Practical
Abolition

FRoM THE INSIDE ouT

|LJULI|J LiL

3 Reflectmns on pnsoner sulnlanty organizing
by some members of the Barton Prisoner Solidarity Project

CICIRI

b

In the US and Canada, it doesn't get that much
lower than the prisoner. Excluded in every way,
stripped of their most basic rights, exposed to
humiliation and violence regularly, deprived of basic
necessities, prisoners are at the very bottom of the
social hierarchy, scorned and blamed by all the other
classes. Prison crystalizes all forms of oppression
and also props them up, and so organizing around
prison can be a way of getting at the core of
exploitative power relations in a community.

In Hamilton, our local prison is right in middle of the
city, in between the cheap grocery store and the
beer store. We pass it all the time, and it literally
casts it shadow over us. Our goal in starting the
Barton Prisoner Solidarity Project (or BAPSOP) in
2018 was to "thin the walls" and make it so we could
hear the voices of our neighbours on the inside,
make them feel a little less alone.

With this text, we want to explain some of the
philosophy behind our group and make a case for a
certain way of approaching prisoner solidarity
organizing - and maybe even solidarity organizing in
general.
What we do

Our activities as a group include maintaining a
phone line and PO box in order to be in touch with
prisoners and both provide direct support and
monitor conditions inside. We also keep up social
media accounts and work with the mainstream
media to share news about what is going on inside.
We also occasionally hold rallies or other public
events to put pressure on the prison.

These are simple activities, but they are powerful.
Our goal is to change the balance of power inside
the prison by supporting prisoner self-organizing.
We do this by working with prisoners to identify
issues and help them develop tactics for pressuring
the institution. We also advocate around conditions,
develop relationships, and do favours for prisoners,
because we want our neighbours on the inside to
feel respected and cared for when they come out,
rather than like the shit on society's boot.

There are some things that we don't do. We don't do
long-term case work, following prisoners through
their process, trying to get them better outcomes in
the courts, or providing support when they get out.
We do random favours, like helping with a three-way
call or sending a few texts or finding a lawyer, but
we don't go much further than that. We don't give
anyone money or legal advice. We don't do popular
education for non-prisoners, and we aren't trying to
grow as an organization. BAPSOP is a closed
collective doing some specific work, and we intend
for it to stay small and focused. Other prisoner
solidarity groups have struggled to keep going
because the level of need is so high that they take on
many different kinds of work and burn out - by
being clear about what we do and don't do, we hope
to make our project more sustainable.

Philosophy

There are other groups that do prisoner solidarity
work, but our philosophy makes BAPSOP different.

Abig piece of that is political clarity - we are
anarchists and we are always fully against prison.
Folks on the inside know who we are and what we
stand for, which is part of not just being another
service organization. We get into the details of what
goes on inside the prison (like, we know if laundry
came on the day it's supposed to and which
sergeants are on duty), but we are here because we
want to destroy the institution.

The reason we don't do outreach work and don't
seek new members is that the site of struggle is
the range. Our goal is to shift the balance of power
between prisoners and the institution that oppresses
them. If we win, we win on the range. We are not
trying to create change by pressuring the
government, changing people's opinions, getting
more funding for programs, or anything like that. We
want change to happen because the administration
is forced to reckon with an organized body of
prisoners and supporters that is capable of pushing
back on their authority.

Struggle is constant - wherever there is
oppression, there is resistance, and people tend to
resist spontaneously at the site where authority is
exercised over them. In prison, that site is the orders
from the guards and the rhythm of the day. When we
set out to support prisoner struggle, we look at the
ways resistance is already occurring organically and
ask how can we encourage it to deepen and spread.

It is not enough for people doing prisoner solidarity
to simply repeat the demands from inside. We
believe that people on the inside and on the outside
have different goals and roles. This is a way of
dealing with the tension around demands related to
reform versus abolition.

