Donate

Seeds through Concrete: Issue 43 of The Abolitionist is out now!

This isn’t just a new issue—it’s a lifeline in a time of escalating repression.

Issue 43: Seeds through Concrete confronts the tightening grip of censorship, surveillance, and state control—featuring surrealist strategy in the Black radical tradition with kai lumumba barrow and Gallery of the Streets, Emily Hobson’s research on HIV/AIDS activism inside prisons, resistance to mass disappearances under El Salvador’s Bukele regime, and cross-wall analysis of expanding mail bans and surveillance in US prisons, alongside powerful reprints from Orisanmi Burton, Mariame Kaba, and Garrett Felber.

With censorship and repression inside and outside of prisons rising, this issue takes creative risks: layered language, symbolism, and subtle code-switching shape the text in hopes it slips past censors and is planted where it’s needed most. Every page is a tactful act of subversion—and an offering.

Across these pages, imprisoned organizers and outside allies break down censorship and repression and share the tools we need to outmaneuver it all—behind bars, on campuses, and in movements refusing to be erased.

Issue 43 is now en route to 4,800 imprisoned subscribers and over 400 paid subscribers and movement partners outside of cages. Print copies are limited edition, so make sure you sign up today to support free subscriptions to prisoners and receive your very own copy.

 Subscribe or donate now: bit.ly/abby-subscribe

This issue is a signal. A bridge. A refusal to be disappeared. Our lives depend on it.

What’s inside?

Read the Letter from the Editor’s below, and the two sneak peeks here. 

 

 

Issue 43 Letter from the Editors

SPRING-SUMMER 2025

 

Dearest Readers,

This issue is for everyone who has ever found themselves surveilled, silenced, or told they couldn’t speak for themselves. It’s for those who already know what it means to have their letters intercepted, their art returned, their lifelines cut. And it’s for those just beginning to realize how deeply state repression operates—not only behind bars, but in classrooms, movement spaces, at the borders, in book bans, and in the tightening grip of “law and order” rhetoric everywhere.

In Issue 43, we confront the accelerating attacks on expression, dissent, organizing—and on anyone and everyone brave enough to demand a life worth living. But more than that, we document the cunning, creative, and collective resistance that has always risen to push back.

For this issue’s Feature Analysis, we reprint Mariame Kaba’s “Grounding Thoughts,” originally written for the Return to Sender exhibition—an urgent take on how systems of confinement target meaning-making, memory, and connection both historically and in our current landscape. In our extended editors’ introduction, we draw connections across the issue: how repression is intensifying, and how people continue to conspire, create, and connect across hostile conditions.

From surrealism as strategy in the Black radical tradition—where dreamscapes and symbolism refuse the logics of surveillance and state legibility—to subversive, peer-led health education in prisons and organizing against immigrant detention in New York, this issue traces how our movements and communities maneuver through surveillance and control. Issue 43’s Feature Reflection with kai lumumba barrow reminds us that when the state demands clarity and confession, surrealism offers coded refusal and resistance. Her work through Gallery of the Streets embodies that legacy: art that cannot be flattened, commodified, or easily contained— art that insists on freedom, even when it must travel underground. Emily Hobson’s research on HIV/AIDS activism inside prisons highlights how imprisoned people built life-saving peer education programs under conditions of intense scrutiny in the 1980s-1990s. Using role-plays, layered messaging, and radical care, they protected each other from both illness and oppression—even when state recognition came with costs that threatened to neutralize their work.

The repression we document here is not past tense or limited to prisons. As we go to print, Trump is openly pursuing deporting US citizens criminalized as the “worst of the worst” to authoritarian regimes like El Salvador under Nayib Bukele, where over 75,000 people have been disappeared under a militarized “state of emergency.” These policies aren’t hypothetical. In this issue, we feature a powerful article from El Salvador’s movimiento de familias, relatives of imprisoned people in Bukele’s dungeons where tens of thousands have been disappeared without charge or trial, who resist repression in support of their loved ones and for collective liberation.

And here in the US, the roots of repression run deep, too. As we write, student encampments across the US continually face raids and various attacks for demanding an end to the US-fueled-and-financed genocide in Gaza. The crackdown on Palestine solidarity organizing, and the weaponization of antisemitism to justify it, echo the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and Third World liberation movements throughout history.

