The following statement is in solidarity with @WpgPoliceHarm as part of the ongoing call for police abolition and mass decarceration. Incarceration is a violent state of isolation & seclusion and the most thoroughly implemented government social program. 1/

Prisons, jails, & police headquarters undermine communal spirit & aggravate mental distress, colonize the landscape, and command the public’s implicit consent in their militarization and brutal monopoly over violence. 2/

Prison guards and police give themselves the right to decide who is considered “criminal,” while making themselves out to be exempt from the expansive violence they generate and enforce. 3/

Reform is inherent to the programme of the prison, constantly being reworked with new regimes of control, new facets of functioning, and new ways to enforce control and maintain order. 4/

Ruth Gilmore distinguishes reformism with the concept of “non-reformist reforms” - demands that don’t strengthen the prison industrial complex, that act alongside concrete plans towards decarceration laid out by prison abolitionists, for the long term goal of prison abolition. 5/

Police, prisons, and the carceral system as a whole cannot be reformed. They are to be defunded, disarmed, & disbanded. The organization of the State and State violence, premised upon white supremacy, demonstrates a concerted neglect for Black, Indigenous & racialized peoples. 7/

Winnipeg Police murdered for the 4th time this yr, taking the life of 22-yr-old Stewart Andrews, from God’s Lake First Nation. We grieve for Eishia Hudson, whose life was taken on April 8; Jason Collins, whose life was taken on April 9; & an unnamed victim killed on March 10. 8/

We remember deaths by police throughout Manitoba this year: a 44-year-old woman in RCMP custody in Thompson (Feb. 3), a man who suffered "self-inflicted wounds" in presence of Winnipeg Police (Feb. 12), and 31-year-old man in RCMP custody in Oxford House (March 31.) 9/

We also remember the three people who have also died in federal prison Stony Mountain this year: Shawn Poitra, 29 (Jan. 5), Adrian Young, 39 (March 7), and Patrick Eaglestick, 25 (March 24). 10/

We honour lives lost to police violence by committing to an abolitionist practice. Among lives taken by Hamilton Police Services: 36-yr-old Tony Divers (Sep 30, 2016); 19-yr old Quinn MacDougall (April 3, 2018); 30-yr old Robyn Garlow (October 20, 2018), an Indigenous woman. 11/

We honour these lives alongside the countless lives lost in Barton Jail, each one preventable. 12/

We hold the same grief and anger for the recent killings of 26-year-old D’Andre Campbell, killed by Peel Regional Police on April 6, 2020; and a 43-yr-old unnamed man killed by OPP in Temiskaming Shores on April 9, 2020. 13/

Every holding cell, every prison is a potentiated death camp, especially under current COVID-19 conditions. It is crucial, now more than ever, to resist the expansion of police & state powers and to hold a firm abolitionist principle in all we do. 14/

We extend a statement of solidarity to the unhoused people of the Stewart Squat, many of whom were detained yesterday. As supporters of the @KeepYourRent call (spread to Hamilton), we look to you as beacons & struggle forward in collective vision. 15/

We sign off with solidarity to
@WpgPoliceHarm. We sign off with solidarity to those incarcerated in Barton Jail, and the Barton Prisoner Solidarity Project - @ProjectBarton. You have our deepest love. 16/

From Barton, to GVI, to Rikers, to Sing Sing, to Hudson County, to Parchman Farm, to Ramleh, to israeli Administrative Detention Centres — the call to #FreeThemAll is imperative and more urgent than ever, in the ongoing struggle for freedom. 17/