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ABSTRACT
Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of flourishing, free and caring communities. Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.
Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. With increasing rates of incarceration and migrant detention, especially among women and racialized communities (Roberts 2017; United Nations (UN) General Assembly 2010; Zinger 2019), large numbers of people are being torn from their families, forced to leave their life and everything they know behind. People in prison or on parole, the undocumented, and those in immigrant detention share experiences of dislocation, disenfranchisement, racism, violence and dehumanization. Often, they are confined in the same facility. In this bluntest of ways, the ‘problems’ of prison and of immigrant detention converge.
But it may be prison abolitionist ‘solutions’ that matter most in this convergence. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of flourishing, free and caring communities (Davis 2003). Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.
Mutual aid makes it possible both to survive the present – solidarity as resistance – and to imagine and build ‘decarceral futures’ (Aiken and Silverman 2019; Spade 2020; Kaba and Spade 2020). Particularly when seeking help from state and official sources is a dead end and an active harm, people organize to help each other. Perhaps there is no refugee camp, no migrant community, no institution of confinement, no group of survivors, no low-income neighborhood where people of color live, where that isn’t the case.
In prisons and migrant detention facilities, mutual aid is a way of life and survival. Extensive research has shown that mutual aid or peer-support is very beneficial for criminalized people (Maruna and LeBel 2003; Pollack 2008; Sheehan, McIvor, and Trotter 2011), yet the oppressive carceral system typically does not support it. In carceral settings, relationships are highly structured and controlled (Pollack 2007), while solidarity and even friendship among prisoners is repressed (Anonymous Prisoner 4 2017; Fayter and Payne 2017; Law 2012; McCorkel 2003). Despite this, many people with lived experience of incarceration advocate for and support other prisoners and criminalized people, organizing resistance to the carceral state. Abolitionist praxis requires a politics built around this type of solidarity in action.
As a former prisoner who spent almost four years in prison, I (co-author Rachel Fayter) can personally attest to the importance of mutual aid. When I first arrived at a new institution, I relied on those who were there before me to learn the rules and how to navigate the system. I also quickly learned that fighting for my rights would result in being targeted by staff. In federal custody there were technically several prisoner employment positions focused on mutual-aid, such as inmate committee, grievance coordinator, and peer-support. These jobs were considered ‘positions of trust’ within the institution, which effectively meant that anyone who had a misconduct was not allowed to work. Some of these positions remained unfilled for years at a time, but informal mutual aid is persistent; when the sanctioned opportunities were not available prisoner support moved underground.
Engaging in ‘everyday acts of resistance’ (Scott 1985, 1990) prisoners often made care packages for new arrivals, with hygiene products, coffee, and stamps. We cooked for one another, lent clothing to someone who had a visit, and shared a book or music album. These acts of kindness were prohibited by the system and anyone who participated risked misconduct charges, which reduces one’s chance for parole. Despite the risk, we strive to live in solidarity.
Resistance and solidarity coincide in mutual aid (Medina 2013). This convergence drove our own opening workshop at the 2019 Decarceral Futures conference. Walls to Bridges courses bring together incarcerated and non-incarcerated students as classmates (wallstobridges.ca). W2B learning circles are founded on the idea that we need each other’s shared knowledges and our incommensurabilities (Gaztambide-Fernández 2012). Examining the hierarchical and oppressive power relations that structure institutions of punishment as well as education, students forge, test, challenge and strengthen other ways of relating. To teach, learn and unlearn together: education as mutual aid.
Since the militarization of the US-Mexico border, Covid and the 2020 uprising against anti-Black racism, both existing and emergent networks of mutual aid are becoming more intentional, being coordinated into larger networks of care, refined and guided by those from marginalized communities.
‘Caremongering’ is a human trait; it is also an abolitionist building block (Chopra 2020). It is a collective deepening of webs of relationship that are neither defined nor ‘managed’ by carceral or capitalist structures. Perhaps these long-established relational structures, coordinated networks of collective care, provide the grounds for an alternative conceptualization of ‘citizenship’ (Abu El-Haj 2009), one based not on papers or the nation-state, but on situated engagement in mutual aid.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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