Although we have many reasons to be against prisons and against this prison expansion project in particular, our motivations are profoundly anti-capitalist, since prison is an important part of how capitalism functions. However, we understand that not everyone will share this motivation, even if we have a shared goal of keeping this prison expansion project from happening. Therefore, while our primary goal is abolition, our secondary goal is to stop these prisons from being built, so we will need to find and reinforce common ground with others. Perhaps the best foundation from which to work is to identify the state, in the form of the provincial government, as a common adversary in this fight.

The state will try to undermine any anti-expansion organizing taking place, and the best way for it to do that is to take up a version of our demands and use them to justify expansion and reform; in a word, recuperation. Read More …

Prison is being restructured across the province, and at this time the process is focused on northern and eastern Ontario. These two strategies follow on a previous wave of prison expansion, heavily focused on Toronto but that also included a new prison in Windsor. There will be other waves after this one, probably aimed at south-western Ontario.

Both of these strategies double the prison capacity in the areas they affect. Although some of the projects involve replacing older prisons with new ones, the older ones are also being renovated. Because they are very likely to continue being used in some form, until they are demolished, they still represent capacity that the provincial prison system has at its disposal. Read More …