms to hold people accountable to that relationship.
Alia: My good friend has been doing your project for a long time and they often talk to me about the emails and they're the only person that their pen pal speaks with, and they're often in very difficult isolation and they're trying to access all of these resources for them. They don’t actually talk about it that much. I don't think they're frustrated by it but I think they're definitely confronted by a different sort of relationship than they thought that they might have going in, which I guess is the point. It’s an opening up the prison, which is, like, if you're lucky, to not be in a situation where you have grown up with people on the inside or had to already confront those systems, well then you have to confront them in very different ways.
Maggie: I guess what a lot of people find jarring when they first get involved is just like the vastness of difference, sometimes, not always, between their life and the person that they're writing to. Where often queer and trans prisoners, in particular, are cut off from their families and have not spoken to anyone on the outside in, like, many years. It's difficult to even conceptualize if you haven't experienced this level of isolation yourself, to think about being so cut off from the outside world physically, emotionally, socially, culturally, and technologically. There are people who write to us who are like, "I've never used a computer. I'm getting out next year and I'm scared because I don't know how the world works anymore."
[19:58]
Excerpt from: Jones, El. Abolitionist Intimacies. Fernwood Publishing, 2022, p. 35.
The Prison is Always With Us
A couple of days before Randy's call, Jerry called me. Jerry has been inside for thirty-two years. A bank robbery went wrong and he killed a cop. A life sentence is supposed to end at 25 years, but every time Jerry gets close to parole, they find a way to bust him and move him back to a higher security institution. One time, they said he was running a store selling some chips or pop. Another time, they said he got close to an officer for information. Just small things, but it's enough to hold him in place. He can't get parole for a maximum. When he first gets in touch with me, all he wants, his parole officer to see him. It's been over a year and the guy won't meet with him. He can't get a new officer. He can't transfer to another province in any ways. He has a wife. He can't get down to a lower security level. He's stuck
Out in the world when something goes wrong you can make calls. You can ask questions. If people don't respond to you, you can take it further, you can complain. In prison they can do what they want. It doesn't matter if it's unfair, or against regulation, or even illegal. What is anyone going to say when the prison has you at their mercy? If someone doesn't want to do their job, you have no way to make them. Jerry just has to take it.
Every time I talk to Jerry, he is thoughtful. He speaks about remorse, about accountability, about amends. He is soft spoken, always asking if it's a bad time, always thanking me before he ends the call. He's then in so long he's seen everything, knows everything and he keeps reaching towards the world, even when it doesn't seem like he'll ever be allowed back into.
[21:50]
Alia: I'm not sure how much you can speak to this, but you know you were saying how it's even harder to send letters now and it just seems like even though we know intimate relationships in their broadest sense and even intimate relationships within the prison are what give people the capacity to sustain themselves, the prison is structured around basically making intimacy extremely difficult, very surveilled, very mediated, and I wonder how the prison itself, is built to gate keep and prevent intimacy?
Maggie: Yeah, I mean, so even just on like a structural level, our project operates with the understanding that basically everything that we send into prisons and basically everything that's coming out of prisons by mail is being opened and read by someone who works at the prison, who we don't know, and who we can presume to not be too excited about our project. So a lot of the letters that we send get rejected before they even make it to the person for reasons like, some of our resources that have information about safer practices and so it gets rejected on the basis of being sexual content which threatens the security of the prison. In some states the prison has a policy against pen pal programs in general. So if we send a form letter that explains that we're a pen pal program that gets rejected. When people sign up, we tell them, if there's anything that you wouldn't want, like a prison official knowing about you, maybe keep that in mind when you're writing a letter. It's just like kind this cloud that hangs over everything that we do and everything that anyone in prison does, any prison organizer that is, is just like someone is reading this.
Alia: I think we haven't really spoken to the fact that PCP is focused on supporting queer prisoners. Maybe you guys can speak to what it mean to do queer prison justice organizing? What does supporting queer prisoners specifically look like in the work you do?
Josh: Some years into the project we tried to do a sort of reframing away from a support project for current trans prisoners to a queer and trans support project for prisoners to really underline the ways that the issues that queer and trans people in prison face are the issues that prisoners face, but sometimes more acutely, or in just slightly different ways. So yes, people have difficulty accessing gender-affirming care or getting their HIV meds on time, but that is part of the medical neglect that everyone in prison faces. Right, like, yes, current trans people in prison may be especially cut off from the outside world because they don't speak to their family. But everyone in prison is being isolated from the people that they love and the people that love them in their larger community. You know, there are specific issues like not everyone in a prison is interested in the details of gender-affirming surgery. It is specific information, but they are just parts of these larger issues of the prison justice movement.
Maggie: Yeah, when I first got involved in PCP, it was framed to me as being the twofold mission of bringing people who are in prison, who are systematically isolated into a sense of community through sharing, writing with each other by connecting them with queer people on the outside and also as a way of bringing queer people into the prisons. Like these are not your enemies. These are not like the bad guys. This is your community.
