London Anarchist Black Cross

**Demonstration outside HMP Pentonville, tonight Fri 30/8, at 8pm** (HMP Pentonville, London)

Our comrade, who we have been supporting for over a year, attempting to mitigate the effects of criminalisation and terrorisation by the state, is now being remanded in custody at HMP Pentonville, London.

Being a trans woman in a male prison, and struggling with extreme dissociative states of mind, her immediate safety is in doubt. She’s on hunger strike since Monday. We are unaware of the conditions she is being held under inside the prison.

She informed supporters about the strike, and asked them to circulate a petition to demand an immediate end to her incarceration in a male prison.

A year ago she was charged for an attempted robbery, and this summer she was found not fit to stand trial because of her mental health. The act was ‘proved’ and the judge recommended a hospital order (meaning kidnap and incarceration in a locked ward ‘for her own good’). More recently she has been arrested on several occasions for alleged crimes, mostly in connection to unbearable living conditions and refusal of help by hospitals. Now the same State that says she is too ‘crazy’ to be punished is holding her in a male prison, since Monday and at least for another week.

Tonight we are demonstrating at the prison, as the most immediate way of communicating that we hear her, and she is not alone.

For some of us, gender is a living terror. Not an idea, a topic for debate, a transactional ‘identity’, but a daily lived terror.

For those of us who have been offering support to our friend, in small and imperfect ways, for a year and more, it has been a lonely, conflicted and compromised process. All of us must engage with how we practice solidarity every day, with those around us who are experiencing the terror of gender and gendered violence most acutely.

It is our personal opinion as improbable combatants and improvised ‘care-workers’ that solidarity must translate as attack. Attack on and flight from the system that sustains prisons and gender, what we call ‘the gendered prison’ of this society. We are convinced that the present circumstances illuminate this only more starkly.

Manifestations of shared rage, and letters to ‘Prisoner J’ are welcome. Please email survivaldefence@riseup.net to get in touch.

Received by email

The logic of the prison, its categorisation of ‘good citizens’, the ‘innocent’ and the ‘criminal’ and the ‘guilty’, its colonisation of time; its punishment by the hours that drip away, all its routine brutalities, its petty pecking orders, its enforcement of servility, the breaking of rebellious spirit— this logic is both the way our society disappears its problems and paradoxically how everything within it really functions.

We have held two demos outside pentonville recently, on each occasion those hostages of the state on the wings that could see us crowded at the barred windows, screamed aloud for their freedom and set fires in their cells. Three times we have gone out in numbers in solidarity against the prison industrial complex and its functionaries, to fill the night with a message of liberation, and our rage of accomplices with the incarcerated.

London is a gentrified, policed and surveilled castle where laws made to kidnap the poor have their immediate correlate in the looming threat of repression which any rebel faces when she decides to act to reclaim his life. All around the world the irreducibles who turn words into action find themselves encircled by this monster whose monument we intend to disrupt and agitate against again.

Let’s break the pacified, tedious, lonely, routine of prison- both within the walls and without.

Let’s declare here and now, unambiguously, with every muscle of our bodies and all the passion we have left in our hearts; that we have no need of this wretched institution, or the vile hierarchy of dogs which staff it at every level.

Despite everything, we still have an idea of freedom, solidarity and dignity; a truly living idea which cannot be content to live dead in the cells of this society, much less cower from fear of its pathetic attempts to control us. We carry with us a vision of a terrible vengeance raining down on their palaces, and the total liberation of everyone from their gaols. Let’s go into the streets together, to send up our rebel signal to those held hostage in the entrails of Fortress Britain. Let’s go out into the night and make a dent, however brief, in the illusion of the authority of the courts, cells, judges, screws and cops who would separate and govern us, and pretend themselves our captors.

Let’s punch our fists into the starry sky and cry out our complicity against the prison society, and against every social effort to reform its disgusting system of death!

