Trans connections: pockets of hope through collective organising
Dalton Harrison visits Bent Bars & Abolitionist Futures
Image: Dalton’s book and the Bent Bars newsletter from 2018
I sit here after the hum of London has long left my ears, and the bustle and noise are but an echo in my memory. Only the flutter of the wind and the song of a distant bird keep my body in the present as my mind drifts back and forth between the past and the memories of our conversation against the backdrop of a vibrant London street where we sat and talked about Bent Bars, academia, and Abolitionist Futures. In this reflection, I will share some of how these three spheres of engagement come together for me as part of a project ‘arts & abolitionist futures’.
Making Connections:
My mind began connecting more memories as I looked at the newsletter I had kept all these years, issue seven of Autumn 2018 of the Bent Bars Project – written by and for LGBTQ+ prisoners. When another transgender prisoner gave me this copy, we sat in a small cleaning cupboard, waiting to start work. I was in the second year of my sentence. She was so proud she had published a piece in the newsletter. These moments that I recollect now are old snapshots of a past life. This moment when she handed me that newsletter at the time felt like the utmost act of defiance in a system that controlled us and kept us in the dark of that cupboard, waiting for us all to be counted and rechecked before we could move. I could never have dreamt of the world I live in now. At that moment, I just looked over my shoulder to check I was not being watched, wondering how to get it back on my wing without it being taken from me.
Nothing in my life at that point would have ever given me the notion that one day I would be sitting in this beautiful office filled with art, activism and purpose on the verge of finishing a degree in Criminal Justice and Criminology. At that point, I was a prison number – one of just a few trans men in an overcrowded women’s prison – feeling like a statistic.
The first thing you see when you go to the Abolitionist Futures webpage is the harsh reality of those statistics – such as:
‘Over 90,000 people are currently in prison in the UK’
‘There were 268 transgender prisoners in the 2023 data collection’ (from the most recent Equalities report Gov.uk)
And ‘In the 12 months to September 2023, there were 304 deaths in prison custody’ (from Gov.uk)
These numbers remind me about the ongoing harms, destruction and the difficulties we faced keeping safe in prison. Seeing these numbers sets off a film in my head that flickers on people, situations and prison stories. The punishing mentality that seems to be common sense is aggressive, violent, and isolating. Officers that tried to do anything differently were ostracised by their peers called ‘radical’ or ‘a soft touch’.
On the Abolitionist Futures home page, I scroll down and see the stark hope in the cross-stitch image that says ‘Create the things you wished existed’. I start to reflect on these two states of being – how can we practice things differently in a violent and punishing system? If we want change, we need to create and build real alternatives.
Creativity and community
I have always believed that if you can't see it, how can you be it? For example, when I first encountered Bent Bars and their newsletter, I enjoyed the creative energy – it was a buzz – something different from the chaos and noise I was experiencing. Later, when I was in the bail hostel, I had access to community projects for the first time. Their support gave me a sense of confidence beyond the aggression and violence that I was used to. I thrived with activities that allow people to find out what community means to us; what everyone brings to the table. Safe spaces that allowed us to generate discussion, confidence and openness. To me, it was important to learn how to collaborate and recognise how collective working, talking, and imagining can make a difference.
When I later entered higher education and began researching transgender studies, I found Lamble’s academic work. I did not realise till later that this was the same person with the same organisation – Bent Bars – who had started my journey of change inside. These are the acts of everyday abolition we all can do: sharing knowledge, collaborating and reimaging a different future.
I met Lamble before Bent Bars organisers joined, and we had a wide-ranging conversation about media, popular culture, and how criminalisation and spending time in prison causes stigma that seems to stick. I wanted to find out from them more about how they see politics, media and culture come together making punishment such a lens for how we live outside.
Building a world on social justice and not criminal justice
It’s not that community doesn’t exist in prisons: we have pockets, and activities and different groups. LGBTQ+ prisoners have diversity representatives who would help people engage with groups, move around the prison and access support. But the ‘rights’ we had didn’t always match the attitudes.
‘DH: When I was in prison, we had a pride and well-being day, and the officer shouted, "We better get you back on the wings and locked up. We don’t want it getting back to the media. You had such a lovely time. This is not what you are here for.” And I remember thinking, is it not our loss of freedom that is the punishment not more inside here?
SL: All these things normalise the criminal justice system and prevent us from thinking more creatively about what we might do differently. At the beginning of Angela Davis's book Are Prisons Obsolete, she asks the reader why it is so hard for us to imagine a world without prisons. It is a bizarre practice to put people in cages, especially in liberal democracies where we claim that freedom is one of our highest values. Yet Western liberal democracies have a higher imprisonment rate now than they ever have in human history. We need to work on undoing these assumptions that prison is the answer to social problems in society. In popular culture, there’s a lot of equating justice with punishment, and a presumption that if there is no punishment, justice isn’t served. Abolitionists think the punishment causes further harm and doesn’t repair it. In some ways, popular culture prevents us from practising meaningful justice.’
What is your pocket of hope?:
For those still in prison, feeling removed from society and that it’s difficult to get back again, community initiatives and organising can form the bridge between the two. We need a sense of community – folks that don’t judge. I felt so amazed to meet the organisers of Bent Bars whose letter-writing project made such a difference while I was inside – really a pocket of hope for me.
My conversation with Lamble cemented my sense that learning together, solidarity practices and collective imagining are part of creating a world without prisons, and without punishing mindsets.
About Dalton and ‘arts & abolitionist futures’:
Dalton is a poet, a criminology graduate and a creative facilitator based in Leeds. His book ‘Boy Behind the Wall: poems of imprisonment and freedom’ is available for purchase.
Dalton’s research trip to London was part of ‘arts & abolitionist futures’ - a Sapling project supported by Leeds Arts & Humanities Research Institute, Leeds Cultural Institute, and led by ally walsh.
His first blog is here.