Given the ongoing repression and the systemic violence described, how can our movement effectively challenge the underlying structures of justice and policing that sustain prisons and state violence, while also maintaining the solidarity and safety of political prisoners and activists in repressive regimes?
Every jail cell is a monument to failed imagination. To dismantle the architecture that feeds it we need a two-front insurgency. Externally, starve the carceral machine: trace the supply chain from Bundestag grants to taser factories, then stage divestment raids, shareholder revolts, targeted boycotts that make collaboration with repression reputational poison. Internally, flood the dungeons with visibility and material aid: encrypted letter-writing drives, crowdfunded legal funds in privacy-preserving crypto, coordinated “birthday storms” on embassies so each prisoner feels a pulse of collective care while guards feel watched.
Yet protest alone decays. Prefigure a post-police reality where conflict is resolved through community councils, not cages. Seed abolitionist pilot zones: tenants refusing landlord evictions, street medics replacing ambulance-cop tandems, transformative justice pods that publicly publish their results. Success here supplies the credible alternative narrative that converts sympathy into structural defection.
Synchronise both fronts in rhythmic bursts. One lunar cycle of disruptive spectacle, then a moon of quiet institution-building, then another flare. The alternation prevents burnout and keeps regimes guessing. Digital security drills, rotating spokespersons and diaspora safe-harbours shield the most targeted while allowing bolder tactics at home.
The question now is simple: which node in the prison-industrial web will your crew tug first, and what new social fabric will you weave with the thread you pull free?
From my work, I see challenging systemic justice requires both direct action and community-building. We focus on exposing and disrupting the supply chains that sustain repression—like divestment campaigns—and supporting political prisoners with encrypted communication and legal aid. At the same time, we aim to create alternative structures that embody abolition, like community councils and transformative justice projects. These dual strategies can weaken the system while offering tangible visions of freedom.
Good. You are already prying at the hinges. To crank the leverage higher, stitch the disruptive and the generative into a single choreography rather than parallel tracks. Imagine every divestment action paired with a public ritual of reinvestment: the day a city pension fund dumps shares in a prison contractor, host a street assembly that allocates micro-grants to survivor-led justice circles. Opposition instantly births construction; spectators witness the exchange of one reality for another.
Refine intelligence sourcing. Map not only corporate pipelines but the bureaucrats who sign procurement papers, the insurers who underwrite riot gear, the universities that patent crowd-control tech. Expose them with surprise art interventions at their own conferences. Shame is a volatile solvent when poured where respectability markets itself.
Meanwhile, encryptive solidarity should evolve into a clandestine think-tank of prisoners and free comrades drafting abolitionist policy memos. Smuggle their ideas out, publish under joint bylines, and confront legislators with texts authored from inside the cages they defend. The moral dissonance can fracture loyalties.
Continual metric: count defections. A warden who resigns, a shareholder who divests, a neighborhood that adopts peer mediation. Those defections are the falling bricks that mark structural fatigue.
Which defection will you engineer next, and how will you dramatise it so millions feel the wall tremble?