prisons

A collective of deep reflections and stories from Assata Shakur.

"Welcome to transitions; m name is Fatima Shayla Pearl, I am an African American Transwoman doing time in prison like many other transwomen nationwide and possibly world wide. However, like most people there is far more to me than my being a transwoman. I'm a college graduate, and have also had the opportunity to travel both at home and abroad."

"Greetings! my name is Kebby Warner: I am a Woman prisoner held in Michigan. This is my story of the time I have done inside the Prison Industrial Complex. Society tends to forget that as human beings, we feel pain, anger, and cry tears. They forget that we are human; they forget that we have personalities and have placed labels against us, when most of us are genuinely good people, who have chosen the wrong roads in life's journey."

A dictionary of tattoos found in Soviet Prisons and their symbolic meanings

This pamphlet was written in Kingston Ontario, the city with the largest concentration of prisons in Canada, and our hometown. We wrote it to bring people up to speed with what we see as a dangerous agenda at work within the federal government with respect to the Canadian prison system. At this very moment, the federal Conservative Party, their various corporate partners, and their provincial proxy-parties are pushing hard for a major expansion of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). This is the term we use to refer to the interest groups, businesses, and government institutions that rely on locking people up to increase their bottom line. While private contractors are a major aspect of the PIC – one we’ll delve into later in this pamphlet – this issue is about more than privatization. It’s about an ideology of “Law and Order” driven by fear, racism, and moral panic. It’s about the extent to which the logic of prison is being extended into society generally, through increased surveillance and heavier-handed policing in the name of “public safety.” And it’s about our town, Kingston, Ontario, where the first Canadian prison was ever built, and what it means to be a city that experiences economic booms when more people are being put in prison.