Abolitionist Futures Digest: July 26
Abolitionist Futures Reading Group Continues
A collection of abolitionist books.
Big thank you to everyone who has participated in the first five sessions of the reading group. If you missed them it is not too late to join. Please register below.
Sessions will be held on zoom starting 5th May 2026, every second Tuesday evening (7.30 pm - 9:00 pm - UTC+1/BST). We usually start the call together, then break out into smaller rooms with a facilitator in each group to discuss the readings, and then return to the larger call.
These are the final two sessions:
14th July 2026 Session 6: Everyday Abolition
28th July 2026 Session 7: So what do I do? From reading to action
Click here for audio versions of the readings (currently being updated)
If you want to catch up on the readings for the sessions you missed, they are available here:
Session 1: Introduction to Abolition
Resources: Latest blogs from Abolitionist Futures
From the prison notebooks by Amu Gib
Amu Gib’s From the Prison Notebooks is a hybrid collection of personal notes, snapshots overheard in the house block, pieces of conversations, ideas for the future, and research brought to them by friends on the outside, all mixed up with quotations from the texts Amu reads inside prison, where both reading and citing are political acts. The fragmented form of this text mirrors the fragmentation of the experience of incarceration, especially the fragmentation of time.
More Categories are Not Enough – Hate Crime, Queer Lives and an Argument for Abolition by Kevin Guyan
This blog post uses the topic of ‘hate crime’ to initiate a broader discussion of cracks in Scotland’s liberal imaginary as a place that is safe for queer communities.
Abolition Isn’t a Demand. It’s What Logic Requires by Tommaso Biagi
Tommaso Biagi makes the case that carceral institutions systematically destroy the conditions that make justification possible, this makes the reformism category mistaken rather than merely insufficient.
Other Resources
Handbook on Signal
SCALP Scottish Community & Activist Legal Project (SCALP) is a collective of people offering legal support.
We attend protests, challenge police abuse, support people in case of arrest, and provide legal guidance.
This handbook is produced by the Movement Research Unit and kindly shared with SCALP.
It covers how your messages (including disappearing messages) might be accessed, how to protect your messages, and the companies supplying message extraction technology in the UK.
If they build it
If They Build It: Organizing Lessons & Strategies Against Carceral Infrastructure is a resource from Community Justice Exchange for generating abolitionist struggles against the construction and expansion of cages. It draws on experiences of fighting jail expansion across the US, and particularly on the experiences of campaigns within the No New Jails Network, to offer lessons learned and recommendations for current and future efforts against carceral infrastructure.
Blog
Rootwork: Like The Seeds of a Pomegranate, Loa Pourmirza Healing Justice London
Systems do not transform themselves—people do...
Events
Community Picnic 11 July, Burgess Park, London
Join us at our first community picnic in Burgess Park!
Saturday 11 July, 12-4pm
Burgess Park - meet near the red and black metal bridge (Bridge to Nowhere)
Meet your neighbours, strengthen our community, celebrate Burgess Park, share food, play kids' games or footie (if you want to!)
Bring a dish to share, or just yourselves. All welcome, bring friends, child-friendly.
Please share with your networks! Poster attached. We printed some posters and flyers - if you know a notice board, local cafe, or anywhere else where we could put them up, could you pick up some posters/flyers from Gayle's Coffee Bar and distribute them? Thank you!
Picture of Burgess Park with date and time details (11 July, 12 - 4pm).
Toward Abolitionist Praxis: Dismantling the Mental Health Industrial Complex and Reimagining Lived Experience
12 July: online event
Join us for a seminar and open forum with Parth Sharma (he/they) Abolitionist, Anti-colonial Scholar, Global Mental Health Researcher.
Fundraising for a queer comrade to reclaim their safety - please donate here in lieu of ticket prices.
In this session, we critically examine how the Mental Health Industrial Complex (MHIC) compounds harm for people, especially those from marginalized groups, by reinforcing the very social determinants of health that exacerbate distress, such as poverty, discrimination, and state violence. Rooted in community-based participatory research, and drawing from anti-colonial, intersectional feminist and abolitionist frameworks, this session synthesizes insights from youth-led collectives, community-based practices, and cross-movement solidarities (including disability and climate justice) to reimagine mental health. It highlights alternative approaches that centre Indigenous knowledge systems, relational forms of care, and the leadership of young people with diverse and intersecting identities, particularly from the Global South.
A Prison Within a Prison: Book Launch with Dalton Harrison
Wed July 22nd
The Bookish Type, Leeds
Join us for a launch of Dalton Harrison's new release - A Prison Within a Prison: An Evocative Autoethnographic Approach to Being a Transgender Man in a Women's Prison in England.
Mixing academic discourse with poetry and creative writing this book tells the story of one trans man's journey through society and prison and out the other side. There is little known about trans men in prison and this is a one-of-a-kind chance to understand what happens in prison and what it means to be queer in today's society and formerly incarcerated.
This book takes you beyond the media headlines and shows you what happens off the record. Dalton will be reading true stories from the book, as well as a poetry performance that takes you on his journey, followed by Q&A. Dalton is joined on a panel discussion by Professor Aylwyn Walsh from the University of Leeds and Pam Bircumshaw who has an extensive career in Probation and female approved premises.
Reminder: Pre-order Lamble's book Unsafe
Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash - Pre-order via The Common Press and Haymarket will donate a book to a prisoner.
All notices, events and links are for sharing how abolition is at work in allied movements, organising and wider culture and not necessarily endorsements.