Dear friends and supporters of Critical Resistance (CR),
As we reflect on 2024, a year marked by global crises and increased targeting of our movements, we are grateful for the resilience and commitment of our community, including your invaluable support. This year, CR has not only continued to advance our mission to make prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition common sense and irresistible, but has also achieved significant campaign victories, created concrete tools to further abolitionist organizing, actively supported internationalist and cross-sector liberation struggles, and made strategic internal enhancements to ensure our organization is robust and ready for the uncertain times ahead.
As part of CR’s ongoing commitment to sharp analysis of – and response to – shifting conditions, we have embarked upon a 5-year strategic plan for the organization, a plan which will see us bolstering the skills and organizing capacity of our membership, deepening connections between PIC abolition and other liberatory organizing fronts, advancing abolitionist campaigns
and analysis, and bringing currently and formerly imprisoned comrades more meaningfully and consistently into all facets of our work. This long-term arc of movement-building work, and the collective process of creating and articulating it, is a steadying force for CR members during this period of rapidly escalating repression that seeks to destabilize our communities and movements.
Across this first year of our strategic plan, CR continued our fight to close California prisons and keep them closed, built community support to end immigrant detention in New York, seeded the ground for anti-policing work in Portland, all the while bolstering our political relationships with imprisoned people, sharing organizing strategies with other liberatory formations, and even launched a new chapter in Central Appalachia! Additionally, CR released two bilingual issues of The Abolitionist newspaper to over 5,000 people inside prisons, jails, and detention centers for free – Issue #41 on ecological justice and Issue #42 on anti-war organizing.
Upon engaging with already tumultuous conditions in 2025, we wanted to share a compilation of campaign and project updates and wins, political education resources, and more from 2024 (all attached in the pdf embedded below). We utilize these materials in our analysis- building and organizing, and we hope you will too.
CR has remained true to our work wielding PIC abolition as part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness, and the need for abolitionist advances has become even more dire with this current period of rising fascism and increased deployment of imprisonment, policing, and surveillance against our communities. No matter the threat, it is essential to grow and fortify our struggle across movements and geographies. This is especially true as we fight to resist the organized abandonment of our communities and intensification of fascist policies.
So, whether you are a community organizer, movement partner, volunteer who sustains us with your time and effort, a general supporter of CR and PIC abolition, or newly abolition-curious – we invite you to take up the mantle of abolition alongside us. Continue to be in relationship with us and other radical organizers and organizations, wherever you may be, and bring more people into the struggle for freedom. A world without walls and cages is possible. Together, let’s fight like hell to bring it into being.
In solidarity,
– CR’s Co-Directors, Development Team, and National Fundraisers