Alia: This moment of reframing of how you're thinking about the relationship between the gay liberation struggle and the prison justice struggle, as not at odds. These two things are just by evidence of sitting at the margins going to create more liberation and more solidarity. But guess I'm specifically interested in how gender and sexuality are policed within the prison. I imagine it to be similar to the ways that gender expression and sexual expression are police outside of the prison. Queer movements, I think, invite everybody to have a more open, more free understanding of their sexuality and gender. I'm curious about what it looks like to bring that sort of solidarity into the prison? How are these movements kind of expanding one another?
Maggie: Every aspect of people's lives in prison is dictated by a set of rules and there are people that are telling you what to do and putting you in isolation if you don't do it. But it's basically all of the same issues that we are dealing with on the outside. The like gendered washroom conversation. It's the same in prison, except it determines which prison you're housed in, who you're surrounded by.
Alia: Yeah, I guess I don't even know. That's like our prisons.
Maggie: Yeah. So there's men's prisons and there's women's prisons. Basically every state and most provinces, which one you're housed in is determined by your genitalia, with some exceptions coming along with trans people who are, like, fighting and taking their situations to the courts to argue that they should be able to decide where they're being housed.
Alia: A trans woman who's in a men's prison that might be somebody who's writing to you, and you might be like offering them resources.
Maggie: Yeah. So a trans woman will write to us from a men's prison and ask if we have information about gender-affirming surgery. If we could provide information about how to change their legal name, how to change their gender marker, how to try to get housed in a women's prison. We have members who have done all of those things successfully and have written about it and we've been able to share those stories with other inside members and just try to sort of build up these networks of advocacy in that way where people are just basically describing, this is what I did, this is who I talked to, this is who I got my contacts on the outside to talk to because that often has more of an impact than someone on the inside advocating for themselves. Saying like, these are the court precedents that I used to justify my case. The other thing is like the Canadian federal prison system changed their policies like now a few years ago to say that trans people can ask to be housed according to their gender identity. So we've spoken with people who have moved from a men's prison to a women's prison and it hasn't answered all of their problems. One person said that she was treated way worse in the women's prison than she was in a men's prison. We're not answering the systemic issues by asking someone their pronouns before putting them in prison for ten years.
Karl: [Translation from spoken French] I read an article that said that Trudeau said that “trans rights are rights” to justify more inclusive prisons. In western Canada they are starting to build “indigenous friendly” penitentiaries shaped as eagles. This idea of make prisons more inclusive is terrible. Prisons cannot be inclusive. They are exclusive institutions and by try to include marginalized populations, we are just continue to marginalize them.
Alia: Yeah, there is something antithetical about thinking about liberation within the prison.
Josh: So PCP did this policy review I think it was like five years ago now. It was an issue that we worked on at the time to try to put out some points about what we wanted to see in a new policy. We were very inspired by the critical resistance framework of trying to think through is what you're asking for, allocating more resources towards prisons or less? Is that giving more discretionary control to prisons or less? One of the things that we pushed for in that campaign was that the prison that someone was placed in should be their choice because there are a lot of different factors that people might take into consideration. Rather than just going for this, you want the right people in the right prisons.
Maggie: Treating it as like a clerical error, like whoops, these people are supposed to be locked up here, not here.
Alia: I guess there's like the commonplace assumption that prisons create safety for people on the outside, and that the radical unsafety of the prison is justified by creating safety on the outside. I'm just wondering how do you think about safety in relation to the prison? Like, how do people create safety within the prison for themselves, even if momentarily?
Josh: The idea that putting these people in prison will keep the rest of society safe is based on this assumption that the reasons that you have crime or violence are because you have particularly evil people, and so you need to isolate these people from the rest of the population, and then everyone will be safe, right? But that isn't true. And that isn't what we know about crime, right? There are social determinants of crime that are rooted in poverty and other social structures. One way that we've talked about this and sort of confronted it within the project, is we have a significant number of people in the project who are in prison for sex related crimes. Sexual violence is particularly understood in this way, right? If someone goes to prison for stealing a loaf of bread and breaking a window. Everyone's like, oh yeah, that was caused by poverty. But when it's sexual violence or sort of a related set of charges people who otherwise might understand crime and social systems revert back to this individual evil problem. So one of our collective members was talking about it on the panel several years ago and really went back to looking at the feminist anti violence movement. That really kind of rose to prominence in the 70s and in that movement and understanding of what caused sexual violence was the structure of society. It wasn't that you had a bunch of individual people that needed to be caught. It was that society had structured itself in this way, where people weren't held to account for their actions, where there were incentives, personal or social, for certain forms of sexual violence. And so the problem wasn't that we had some bad people. The problem was that you had a social structure that needed to be reformed and this turn to putting people in prison. I mean, it's a way of scapegoating certain people and not actually addressing the work of reforming those larger social systems.
