Beloved Readers of The Abolitionist,

Behold our final issue of 2023–Issue 40 featuring articles on control units. Across the globe, state violence escalates to repress liberation movements. As referenced in this issue’s Critical Resistance (CR) Updates and Movement Highlights column (pg 22) and “Until All Are Free” Political Prisoner news (pg 26), in September of this year, 61 people affiliated with the Stop Cop City campaign in Atlanta were charged under Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law in an attempt to delegitimize the Stop Cop City movement as a “criminal conspiracy.” A month later on October 7, apartheid Israel escalated its genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza. With over 15,000 Palestinians murdered and over 35,000 injured in only eight weeks, the overlapping crises of Israel’s ongoing genocidal attacks which have collapsed Gaza’s healthcare system, COVID-19, and climate disaster have made conditions unlivable for over 2 million Palestinians, igniting powerful worldwide solidarity demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire and for Palestine to be free.

As we write this letter at the end of November before heading to print in early December, Israel and Palestine enter a temporary pause for a long-anticipated prisoner exchange resulting in the release of over 117 Palestinian political prisoners so far, most of whom are women and children detained indefinitely without trial or charge under Israel’s administrative detention. Meanwhile, Israel has continued raiding Palestinians homes in the West Bank, arresting over 116. From Palestine to the US, the systems and conditions we fight against are varied and distinct, yet the prison industrial complex (PIC) remains the boot on all of our necks—ready to criminalize, control, imprison, police, kill, harm, and repress our communities and our movements. At CR, we understand control units as a foundational—and particularly violent—repressive tool of the PIC we must vehemently oppose and organize to abolish.

While control units may vary in name, regulation, and logistics, across geographies they are an imprisonment strategy designed to break our will to resist. The issue’s feature analysis article ( page 4) by longtime anti-prison activist and author Nancy Kurshan traces the origins of the first control unit in the US, the campaign to shut down the first lockdown at USP Marion, the development of control units as a counterinsurgency strategy to destroy revolutionary movements on both sides of the wall, and the proliferation of control units since the 1980s. Similarly, in an interview with former political prisoner Susan Rosenberg (page 6), we examine how the Lexington High Security Unit in Kentucky was designed to torture and break women political prisoners as Susan reflects on a successful campaign to shut it down. Because resisting control units now in the 2020s is quite different than in the 1980s, we include an original piece by The Abolitionist Project Coordinator Molly Porzig on CR’s work with Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition supporting prisoners wage the largest action of its kind in US prison history. Based on conversations with coalition partners Marie Levin and “Comrade Pops,” the piece discusses the necessity and power of disciplined prisoner leadership, of cross-racial unity across imprisoned resistance, international solidarity, and family members fighting back all to defy solitary confinement.