Building Communities of Resistance
Against Prison Expansion in Britain
A Community Organizing and Strategizing Event
- PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DATE:
Now: Sunday 22 November 2009
2-5:00pm Networking, Strategizing and Discussion Session
5:00pm Food / social gathering
5:30 pm Special Performance of "Prison?" by Charlie Ryder
Charlie performs using puppets, masks, physical theatre and silences to shine a light on his 8 months in prison. This show will be followed by a question and answer session.
Location: LARC - London Action Resource Centre - (LARC) 62 Fieldgate St, Whitechapel, London E1 1ES
Location is wheelchair accessible including toilet. Wheelchair access through side entrance.
Please note event is limited to 40 people: To reserve a spot, please email by October 31:
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Get involved in a grassroots campaign to stop the new prisons!
Background:
The British Government is currently embarking on a £3.2 – £4.6 billion prison-building spree. The government plans to create places for more than 10,500 new prisoners by 2014, on top of an existing 9,500 place expansion program. These new prisons will be privately financed, built and run, taking vital resources out of our communities and investing them in a prison industry that wants to profit from locking people up.
We know who is most likely to be targeted by these prisons: people of colour, immigrants, youth, poor and working class people, sex workers, people with mental health issues, drug users and people with disabilities. We also know that these new prisons plans will not address violence and harm in our communities, but will further entrench existing injustices and cause further harm and violence.
We don’t need more prisons; we need real community-based solutions.
On November 21st, 2009, from 12-5pm CoRe is hosting an afternoon of speakers, group discussion and collective strategizing, called “Building Communities of Resistance: Against Prison Expansion in Britain.”
The goal of the event is to provide an opportunity for groups who are already working on issues related to imprisonment – whether it be poverty, policing, criminalization, deaths in custody, violence, drug policy, mental health, racial profiling, immigration detention, sex work or other issues - to share information, offer mutual support and collectively strategize around how to stop prison expansion in Britain.
How to get involved:
1) Attend the November event: Come as an individual or as part of a community or group. You will have a chance to share information about organizing in your community, make links with others doing related work, and offer strategies around how to connect current projects with broader efforts to stop prison expansion.
2) Make a public statement against prison expansion: We have drafted a statement about why we oppose the creation of any new prisons (below) We invite you to add your name to this statement. Alternatively we encourage you to write your own statement. The statement doesn’t have to be long – even a few sentences can be effective. We know there are many different reasons to oppose the building of new prisons, so we want to collectively compile as many perspectives as possible.
3) Share information about your work. We are hoping to promote the work that groups are currently engaged in, in order to strengthen ties and support each other in the work we are doing which broadly relates to issues of imprisonment, policing, immigration detention and criminalization. If you have upcoming events or current campaigns you are working on, we’d like to post them on our website.
Please get in touch if you want to attend or get involved:
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STATEMENT AGAINST PRISON EXPANSION IN BRITAIN
We call upon all levels of government to immediately stop all plans for prison expansion in Britain. We also call upon businesses, social agencies, community organizations, academics and financial institutions to refuse to support, endorse or assist with any plans for prison expansion in Britain.
We make this call in the context of a government that is currently embarking on a £3.2 - 4.7 billion prison-building spree, with plans to construct five “mini-Titan” prisons and five other possible prisons by 2014. We make this call knowing that there is no clear evidence that more prisons will make our communities safer. In fact, considerable research shows that more prisons will contribute to further harm and violence.
The prison population in Britain has nearly doubled in the past 20 years, largely due to changes in sentencing policy. Although reported crime rates have not increased during that period, the number of people locked behind bars has risen dramatically. Prisons are increasingly used as warehouses for those who are poor and homeless, people with mental health issues, people of colour, migrants and people with disabilities. Among those in prison are approximately 3,000 children.
Britain is following prison expansion trends that are dangerously similar to that of the United States, which now locks up 1 in every 100 adults. Yet as made painfully clear in the US context, prisons do not reduce crime. Prisons have failed to protect our communities and have failed to stop violence, particularly against women, migrants, people of colour, queer and transgender people, people with disabilities, children and youth. As Dr Carol Hedderman, a former senior Home Office researcher, has stated: “Prison will never be an effective crime-control tool because the evidence clearly demonstrates that it actively creates or compounds the factors that contribute to offending.”
We do not need more prisons in Britain. We need real solutions and community-based responses that prioritize prevention and focus on root causes of harm and violence.
For these reasons, we demand a complete halt to all plans to build any new prisons and immigration detention centres in Britain. |
