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CR in the Media: Summer and Fall Highlights

This summer, Critical Resistance (CR) has been hard at work in our projects and campaigns against policing and imprisonment. As we continue chipping away at the prison industrial complex, our work to provide analysis, history, and common sense understanding of abolition remains central to how we organize. Check out the latest hits featuring CR in the media and bringing abolition into the mainstream.

WATCH: The 5-Year Fight to Shut Down ‘War Games Training’ in the Bay Area

“We know very well that police departments and the institution of policing is about controlling communities…[This victory] was about stripping power away from the system of policing itself.”
For over five years, CR has been part of the Stop Urban Shield Coalition. This year, we achieved a tremendous victory in putting Urban Shield, the world’s largest SWAT training, to an end. Check out this video by Colorlines that covers our work and victory.

What is Prison Abolition?

By John Washington

“Critical Resistance’s Ehehosi—who served 14 years in a Virginia prison as a political prisoner, in his view—emphasized the need for food co-ops, housing co-ops, and other means of offering people affordable and healthy means to live and survive—with the end goal of building community—so that we can deal with tensions in our own way and don’t need to rely on armed police and incarceration. ‘When you’re poor, and you don’t know when your next meal is going to come, everything gets a lot harder,” Ehehosi said. “It’s not just about closing down prisons, but the whole complex.'”Read the article.

‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE’

By Ruairi Arrieta-Kenna
“There are certain reforms that seek to fix or improve or tweak the way that the prison industrial complex functions,” Shehk says, “and then there are reforms that actually seek to chip away at its power.” It’s the latter that abolitionists seek, he says.

Regarding the prison industrial complex—a term many abolitionists use to refer to the collective of prisons, jails and detention centers, and the structures that support them, like bail, police and more—Schenwar says, “Once we understand that basically its roots are rotten, then we understand that we can’t just replace certain aspects of it or improve it or make prison kinder and gentler; we actually have to uproot it.”

The Problem with Bail isn’t the Bondsman, it’s
the State

By Lily Fahsi-Haskell and Mohamed Shehk

“The story of SB 10 is a familiar one of policy reform gone haywire, with politicians manipulating community interests towards political gain in a final gut-and-amend maneuver. As movements fight to scale back the reach of the prison-industrial complex, the shift from victory to potential loss is a harsh reminder of the nature and aims of imprisonment. Imprisonment enforces social control in order to uphold economic, racial and social orders for the state to function as designed; that some private entities are able to make a profit by exploiting this enforcement of social control is merely capitalizing on its function, and not the cause of imprisonment. Thus, reforms that attack private profit as their end goal but do not target the state or its capacity to cage people are even more prone to result in mere shifts to the shape of imprisonment, rather than steps towards its dismantlement.”

What Advocates are Saying about South Carolina’s Refusal to Evacuate Prisoners in Florence’s Path

By Jack Herrera

“The imprisoned population is literally the most vulnerable to a storm, and, as such, must be the first to be evacuated by a society that has any humanity. By not evacuating prisoners to the safety afforded to everyone else, South Carolina is essentially sentencing people behind bars to premature death.”