This coalition actively draws connections between national and international struggles and between political prisoners and social prisoners, who are mostly working-class victims of poverty, racism, marginalization and neglect. Our position regarding prison abolition is informed by the need for an alternative to capitalism because capitalism  is carceral and authoritarian whether in its neoliberal or statist forms.

Source:  https://worldwithoutprisons.wordpress.com/about/

The COVID-19 pandemic has given new urgency to the need to abolish prisons, refugee camps, migrant detention centers and the inhuman capitalist carceral system. Prisoner and refugee populations are facing an imminent death sentence from the fast spread of the virus in the crowded and unsanitary conditions of prisons, camps and detention centers worldwide. Meanwhile, various states’ continued reliance on prison labor, including the production of hygiene and medical equipment, has left inmates vulnerable to infection due to the impossibility of social distancing in production and has also exacerbated longstanding conditions of wage theft and chronic overwork.

There have been protests and hunger strikes inside detention centers and prisons in the U.S., Iran, Italy, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Lebanon, France, Canada, India, Egypt and elsewhere, as well as prison breaks in Iran and Brazil.  Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey have been denied early release and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons have been completely cut off from the outside world and denied the right to use the prisons’ public phones.   Prison abolitionist and migrant solidarity groups are calling for a comprehensive plan to release people from jails, prisons, and detention centers and have organized protest car caravans outside some detention centers.

This pandemic compels us to create a global prison abolitionist movement that comprehends and confronts the connections between prisons, refugee camps, detention centers, surveillance infrastructures, and racism, heteropatriarchy, sexism, imperialism and the inhumanity of the global capitalist system.  It demands that prison abolitionists offer alternatives to all forms of state violence, exploitation and domination.

This coalition actively draws connections between national and international struggles and between political prisoners and social prisoners, who are mostly working-class victims of poverty, racism, marginalization and neglect. Our position regarding prison abolition is informed by the need for an alternative to capitalism because capitalism  is carceral and authoritarian whether in its neoliberal or statist forms.

We are living through a critical m