We are against prison and against reforming prison,
and we also make specific demands based on what
prisoners are asking for. However, demands are
slippery — the nature of a demand changes when it
travels from the inside to the outside. Inside, a small
demand can become explosive, with no limit to how
much it can escalate. It is no exaggeration to say
that people have died over an early lockup. But on
the outside, that same demand is just a mild policy
disagreement, and we would just be reformists
dialoguing with power if all we did was repeat it.

To resolve this tension, we need to understand what
our role is as people in solidarity and therefore what
our goals are. The role of prisoners is to win
concrete struggles and build their power; the role of
people on the outside is to destroy prison. We
support them to win inside, but we don't make their
demands our own — we stay focused on destroying
prison brick by brick while also calling on the admin
to negotiate with prisoners to meet their demands. 4
‘What organizing looks like

In the four years our group has been around, one of
the main forms prisoner struggle has taken is the
hunger strike, and here we are going to walk you
through the process of how a typical hunger strike
happens.

First though, hunger striking as a tactic is not well
understood. The prison system is used to hunger
strikes, and an individual doing it to try to produce a
crisis by affecting their own health is unlikely to
succeed. The prison treats it as no different than
other forms of seltharm and has policies and
procedures in place to funnel you into the medical
system. Collective hunger strikes are different -
rather than trying to create a health crisis, they
create a crisis of mass disobedience and refusal.

Prison tries hard to get prisoners to participate in
their own incarceration. You have to participate in
programs, talk to a psychologist, cooperate with
guards, take on prison jobs, and follow all orders in
order to receive privileges within the system.
Without the participation of prisoners, the
fundamental violence of the prison system is laid
bare and the prison is left with no choice but to
govern by force.

In a hunger strike, prisoners are refusing to take
their meals, one of the most basic acts of
participation they are invited to engage in. Typically,
prisoners would also refuse to have their strike
medicalized by not cooperating with the daily
medical exams the prison tries to force on you when
you are refusing meals, which further throws a

gvrench into the prison's procedures.
Here is how it often goes down:

« First, we establish contact, usually by phone. We
write our number on a banner and hangout around
the prison where people can see us.

+ We get calls, we listen, we take detailed notes

* We build relationships on as many ranges as
possible and try to get people calling us regularly to
keep us posted about conditions.

« Once we have some relationships, we try to
identify organic organizers, the people who are
already talking to folks on their range about
collective problems. We also try to cultivate
organizers by encouraging people to take their
complaints about conditions to other people on their
range and get on the same page about what is
wrong.

« We then compare notes across different ranges,
telling people who call us about the problems
elsewhere in the prison. This gives us and the inside
organizers an overall picture of conditions in the
prison.

« We support prisoners in creating lists of demands
and building support for the list on their range.

— This is done in one of two ways: either
through an assembly, where the TV is turned off and
everyone on the range discusses together, or quietly,
where the demands are circulated in one-on-one
conversations and the written list grows and evolves.

— Demands have included: an end to
lockdowns, access to books sent from outside, daily
yard time, faster mail, access to hygene supplies, ¢
visits, additional canteen items or the ability to hold
more money, and more

* We communicate the list of demands to other
ranges and get buy-in so that multiple ranges are
asking for the same thing. This often involves things
being added to the list, which involves more
conversations on the ranges that already agreed to
it.

« We discuss possible tactics. Here, we are careful
not to push people towards any particular tactic. We
try to let it emerge from what struggle already looks
like inside and from the history of struggles that
prisoners are aware of.

— There have been actions that aren't hunger
strikes (like ranges refusing lockdown or refusing to
return their meal trays or vandalizing phones or
assaulting guards), and we try to be clear that we
are in solidarity with any form that resistance takes.
We do try to emphasize that things are stronger
when they are more collective, which often involves
them being planned in advance.

— Prisoners in Ontario's provincial prisons do
not have access to work and don't really have any
programs, so the range of tactics available to them is
pretty limited.

