By Jes Mason
Content Warning: this article includes mention of police violence, racialized attacks and substance use
How can people abolish prisons? How can communities resist the systemic violence that comes with policing and incarceration? How do organizers sustain the fight against the multi-billion-dollar prison-industrial complex (PIC)? These are the questions at the heart of activist Rachel Herzing and University of Ottawa criminology professor Justin Piché’s recent book, How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment.
Herzing is a longtime organizer and activist based in New York City, who co-directed abolitionist organization Critical Resistance. Piché is a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, where he is also the co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. He advocates against prison expansion and construction as a founding member of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project.
On Oct. 26, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) criminology professor Jessica Evans facilitated a book launch for How to Abolish Prisons featuring a panel with Herzing and Piché, alongside speakers Tiina Eldridge—a social worker specializing in trauma—and Robyn Maynard—an author focused on race and gender-based state violence. The event took place at the Workers’ Action Centre and was co-hosted by the TMU criminology department and the faculty of arts.
Critical Resistance defines PIC abolition as “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”
In an interview, Evans explained that abolitionism recognizes that prisons are an ineffective way to address harm in society. “Prisons themselves do nothing to prevent harm. In many cases, they reproduce and extend harm.” Evans mentioned that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are subject to trauma, unemployment, poverty and social isolation.
Evans added that the carceral system also harms survivors of violence and can sometimes increase the risk of future harm to victims. For victims of crimes, navigating the criminal justice system is often retraumatizing and dehumanizing. According to Evans, this punitive approach also consistently fails to encourage accountability.
Prison abolition is rooted in the understanding that modern prisons originated as a continuation of slavery through the forced labour of formerly enslaved Black people, Evans said. According to Critical Resistance, the contemporary PIC manifests in huge private profits. In Canada, Black and Indigenous people are highly overrepresented in the prison system.
“This [carceral] system injures, maims and kills people all the time,” said Piché. In the span of five weeks between August and September, nine Indigenous people were killed during police altercations in Canada, including 15-year-old Hoss Lightning. In July, Tylor Coore, an Afro-Indigenous man, was shot by Toronto police in Cabbagetown during a mental health crisis. On Monday, a Québec police officer shot Inuit twins Joshua and Garnet Papigatuk, killing Joshua.
To open the panel, Evans read a land acknowledgment identifying the land Toronto was built on as the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabeg. During the land acknowledgment, Evans added that the criminal legal system in Canada is historically and presently a tool of colonialism, and as such, “abolition cannot occur without decolonization. It’s through our shared responsibility to each other and the land that we might imagine and live in worlds free from carceral violence.”
Herzing said that she and Piché began writing How to Abolish Prisons in 2014, at a time when there was increasing awareness and education about PIC abolition. With their book, Herzing said they wanted to “speak to the how,” reflecting on strategies used to put abolitionist politics into practice.
While writing the book, Herzing and Piché spoke to prisoners’ rights and abolitionist activist groups throughout the United States and Canada. This included Rittenhouse, a Toronto-based organization led by Eldrige that advances transformative justice through public education, support groups and skills-building for communities.
Evans explained that the ideals of abolitionism are more broad than simply abolishing prisons. “Before we destroy or abolish prisons, we first need to build up communities so that people are resourced in ways that allow them to lead healthy and dignified lives,” Evans said. “If we lived in a world where people were adequately resourced, incidences of harm would be less likely.”
Piché mentioned several groups across Canada that are fighting against the PIC through services ranging from legal advocacy to mutual aid. Bar None, for example, is a Winnipeg-based organization that provides ride shares to family members visiting incarcerated people. In Vancouver, the Prisoners’ Justice Day Committee produces radio programming and hosts an annual memorial to raise awareness about prison abolition and deaths in custody. On the other side of the country in Montréal, the Prisoner Correspondence Project facilitates connections between 2SLGBTQIA+ prisoners and community members outside of prison.
In Toronto, Evans was a co-founder of a mutual aid effort called Toronto Prisoners Rights Project (TPRP). TPRP ran a jail hotline so prisoners could report on prison conditions and connect to resources. TPRP also raised over $350,000 for prisoners through direct donations during COVID-19.
Evans added that many organizations are already contributing to the work of abolitionism without adopting the label, although she encourages them to explicitly identify as abolitionist. This includes harm reduction efforts, “by reducing contact with police and increasing community forms of care.” Maynard echoed this during the panel. “To save harm reduction is absolutely an abolitionist struggle.”
Panellists then drew focus to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which they said was a “flashpoint” that called attention to the enduring violence within the United States’ carceral system. The convicted murder of George Floyd by police led to international protests—including one of the largest protests in Canadian history, according to Maynard—and a massive shift in public opinion towards defunding the police.
“We saw mass public consensus around the idea, not only [that] police violence has to end, but that policing is violence,” said Maynard.
According to a survey conducted by Ipsos, over 50 per cent of Canadians supported defunding the police in 2020. Since then, however, Canadian police budgets have continued to increase. In 2024, the Toronto police budget was $1.186 billion, an increase of $20 million from 2023. A recent study from the University of Toronto found there was “no consistent association” between police funding and crime rates.
“Criminalization is really in vogue,” Piché said. “We’re experiencing a lot of heavy conservative far-right backlash.” Panellists cited various issues, including the recent decision to close safe consumption sites in Ontario and the criminalization of pro-Palestine protestors.
Maynard added the prejudice is “the worst we’ve seen.”
Panelists also emphasized the importance of counting victories for the movement.
“It’s easy to be really dispirited about the post-so-called racial reckoning [of 2020],” Maynard said. “But it’s still helpful to think about the kinds of transformations in public consciousness that we did see.” Among these victories, Maynard mentioned the creation of mental health crisis response teams that mitigate police involvement in Toronto. In September, these services expanded citywide.
On TMU’s campus, another victory for the movement was the cancellation of the special constables program in June 2020, following organizing by the No Cops on Campus campaign and the Black Liberation Collective, as previously reported by The Eyeopener.
Panellists also discussed the importance of coalition building. “We need to join forces with people who may not think about the prison-industrial complex,” said Herzing.
“This is a long struggle. It’s existed for as long as these systems have existed,” said Piché. “We just have to find ways to build organizations, build the ideas, build the practices, do the work.”
According to Evans, TMU’s campus is a site of over-policing and surveillance. “The downtown area around [TMU] is an area that has been…progressively gutted of its social services.” In the absence of those services, she said, there is an increased police presence. “The hyper presence of police around TMU campus is a reflection of our current approach to what are, in reality, public health issues.”
“The vast majority of the problems that we encounter around campus are issues related to substance use, to homelessness, to mental health issues,” said Evans. ”These are not criminal things. These are unmet needs amongst a marginalized and vulnerable population.”
For students looking to advance an abolitionist politic and community care, Evans recommends looking to existing efforts to see where they can support or build on the work already being done. If there is a need that isn’t yet being met elsewhere, Evans encourages students to organize themselves. “[Don’t] be afraid to start something on your own,” she said.
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