What we wrote about it at the time: A conversation about the movement for prison abolition and refusing the logic of race and sex that underpins the criminalisation and mass incarceration of communities.

With upwards of 7 million people (25% of the global prison population) currently under the control of its criminal justice system, the USA incarcerates more of its population than any other country in the world. At the same time, 11 million US immigrants are out of compliance with immigration law, at constant risk of harassment, detention and deportation. How are categories of race, sex, sexuality, gender and class mobilised to criminalise communities and create and maintain such carceral spaces? How does this compare to the situation here? And how are people organising in realisation that it is not enough to work to reform the system, but that the system itself is the problem?

Tourmaline is Activist-In-Residence at Barnard College’s Center for Research on Women, and Membership Director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University, and a leading cultural critic and writer on blackness and slavery. Charlene Sinclair is the Director of Centre for Race, Religion and Economic Democracy at Union Theological Seminary and co-organiser of the Cell Blocks and Border Stops conference.