Past Events
Organise Against Prison Expansion!
Tues 19 June 2018, 10.00-14.00, Freedom Bookshop, Whitechapel High St, London
Come and meet people from Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE) and get active in fighting prison expansion in England.
Find your role and learn what you can do to resist the expansion of the prison system. All welcome!
Find out more here.
Visioning A World without Prisons: Imagining a Women’s Building at Holloway
Tues 19 June 2018, 19:30 – 21:00, New Unity, Newington Green, London
Prisons are often overlooked: we seldom hold them in mind, and take for granted that we’ve always needed them. But what if this isn’t true? Using the history of Holloway prison, closed since 2016, we’ll imagine a world without prisons.
Bringing Feminist Abolitionist principles to bare, we’ll consider how through a Women’s Building we might better organise our care for each other – including how we tackle issues like gender-based violence – without continuing to rely on our broken criminal justice system.
Find out more and book tickets.
Racism, Gender Violence and the Build up of a Prison Nation: The Case for Feminist Abolition Politics
Wed 20 June 2018, 18.00-20.30, Birkbeck, University of London
The Department of Criminology at Birkbeck is pleased to welcome Dr Beth Richie to give our annual criminology public lecture.
Dr Richie’s presentation will focus on the ways that gender violence, systemic racism and criminalization interact to create particular vulnerability for Black women and other marginalized groups. Using the conceptual frameworks of Carceral Feminism and Prison Nation, Richie will bring a Black feminist analysis to the convergence of these issues. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the role that abolition could assume as a social justice strategy to reduce harm.
Find out more here.
Sisters Learn Sisters Learn! with Sisters Uncut
Thurs 28 June 2018, 18.45-21.00, Tindlemanor, 52-54 Featherstone St, London, EC1Y 8RT
Join us at our monthly meeting dedicated to political education. Sisters Uncut is a direct action group fighting against domestic, sexual and state violence and the government cuts that destroy support services for survivors.
Sisters new and old are invited to learn together about political ideas, movements and histories affecting our lives and our fight against violence and austerity. This session will focus on feminist, queer and anti-racist approaches to prison abolition. In part inspired by the Abolitionist Futures reading group, however, this session does not require any prior reading; together we will explore ways to relate these approaches to our organising as Sisters Uncut.
New sisters are always welcome, you don’t need to be an expert to be valuable…COME DOWN & GET INVOLVED!
Find out more here.
Introduction to the Incarcerated Workers’ Organising Committee London
Sunday 1 July 2018, 14.00-17.00, New Cut Housing Co-operative, 106 The Cut, Waterloo, SE1 8LN.
The Incarcerated Workers Organising Committee supports prisoners to organise & fight back against prison slavery and the injustices of the prison system. IWOC is fighting against prison expansion and the increased exploitation of prison, as well as against IPP sentences (Imprisonment for Public Protection, an indeterminate sentence) and other forms of injustice in the prison system.
Come along to the very first meeting of the London branch of the Incarcerated Workers Organising Committee (IWOC) to find out what IWOC does and how you can get involved. Everyone welcome.
Find out more here.
HOUSING JUSTICE
Friday 11th May & Saturday 12th MayFriends Meeting House, 22 School Lane, Liverpool, L1 3BT
This two-day free event in Liverpool brings together housing campaigners, activists and researchers from across the UK to share and exchange experiences about how we can tackle the multiple challenges in housing and demand housing justice. This includes people from: housing campaigns, community land trusts, tenant unions, construction, trade unions, activists and artists.
Organised by Harm & Evidence Research Collaborative – Open University & University of Liverpool
More Details on the HERC Website here
Film Screening ‘Born in Flames’
7:30pm- 10:30pm – Wednesday 9 May DIY Space for London
Cinenova presents Lizzie Borden’s seminal 1983 science fiction masterpiece BORN IN FLAMES, a film screening to help raise money for the our Solidarity Fund
Ten years after the “social-democratic war of liberation” in a not-too-distant future New York, notions of equality and social reform propagated by the incumbent Socialist Party seem much forgotten. Poverty, racism and gender discrimination plague its streets, heavily controlled by a government quick to label any criticism as counter revolutionary. When news of the death in police custody of a prominent Black women’s activist spreads, four intersecting factions of women – the vigilante group the Women’s Army, the editors of the newspaper Socialist Youth Review, and the underground radio stations Phoenix Radio and Radio Ragazza – rise up to take action once and for all against this oppressive state.
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with restoration funding by The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation.
Watch the trailer here
Please support our solidarity fund, and come have a great night out too.
Tickets on sales here
End of Policing
7:00 – 9:00pm Thursday 15 March 2018
Conway Hall 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL
The Black Lives Matter movement has thrown a dramatic light on police tactics and brutality in America.
But this is not merely an US phenomena – many of America¹s most repressive policing measures have been imported to Britain as mainstream policy.
Yet, in Britain the debate on policing has almost entirely focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. In the last election Jeremy Corbyn¹s Labour even argued for increasing police numbers, linking falling police numbers to rising levels of crime.
But, what if the problem isn¹t training or accountability but the nature of the police itself? What if the solution to policing is not more but fewer police? And what can we learn from the response to police brutality in America?
Join renowned expert on policing, Alex Vitale, who is over from New York to discuss police reform and abolition and to launch his new book ‘The End of Policing’ at Conway Hall in 15th March.
Copies of the book are on sale at the event from the Newham Bookshop stall.
Advance registration is essential. Click here to book your place.
Film Screening ‘Criminal Queers’
6:30pm Wednesday 7 March 2018
The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8 8PQ
Criminal Queers, directed by Eric A. Stanley and Chris E. Vargas (USA, 2015, 63 min) visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls. Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation. Follow Yoshi, Joy, Susan and Lucy as they fiercely read everything from the Human Rights Campaign and hate crimes legislation to the non-profitisation of social movements.
Watch the trailer here.
This event is free but booking is recommended. Click here to reserve a space.
This pre-ICOPA event is being co-hosted by the Bent Bars Project; Reclaim Holloway – Women’s Building Group; and Cinenova.