Printable version here:

Kyle Major has tirelessly raised awareness of extreme psychological and
physical violence, and conditions amounting to torture, inside Close
Supervision Centres (CSCs). He has gone public with his own experiences
of the high-security ‘prisons within prisons’ he endured during his
previous prison sentence. He has now been incarcerated again in HMP
Edinburgh (with no apparent crime committed).
He will appear in court in the third week of May, until then he
urgently needs support. Please write to him:

Kyle Major
151703
33 Stenhouse Road
Edinburgh
EH11 3LN

Roll up, roll up! This huge prisoner support benefit is coming to North London!

London Tattoo Circus is a 100% benefit event in solidarity with all who find themselves imprisoned for their ideas and actions within the prison society. All proceeds go to related active groups and/or individuals.

Check out the program and venue info on their blog https://londontattoocircus.noblogs.org/program/

This is an informative, fun, anti prison event, which is open to all who are opposed to oppression in its many forms, and aware that we are stronger learning, listening and working together. Please be aware that the issues being addressed may be challenging and/or triggering. As well as loud music, and flashing or brite lights

After the New Year Eve demos at HMP Brixton and Pentonville and more recently at HMP Bronzefield, those who oppose this prison society will gather once more outside the walls of HMP Pentonville. Bring your love and support for those incarcerated ! Bring your rage and hatred for those who maintain the British prison state !

Friday 12th of April 2019, 8-10pm

H.M.P Pentonville, Caledonian Rd, London N7 8TT

Come in solidarity with Kevan Thakur on the Wednesday, 13 March 2019 from 12:00 to 15:00 in front of Ministry of Justice UK 102 Petty France, SW1H 9AJ, London

On Valentines Day, the 14th of February around 40-50 enraged individuals went to HMP Bronzefield for a noise demo. In solidarity with over 500 women and youth inside and all those incarcerated in an oppressive and discriminatory society. We have no love for the state and its corporate apparatus of punishment and control.
With no interruption from the pigs or screws, we unleashed our rage for hours at the walls of the prison through our banners, messages of support, fireworks and chants.
The anger and the energy shared that night made us all excited at the possibilities yet to come. Stay updated for upcoming letter writtings nights, screenings, benefits and actions.

Against prison society !

London Anarchist Black Cross has called a noise demo outside of HMP/YOI Bronzefield in Ashford (Surrey) on the 14th of February from 8-10pm.

Bronzefield is the largest women’s prison in Europe. It’s the most expensive adult and youth women’s prison in England. At an annual £66,294 a prisoner, it is at least £10,000 more expensive than any other. It was privately built, and is privately run by the outsourcing giant Sodexo. We will go there in solidarity with all of those incarcerated in an oppressive and discriminatory society. We have no love for the state and it’s corporate apparatus of punishment and control. Under a Neoliberal Capitalist regime that destroys all possibility of love and replaces it with capitalist modes of mass consumption we want to express our rage at the cages that seperate us.

As with those incarcerated in women’s prisons everywhere, those inside are proof of a patriacal society maintained by the State. Most of people incarcerated in womens prisons have been affected by patriarcal violence;as survivors of domestic or sexual violence and have reported
experiencing child abuse. These facts evidence that the state “violently criminalises vulnerable women, who are overwhelmingly black, brown and/or working class”. We remember Natasha Chine who was murdered by the neglect and systemic failures of HMP Bronzefield and their staff. Natasha was one of nine women to die at HMP Bronzefield since 2010. Since her death in 2016 there have been three further deaths of women found unresponsive in cells at Bronzefield.

Make noise to draw visiblity to the prison industrial complex that is
strengthening and decentralising under the government and its ideology,
not just on New Years, and not just within the city. We do not take prison as an unchallengable part of our existence. We do not allow the prison to perform the ideological work of relieving us of the responsibilities of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced of sexism, racism, “and increasingly, global capitalism”.
The prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, absent from it.
With no womens prisons remaining within London, gendered incarceration is less visible while systematically displacing imprisoned women far away from their
friends, families, and support services.

Against prison, and the world that maintains them.

Collective departure from London Waterloo at the ticket office at 6:30pm.
For travel from Waterloo Station, Group Tickets in advance and on the day for 3 or more people = £7 per person.
London ABC can help with travel costs and booking tickets! Get in touch!
For travel inquiries/ special requirements and help with travel costs,
contact london_abc@riseup.net

Solidarity,