Prison Abolition: The Struggle for Dignity
Dalton Nolan
1/17/2025
JLS is a prisoner-led prison abolition organization composed of incarcerated individuals who are struggling to dismantle the highly exploitative, brutalizing, and oppressive prison-industrial complex and the various institutions that sustain such a system. In line with this, JLS strives to raise awareness about the injustices happening in jails and prisons, the degrading living conditions of these carceral facilities, and provide political and legal resources to empower individuals to fight against their oppression. As such, the long-term vision of the JLS is the complete dismantling of the punitive prison-industrial complex and its replacement with a system based on restoration, rehabilitation, and reconciliation. In the short term, JLS fights to improve the living conditions of imprisoned human beings. Toward this aim, JLS organized the “Shut ‘Em Down” (SED) Campaign.
The SED Campaign was a coordinated campaign that sought to raise awareness of the horrid living conditions of those in jails and prisons and to demand their immediate improvement. A major objective of this campaign was to unite the organizing of those inside the jails and prisons with community organizations and supporters on the outside. Both parties were to build up support and awareness of the campaign, with those on the outside hosting a variety of events, such as letter-writings, educationals, and demonstrations. All of this was in the lead-up to the “Week of Solidarity,” a week designated by JLS as the time in which those on the inside would withhold their labor and stop all commissary spending, severely hurting the prison-industrial complex from within; meanwhile, outside groups and individuals would organizing mass demonstrations outside of jails, prisons, and ICE facilities, with the clear aim of bringing awareness to the monstrosity that is the prison industrial complex.
To those who are aware of the horror of the prison-industrial system, the actions of JLS and other groups and individuals fighting for prison abolition are noble; however, there are many working people in the US who don’t understand the systemic problems inherent in our punitive carceral system. To many of them, prison abolition is a scary concept that threatens to release the worst elements of society upon us. This line of thinking is incorrect, but it isn’t surprising that many people hold these beliefs given how extensive the propaganda in all forms of media has come to present the prison-industrial complex and its many related institutions as the bulwark between society and the “criminals.” All of us, at one point or another, carried these beliefs. Prison abolition is a must for our society. Under our current economic system, prisons serve the interests of the owning class. This interest lies in exploiting slave labor, making money off prison contracts, privatizing services at the expense of visitors and the imprisoned folk, and removing dissenters.
The slave labor element of the prison-industrial complex is by far the most widely known, with prisons across the US forcing incarcerated people to work for pennies in exchange for making companies extremely wealthy. To drive this point home, the US’s Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” meaning that slave labor in jails and prisons is given legal power to continue existing.
Prison contracts are less widely talked about but are no less exploitative. Prison contracting is where a government contracts out the management of a jail, prison, or detention center to a company, making that institution under the purview of the company contracted. In this arrangement, private prisons make money as long as they remain open and keep people imprisoned. This means that private prisons have no material interest in trying to engage in rehabilitative or restorative services, as that would hurt their bottom-line. This profit-making scheme is further maximized by slave labor. On the flipside, public prisons, while not directly privatized and directly operated under a profit-seeking system, are in bed with companies in a variety of ways that allow for-profit schemes to infest these institutions. Whether through contracting out a particular prison service or needing to supply certain goods to a prison, these contracts can be just as lucrative as private prisons. This means that all corporations are just as invested in the continuation of the prison industrial complex, even if they do not directly operate a private prison. From visitations to commissaries to other services, whatever miniscule “savings” they have from their slave labor or whatever their loved ones have after making their bosses richer is then directly back into the pockets of the owning class. The end result is that the prison industrial complex is a system of continual supply and demand, where in the supply is working and oppressed people and the demand is the ceaseless drive for higher and higher profits.
Finally, prisons also serve as tools for silencing dissent. Throughout the history of prisons, those who challenged the dominant order of things often found themselves behind bars, with the ruling classes of the state hoping this would destroy any ability they would have to struggle against their rule. And this state of things hasn’t ended, as the US has plenty of political prisoners to this day, some who have been locked up for years. Additionally, political figures aren’t the only type of dissenters to be arrested to keep them from organizing for better material conditions. The history of the labor movement is fraught with examples of the US arresting labor organizers, most commonly during strikes, with the intent of disrupting organized labor’s struggle against the bosses. For example, during the Amazon strike a few weeks ago, an Amazon driver was arrested by New York City Police for stopping his van in support of the strike. This scene and many others in history demonstrate that cops are not friends of working people and that prisons are not to stop the imaginary “criminal” but a tool to enforce the state’s and, by extension, the owning class’s power. This characterization of prisons as a tool of the owning class is why many systemic problems continue. Rather than fund social services that address problems like homelessness, these systemic issues are criminalized, and working and oppressed people are punished for something the owning class caused itself. Some will ask, “What about violent offenders?” and while this is a valid question, it is problematic because it is placed in opposition to improving the living conditions of the majority of imprisoned folk, who are mostly non-violent offenders. What that question serves to do is not actually address a concern but make prison abolition appear naive and dangerous so that the inhumane system of the prison-industrial complex appears like the lesser of two evils, prolonging a horrendous system of exploitation, oppression, and brutalization. Must I mention the murder of Breonna Taylor and David McAtee, the systemic sexual assault of children through LMPD’s Explorer Program, the violent repression of the protestors during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings in Louisville and elsewhere, the targeting of pro-Palestinian supporters across the entire country, or the further criminalization of homelessness as seen in HB5?