Meanwhile, the housing crisis worsens daily. Over 650,000 people in the US are unhoused while luxury units sit vacant and police budgets balloon. Rent strikes, mutual aid, and housing takeovers are met with militarized evictions and surveillance. We are witnessing the criminalization of poverty as part of the same continuum that locks people up for surviving, remembering, and refusing abandonment.

As the global tide of fascism swells, we know we need to turn to imprisoned people. Prisons have always been where repression is refined, tested, and made routine, and, where resistance strategies—subtle, poetic, collective—are forged and passed along. What happens behind the walls reveals not just where we are, but where we’re headed, unless we fight to change course.

For Issue 43’s features, then, we took several responses to the Cross-Wall questionnaire we printed in the previous anti-war issue (42 in December 2024) and synthesized the experiences of several of our imprisoned subscribers with research by Prison Policy Initiative on the rapid spread of mail restrictions and surveillance across the US prison system. This Feature Data is presented alongside two feature resources: a reprint of Orisanmi Burton’s open letter responding to prisons rejecting his book Tip of the Spear, and an excerpt from AK Press of Garrett Felber’s forthcoming biography of Martin Sostre. Together, these pieces trace the growing architecture of repression—not just to name it, but to equip our movements with what we need to outmaneuver it and build worlds beyond its reach.

To our imprisoned readers: You know this terrain intimately. Some of you have lost access to this paper. You’ve taught us how to speak through the barriers, to build with limited tools, to stay sharp. We can’t publish every strategy in these pages, but we hope you’ll feel the subtleties—the clues, tributes, and tactics embedded between the lines. This paper exists because of you.

To our readers outside: This is not the beginning, and it doesn’t stop at the walls. The same forces now threatening your books, your protests, your loved ones’ messages, and your safety have long tried to disappear entire communities. If you’re only now waking up to this reality, don’t panic. Get organized. Lean into community. Learn from those who’ve been resisting for decades—because repression is not only a warning sign—it’s a blueprint. And so is our resistance.

Whether inside or outside: We’re in a moment of deep clampdown—and also renewed coordination, creativity, care, and struggle. This issue isn’t just a routine edition. It’s a wakeup call: to strategize, to share tools, to study our histories, and to refuse disconnection and isolation. Our lives depend on it.

We hope this paper continues to be a lifeline. A signal. And a bridge.

Until all are free,

– The Abolitionist Editorial Collective

 

CONTRIBUTORS
  • AK Press
  • Anastasia Franco
  • Charles Reiland
  • Christopher Baker
  • Christopher Harbridge
  • Danielle Squillante
  • Dave Annarelli
  • Devante Gilbert-Bey
  • Emily Hobson
  • Garrett Felber
  • Gary Farlow
  • Grazzia Grimaldi
  • Hugo Gonzalez
  • Jacinda Lee Allenbough
  • Jack Morgan
  • James Bauhaus
  • James Pierce
  • Jeri Shawah Pyrson
  • John Santoro Jr
  • kai lumumba barrow
  • Kareem Cobbins
  • Mariame Kaba
  • Orisanmi Burton
  • Prison Policy Initiative
  • Roberta Bell
  • Samah Sisay
  • Stevie Wilson
  • Suzanne Shaffer
  • Talib Williams
  • Tania Mattos
  • Tim Branot
  • Travis Jordan
  • Tutankhamon E Waterman
  • Yanci López
ARTISTS
  • ABO Comix
  • Alex Aldrich Barrett
  • Critical Resistance
  • Erik Ruin
  • Gary Farlow
  • Jose Cotto
  • Jose Villareal
  • Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative
  • kai lumumba barrow
  • Meredith Stern
  • Michael Eaton
  • Monica Trinidad
  • People’s Paper Co-op
  • Roger Peet
  • Rommy Torrico
  • William Estrada
CR’s EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE
  • Billy Ray Boyer
  • Dylan Brown
  • Jess Ho
  • Liz Atkins-Pattenson
  • Mar Golub
  • Molly Porzig
  • Rehana Lerandeau
  • Susana Draper
TRANSLATOR
  • Luigi Celentano
DESIGNER
  • William Ramirez
COPY EDITORS
  • Anna Stratton
  • Bonnie Feldberg
  • Chiara Bercu
  • Conrad Wolfe
  • Kahn Lam
  • Katherine Downs
  • Kristen Haven
  • Letecia Garcia
  • Mason Mimi
  • Miles Toth