About this Event
How to Abolish Prisons - Ottawa Book Launch
Join us at SAW to celebrate the launch of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment with authors and abolition activists Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché. Presented by Criminalization and Punishment Education Project and Octopus Books. Fundraising in support of the Coalition Against the Proposed Pr*son legal fund to stop Ford’s Kemptville Pr*son plan and save farmland, as well as Prisoner Legal Supports.
Saturday, May 4th, 11:00 AM
Club SAW, 67 Nicholas St., Ottawa
In How to Abolish Prisons, long-time organizers Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché reveal a movement that has made the struggle for abolition as real as the institutions they are fighting against.
Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, Herzing and Piché provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is, what initiatives it has launched, how it organizes itself, and how its protagonists build the day-to-day practice of politics. Readers sit in on the Winnipeg rideshares of Bar None and the meetings of the Chicago Community Bail Fund as they assess the utility of politicized mutual aid. They follow the campaigns and coalitions of Critical Resistance in Oakland and San Francisco and Survived and Punished in New York City, and learn about the prisoner correspondence projects that keep activists behind bars and outside them in constant coordination.
Abolitionist campaigns are constructing on-the-ground initiatives across North America to deconstruct carceral society and build resistant communities. Through the words, deeds, and personalities of this beautifully peopled movement, How to Abolish Prisons emerges as a stunning snapshot of a movement’s thinking in motion.
“How to Abolish Prisons is hope in action. It is right on time.” —Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
“How to Abolish Prisons shows us that abolition is possible, because the work is already happening. This illuminating, grounded documentation of real efforts to dismantle carceral systems makes liberatory visions tangible. How to Abolish Prisons is an antidote to hopelessness. You will emerge from this book saying, ‘We can do this!’” —Maya Schenwar, co-author of Pr*son by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms
Rachel Herzing is an organizer, activist, and advocate fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment. Herzing was executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left and progressive social movements; codirector of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the Pr*son industrial complex; and director of research and training at Creative Interventions a community resource that developed interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services. She lives in New York City.
Justin Piché is Full Professor in the Department of Criminology and Director of the Carceral Geography (Col)laboratory at the University of Ottawa. He is also Co-editor of the (JPP) and a founding member of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project (CPEP). As part of CPEP, Justin was involved in the #NOPE | No Ottawa Pr*son Expansion campaign that stopped a $1 billion J*il from being built in Ottawa. CPEP is also currently involved in the Coalition Against the Proposed Pr*son’s fight to stop a new $500 million Pr*son from being built on the grounds of the former Kemptville Agricultural College that includes prime agricultural land, floodplain and a Rideau River watershed creek. He lives in Ottawa, which is located on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinaabe Territory.
How to Abolish Prisons is published by Haymarket Books.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
SAW, 67 Nicholas Street, Ottawa, Canada
CAD 0.00