« When prisoners choose to hunger strike, they can
begin building a strike fund by stockpiling food.

— Since the goal is not to create a crisis by
ruining your own health, it is not necessary to
completely abstain from food. The important thing is
to refuse the prison's food — to refuse to cooperate
with their feeding responsibilities. This means that
with some planning, ranges can save up food, either
off their trays or from canteen purchases, in order to

keep more people on strike longer. The strike fund is
7
held in common by trusted organizers and is
distributed over the course of the strike.

«+ Prisoners pick dates for the strike

« We try to be clear about what we will do on the
outside: we will talk to other ranges and be out with
a banner at 9am on the day the strike starts to
announce it, we will do social media and send out a
press release, we will hold demos and do a phone
zap, we will release statements and letters from
people inside...

+ Making regular social media updates about
conditions in prison is an important part of our work,
and it allows for some dialogue with the friends and
families of prisoners. It also means we then have
some ability to reach people and mobilize if need be.
The mainstream media is also super important, since
prisoners in Barton have access to the local paper
and all watch the local evening news. Having a good
relationship with journalists looks like having a
media spokesperson in BAPSOP and also arranging
interviews with prisoners or writing press releases.
Relying on these institutions is obviously a problem,
but it has been important in our work.

« Prisoners would then refuse trays and also refuse
medical exams, because it is a political issue and not
a medical one. They would make their demands
known, sometimes by sending a letter to the
superintendent through the guards. And they would
engage in negotiations with higher ups, either all
together or in a small group.
« Typically, the strike ends when the admin makes
concessions or offers a promise of change. But often
these would be only partially implemented or would
prove temporary, and so the cycle would repeat.

Each time the cycle repeated, the actions took less
work and were stronger. During the COVID-19
pandemic, there were three or four rounds of
strikes, culminating in one involving over 200
prisoners, almost half the population of the prison.
This coincided with a COVID outbreak, when
conditions in the jail were really at their worst —a
lot of the demands were about getting "back to
normal," with visits, time out of cells, yard time,
things like that. But in addition to winning these
(sometimes more than once), prisoners also made
some other gains and got items added to cantine (Mr
Noodle cups!), some extra TV channels, and an
overhaul of the library, significantly improving
access to books.

Things have been a bit quieter since then, in large
part due to mass transfers related to some
construction work in the prison (these transfers
seemed to target politicized prisoners,
unsurprisingly). However, transfers have also been a
vector for spreading discontent. For instance, one
prisoner who had gotten politicized in Burnside
prison in Nova Scotia worked on organizing his
range in Barton before being transferred to
Maplehurst (about an hour away) where he
continued that work. Another prisoner was
transferred from OCDC in Ottawa and found the
conditions in Barton to be so much worse that even
just telling other prisoners about the difference was
enough to trigger a wave of organizing. Prisoners

9
also heard lists of demands being used by prisoners
in other institutions through the mainstream media,
which motivated them to develop demands of their
own.

Hard Stuff

There are a lot of challenges in this work that we
don't always have great answers to, and we thought
we would share a few of them here. Our hope is that
other people will bring their own twist to this work
and come up with great solutions to things we
struggled with.

We had a hard time cultivating organizers and
keeping track of people. Since we don't have
control over when we are in contact with prisoners,
we were dependent on them deciding to call us and
couldn't do anything if they didn't. That meant we
often didn't know if people had been transferred or
sent to seg - we just stopped hearing from them,
which also sometimes happened because folks just
didn't feel like calling for a bit. As a result,
organizers were taking some significant risks and, if
they experienced reprisals, we wouldn't know and so
were slow responding to support them.

Similarly, the very local nature of our project was
both a strength and weakness. By focusing on one
facility, we could be very reliable and also have a

very thorough knowledge of conditions, but it also
meant that we couldn't do much if people were
transferred. This was tied to our phone plan, which
made it expensive (or sometimes impossible) to
receive calls from any other prison. Some groups
have tried to respond to this by operating multiple
phone lines for different facilities, but we have so far
not done this. We do occasionally respond to calls we
get from other places, especially if prisoners are
reaching out to tell us they are taking action (our
number really got around), but we are not able to be
reliable around this.