The Brigade first heard about the SED Campaign a few months ago when we attended a virtual meeting organized by the Tacoma International Workers of the World. We firmly believed in the cause of prison abolition, and we signed on to the campaign, quickly gathering like-minded folks to organize Louisville’s participation. Our first event was a community letter-writing event at the end of August, where attendees wrote to those incarcerated in the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections (LMDC). Following this, the Brigade crafted ten demands for the Louisville Metro government and LMDC, demanding immediate improvement to the living conditions of those imprisoned in LMDC. We gathered hundreds of signatures, most of which we got while participating in the Louisville Pride Festival in September. In October, the Brigade hosted an educational featuring local organizer Sonja Wilde-de Vries, who gave an incredible talk on political prisoners in the US.
The Brigade also issued a call to action for a friend of the Brigade, Collin, who was suffering from immense pain caused by a toothache. He pleaded with the jail authorities to see a dentist but was refused, which ultimately led to Collin waking up one day with an incredibly swollen face and unbearable pain emanating from his mouth. Nonetheless, he was still asked to report to his kitchen duties. Collin reached out to us, telling us what happened, and pleaded with the Brigade to provide him with some kind of relief. The Brigade was enraged and quickly responded to his pleas, publishing a call to action on our social media, offering our followers a script to read or write when they called or emailed the jail, demanding Collin receive the medical treatment he desperately needed. In a matter of hours, the numerous phone calls and emails broke through the jail authorities’ resolve, and Collin received the medical care he needed—all within twelve hours of the initial call to action.
The Brigade concluded its participation in the 2024 SED Campaign by speaking before Metro Council on Thursday, December 12. Being the last meeting for some council people because they didn’t get re-elected, Metro Council was in a prolonged self-congratulating mood that lasted for two hours, all the while keeping those who signed up to speak before Metro Council on important issues waiting and waiting and waiting. This infuriated all who were in attendance, which were local leftist and progressive groups who had no interest in applauding the “efforts” of Metro Council. In fact, we all found the self-congratulatory nature of the council people to be incredibly disrespectful and evidence of their sheer disconnect from regular working and oppressed people. This only added weight to our addresses to Metro Council. One by one, three Briagde organizers spoke before Metro Council, highlighting the horrors of the prison-industrial system, the ten demands we had on the immediate improvement to the living conditions of those imprisoned in LMDC, and the systemic neglect of imprisoned folks easily observable in LMDC. After we spoke, we stood in solidarity with the other groups that spoke on issues of funding public transportation, addressing the pollution of Rubbertown, tenants issues, etc.
Through my radicalization, I came to despise the prison-industrial complex, but it was the SED Campaign that really revealed the problems of incarceration in the US. I don’t have any direct connections to jails or prisons. I’ve had family who were in jail and imprisoned, but I never got anywhere close to experiencing any of that, not even as a visitor, as all of those experiences my family members went through were before my time. So, when I began working on the SED Campaign, I came to it without any real-world experience to speak of, yet that didn’t stop me from developing a greater sense of connection with those imprisoned. From going with another organizer to visit Collin in jail to hearing about how jails and prisons privatized all these services to funnel money up toward the owning class impacted me; it made me see prisons in a different light. Again, I had no love for prisons or cops before the campaign, but those few months showed me just how deep the depravity goes. I can now confidently say that jails, prisons, and cops in America under this rotten economic system are not there for the safety and protection of working and oppressed people. These rotten institutions serve either to enrich the owning class or to enrich themselves with leftover scraps. This campaign has reinforced my position on the prison-industrial complex that I will hold dear in my future organizing work.
The work of JLS and of all prison abolitionists must be lauded, but their work is not finished. 2024 has passed, and 2025 is upon us. The work of JLS and other prison abolitionists isn’t just a single aspect of the movement toward the liberation of working and oppressed people but an integral part of each and every other struggle currently being waged. The fight against homeless, the fight for Queer rights and liberation, the fight for Black liberation, the fight for a contract at a unionized workplace—all of these struggles and more share the same enemy with the same forces and material at their disposal. In all of these struggles, the owning class calls upon the prison-industrial complex to crush and silence all who dare challenge the status quo, meaning that the prison-industrial complex must be destroyed for any of us to achieve true liberation. This is a lesson that was reinforced in my work on the SED campaign and is one that many new organizers need to take to heart. The struggle of prison abolition, like most other struggles, never ceases, which means that there is no better time to get involved than now.
Solidarity with and all power to incarcerated human beings and working and oppressed people the world over!