“3 Positions Against Prison” originally appeared in the tenth issue of Fire to the Prisons. It provides an excellent analysis of both prison and many of the positions that characterize anarchist and leftist practice as it relates to prison. The essay is notable for its analysis of how prison functions in the contemporary world, less as a discrete physical institution or space and more as a permeation of different aspects of prison (surveillance, militarization of police, etc). Beyond this, the zine does a good job of critiquing the limits of the prison abolition movement.

An excerpt that expands on some of these themes:

Prison is not a discrete place; its force and logic are distributed across the metropolis. Put another way, there is a place that is prison, and then there is a tendency, a way of managing life, that is prison. The place and the tendency are not two, but one. Macrocosm, microcosm. To speak of prisons as if they were separate from the rest of society is to equivocate. What we call prisons are a node in the prison-metropolis that are indicative of how the metropolis functions as a whole, and without which the rest could not function. Prison is a totality–something that one cannot escape from, but only shift positions within.

You can get the zine from us as a PDF or order it online if you don’t have access to a printer.