Mutual aid as abolitionist praxis

ABSTRACT

Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of flourishing, free and caring communities. Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.

KEYWORDS:

• Carcerality
• mutual aid
• abolition
• praxis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simone Weil Davis

Simone Weil Davis is Associate Director of Ethics, Society & Law at Trinity College, the University of Toronto.  Publications include Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Learning (2013), co-edited with B.S. Roswell.  Simone was cofounder and first coordinator of Canada’s Walls to Bridges program and is a member of the Walls to Bridges Collective.  Her current research considers emotions and embodied experience in learning spaces in and beyond the academy, as a confrontation with racism and the possibilities of anti-racism in education.

Rachel Fayter

Rachel Fayter is a Ph.D student in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa. She completed her B.A. and MA degrees in community psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. While incarcerated at Grand Valley Institution for Women, Rachel engaged in the Walls to Bridges (W2B) prison education program and has been active in the alumni collective since 2014. Since her return to the community, Rachel has been advocating for prisoner rights and social justice-oriented policy changes, through publications, panel discussions, public education, and media interviews. Her work has been published in the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons and Canadian Psychology. Rachel’s Ph.D research focuses on the strengths and resiliency of criminalized women despite histories of trauma and imprisonment, and documenting how prison policies and practices actively inhibit solidarity and asset-based coping among women.