Alia: Yeah, like you can individualize the structural failings that like lead people to commit crimes. In the last interview we talked about meaningful safety or like real safety means safety for everybody. We see outside the prison how the safety structures we have in our society are not for people who are marginalized. They are not who we have in mind when we say everybody deserves safety. I guess if we change our mindset to say, like everybody deserves safety, even somebody who might have committed a very violent crime, then it challenges like the whole structure of the prison as something for people who don't deserve safety anymore, basically.
Josh: I think if we understand it on more like local everyday level, like what the best way to stop sexual harassment in the workplace? It’s to have a union, right! It's to have those structures of support. It's not about having cameras in the workplace, it's about having the rights to be able to advocate for yourself to have people who will advocate for you to have the economic security to be able to remove yourself from the situation and not be dependent on this one.
Alia: Yeah, I was just listening to interview and they were asking like what does everyday abolition look like? And if we haven't built the networks in communities in our friend group where we can deal with somebody who's, transgressing sexual boundaries, you're never going to build the infrastructure on a broader level. That's the foundation of those networks: creating connections and relationships founded on care where accountability can be meaningfully practiced and brought up, which is kind of constant struggle that looks different I think everywhere. And obviously most people who commit some of the worst violences are not incarcerated.
[34:36]
Excerpt from: Jones, El. Abolitionist Intimacies. Fernwood Publishing, 2022, p. 196.
Chapter 8.
I think what I am really asking is what does it mean to live in the world as an abolitionist when we know we will not see the world we labour to build in our own lifetime. Abolition in our current time is inherently believing in something we will always fall short from. We believe prisons must fall, but in the mean time there is money to be put on the phones and canteen, which paradoxically, feeds the prison industrial complex. But that small pleasure of canteen is what makes life inside a little more bearable. We would not ask that to be given up on the theoretical ideal of resistance.
We must learn to make a home in this falling shore. We must learn to make a home in our homes, the foundations of the world we envision. As Mariame Kaba (2021) reminds us over and over, we practice abolition every day in practical ways by challenging ourselves to think differently about conflict, to not see accountability is chastisement, but as transformative to move beyond shame in our failed or incomplete attempts of reparation. We practice abolition by organizing, bringing the groceries, and speaking to our relatives about sexual violence when they have never voiced their traumas and banding together and are building to reject the landlord. We practice it lying under the deportation van and in the protest outside the prison and in the rides we share to these places as we build collectivity and mutual aid. In a selfish society, it takes practice to unlearn our wants to find new wants to reach towards. It is not stripping away what we want, but filling ourselves with something different with love for each other and share its successes.
[36:20]
Alia: I don't know if either of you want to say anything about what people can do to join your struggle? Or particularly the kind of work PCP is trying to do?
Maggie: Becoming a pen pal is a way to participate in the prison abolitionist movement on a personal level, as we've discussed. Like, it's not always the easiest way but it's a way that involves a lot of the skills that we need to build up in abolitionist organizing. It requires long-term commitment, dedication to care, and having difficult reflections about boundaries and your needs versus someone else’s, about preventing violence on a long, long, long-term scale instead of always just in the immediate present. Get a pen pal!
Karl: Every episode we conclude by asking, what do you want to build up in the place of prisons.
Maggie: There needs to be a future for people who are inside prison right now. There needs to be a place for them to live, guaranteed income, a place where they know that they can sleep. I think one of the most shocking things that I encountered when I first got involved with PCP was hearing from people that were inside that were getting released that were not excited but afraid because prison has served as a replacement for all of these social institutions, it's been an excuse not to provide housing for everyone. So there's people inside who are like at least here I know there will be food, there will be a bed, like this stuff sucks, but like it's guaranteed for me in a way that isn't guaranteed on the outside. So, I want people to be able to leave prison and know that they have these things secured.
Josh: Yeah, I think it's been a replacement for these other social institutions, but at a much higher cost, right, both financially and on a human level. So the things that I think need to be built in its place are massive reinvestment in social housing, a jobs guarantee, a safe drug supply and safe consumption sites, accessible education, the list goes on and on.
Alia: Well, thank you both so much, seriously a pleasure! I know that you’re both are volunteers so thank you so much for, you know, offering your time and talking with us.
Josh: I'm sorry it took six months to sit down together. Our timelines just thrown off because of the inside collective.
Maggie: We just needed approval!
Abby and Zo in the QPIRG/ PCP resource library.
[39:23]
Karl: Brûler Bâtir is produced by … Alia, Karl, Abby, Zo, and Orlando.
Alia: Big thanks to Maggie and Josh for being on the show this week. To find out more about their project and get involved you can visit their website which we’ve linked in the show notes.
Karl: There you can also find more information on El Jones’s book, the full Pink Bloc speech we reference in the intro, and a link to the Prison Radio Show, a radio show dedicated to direct collaboration with people who are currently incarcerated in and around Montreal.
Alia: Our outro song is by Kimmortel off their new album Shoebox. We do this work in Tiohtià:ke on the unceded lands of the Kanien'kehá:ka.
Karl: Share and subscribe! Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
