Trouble #20: Inside-Out

Prison is the foundation of state authority and the anchor of capitalist social relations. It’s the baseline threat that coerces us into accepting a daily regimen of exploitation and abuse. It’s a shrine to power and a monument to futility. It’s cameras, motion sensors, and walls of thick concrete wrapped in concertina wire. It’s an ongoing experiment in regimentation and psychology. It’s a sweatshop run on reclaimed slave labour. It’s a forced separation that rips up families and tears loved ones apart. It’s the last shitty stop before you’re deported back to the life you fled. It’s a sprawling job site, where unionized guards earn a living by keeping human beings in cages. It’s a sterile time capsule, where individuals are kidnapped from the present and thrown into limbo for years on end.

For those inside, the struggle against prisons is often a struggle for survival; it’s a constant fight to preserve whatever dignity you can in a place that’s designed to grind you down. For those on the outside, it is a struggle to break through the barriers of institutionalized isolation – whether physical, technical, or bureaucratic. It’s a battle to build and maintain relationships with those the state would have you forget. Prisons are constructed to be impenetrable fortresses. The fight for their abolition is a daunting one. But no matter if you’re on the inside or the outside, their continued existence is an affront to the very notion of freedom... and one that demands resistance.

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 [e-mail].

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!