Our closed collective model had some challenges,
but it was also a strength, since it allowed us to
move quickly and be nimble in responding to events,
and also to develop a really good group dynamic
among a handful of highly motivated people (never
more than 6). But it also meant that replacing people
when they left was really hard, which led to us
taking a six month hiatus at one point after the
phone line had been run by just two people for about
a year (which is a 12 hours a day commitment, seven
days a week).

The high cost of the phone line and the PO box
have been a challenge at times, since the costs stay
about the same every month but our ability to raise
money is mostly limited to times when there is an
exciting action happening. This got worse as people
were transferred, since we tried to stay in touch
with them, but ended up on the hook for hundreds of
dollars in long distance fees. We responded to this
by giving out our personal phone numbers to people
who got transferred who we wanted to stay in touch
with, but this has the effect of transferring costs to
the prisoners and it also creates problems in terms
of safety and privacy (you probably don't want your
personal phone number floating around a prison
with a reputation for being a friendly girl).

And as always, recuperation is never far from our
minds. A lot of the demands made by prisoners are
shared by the system itself — the prison system also
wants less overcrowding, more programming,
§ypports for mental health and addiction, regular
schedules around range and yard time, and so on.
One of the main ways the prison system reforms
itself is by physically expanding, building new
prisons. Some of our members have tried to respond
to this by starting another project specifically
opposing prison expansion, which you can learn
more about here: escapingtomorrowscages.org. We
have been more successful in avoiding recuperation
than some other prisoner support projects, who have
continued advocating for specific facilities for people
with mental illnesses at the same time as the
province is announcing it is building new prisons
specifically for such people. But we can always do
better.

To Conclude

It's not that prisoners are a revolutionary class, but
there are unique opportunities in and around prison.
Prison is a factory for reproducing subordinate roles
within dominant power relationships by creating
trauma and exclusion. When we do the work to
elevate the voices of people on the inside, we can
help interrupt that cycle.

In a small way, we have seen the Barton Jail become
assite of politicization and empowerment, making
marginalized people feel strong and supported. We
can lift each other up, and the struggles for basic
human dignity underway inside do make us all more
free on the outside.

We in BAPSOP are no different than the people on
the other end of the phone — we too risk prison
through the lives we lead, and and we too live in its
shadow. We see ourselves as personally invested in
ending the prison system, even as our motivations
are also ethical and strategic. Understanding this 15
makes it easier to step into your role in the struggle
against prison on the outside — to be independently
invested in fighting and winning, rather than just
being a supporter.

We would love to hear your reflections and
experiences. If you do prisoner solidarity work or are
interested in starting, you should definitely get in
touch with us at bartonsolidarityproject@riseup.net.

13
Further Reading

For more on the idea that struggle is constant, we
were inspired by workers' inquiry from the sixties
and seventies in Italy, where the phrase used was
lotta continua. You can check out the great book The
Golden Horde by Nanni Balestrini and Primo
Moroni, especially the end of chapter 5 and the start
of chapter 6.

For more on participation and refusal, see Locked
Up, by Alfredo Bonnano

For more on how rebels on the inside and on the
outside have different goals and roles and about how
to resist recuperation, see A Crime Called Freedom,
by Os Cangaceiros

For more on how the prison system in Canada has
evolved over the last thirty years, see Taking the
Rap: Women Doing Time for Society's Crimes, by
Ann Hansen

For a summary of recent hunger strikes in Canada,
including the ones in Barton, see Chip Away at It: A
Year of Covid-Era Hunger Strikes in Canada's
Prisons, by MJ Adams

14--
Hamilton, 2023
bartonsolidarityproject@riseup.net