Bu Ruari-Santiago McBride
Visualising Prison and Penal Abolition Together Workshop, Robyn Deasy, 17/05/24
“Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”
The number of people held in prisons across Ireland is rising. At the time of writing, there are over 5,000 people imprisoned in the South of Ireland and close to 1,900 in the North. This represents an approximately 80% increase on the 4,000 people who were imprisoned across the island in the year 2000. Yet, capacity within the prison estate has not kept pace, resulting in an ‘overcrowding crisis.’ Overcrowding contributes to poor prison conditions and makes it impossible to uphold the basic human rights of prisoners or meet their basic needs.
The state response to this severe prison overcrowding is prison expansion. In the South of Ireland, €53m was allocated in Budget 2025 for the provision of 155 new prison spaces, as part of a five-year plan to provide an additional 1,100 new prison spaces by 2030. Meanwhile, disused cell blocks in the North have been reopened and additional staff recruited, at a cost of £3.5m per year. This heavy financial investment in bricks, mortar, and personnel reflects the punitive desire of administrations, North and South of the border, to reinforce and utilise Ireland’s carceral infrastructure. Yet, despite people across Ireland experiencing a cost of living and housing crisis, there has been little political challenge to significant amounts of limited public money being spent to fund a prison expansion agenda.
Recognising this crisis of overcrowding and investment in prisons as a critical moment, a group of academics and activists began discussing how best to resist prison expansion on the island of Ireland. This conversation drew on, and in turn forms part of, the international prison abolition movement. Critical resistance, a pioneering prison abolition organisation formed in California 1997 by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others, define prison abolition as ‘a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives punishment and imprisonment.’ Emerging in the US in response to mass incarceration, racism in the criminal justice system, and the privatisation of prisons, the call for prison abolition has grown into an international movement aligned with anti-capitalism, community organising, and social justice. In Britain and Ireland, for example, the Abolitionist Futures network was established in 2018 with the aim of strengthening the links between prison abolition and struggles for housing, health, education and environment; and for economic, racial, gender, sexual and disability justice. Inspired by these developments, and many others, we organised a workshop to bring together people interested in learning more about prison abolition thought and praxis.
Foundation of the Irish Penal Abolition Network (IPAN)
Initial conversations for creating an all-island prison abolition network were born out of years of experience, research and activism, which led the founding group members to a mutual understanding that people end up in prison due to a combination of political, intersectional and circumstantial factors rather than simply because they are bad people who have done wrong. Early discussions solidified a shared understanding that people sent to prison are rarely rehabilitated. In fact, more often than not, they are left traumatised by their experience. Therefore, as a collective of concerned citizens, our starting thesis was that penal responses to social inequality and interpersonal conflicts do not make communities safer or more just, as they claim to; and, that there is a pressing need to promote radical alternatives to imprisonment that are grounded in community development and aimed at systemic change.
To sow the seeds of an abolition revolution, a workshop was organised with funding from University College Cork’s (UCC) Collective Social Futures, which seeks to drive innovative, critical, theoretical, participatory and community-engaged research. A call was then put out via personal networks and social media to bring together a diverse range of people interested in participating in a prison abolition network. In the lead up to the workshop, the steering group circulated a guiding document, which provided information about the ideas and ethos driving the formation of the network.
On May 17, 2024, a group of over 20 practitioners, researchers, and people with lived experience of prison gathered at UCC for a half-day workshop and to explore, imagine, and work towards an alternative abolitionist future on the island of Ireland. During the workshop, participants spoke about how prison abolition is fundamentally about community building and that divestment from prisons needs to be paired with investment in local communities through harm reduction programmes, mental health supports, affordable housing, and transformative justice programmes. Participants thus spoke of the need to recognise the intersectionality of prison abolition as a political and social project as well as appreciate the scale of the challenge: eliminating prisons requires amelioration of the socio-economic conditions that generate inequality.
Through these dialogues, actions for the network began to germinate. The general lack of awareness about what prison abolition means was noted as a major concern. The group identified the need for myth-busting public education around the effectiveness of prisons as well as consciousness-raising events aimed at shifting people’s mentality away from punitive models of justice. Integrating a prison abolition agenda into broader social movements, it was felt, could increase public appreciation of the benefits of prison abolition. In this vein, participants discussed the need to identify and build allies across progressive sectors and radical movements.
Reflexively, the group examined the importance of having a diverse network that included people from a variety of backgrounds, especially members of working class, racialised and minority communities who are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system. For an abolitionist agenda to be meaningful, it is essential that the voices of those with first-hand experience of this system are centred.
Concluding the workshop, it was agreed that the primary aim of the Irish Penal Abolition Network (IPAN) would be to push for a halt in prison expansion through concrete actions.
Abolitionism across discourse, community and policy
In anticipation that the Dáil in the Republic of Ireland would be dissolved at some point late 2024/early 2025, one of the first collective acts of IPAN was a bottom-up campaign aimed at deflating the myth that more prisons make communities safer. Challenging tough-on-crime electoral narratives, the campaign sought to educate voters that fewer prisons and less prisoners would allow a re-allocation of much-needed resources to communities.
IPAN developed a leaflet, which provided individuals and groups with resources to engage politicians and canvassers on their doorsteps. The ‘Build Homes Not Prisons’ leaflet outlined three clear propositions: end prison expansion, reduce prison population and invest in communities. The short synopsis for each proposition on the leaflet was expanded in an online version of the leaflet available on the IPAN webpage (hosted by Abolitionist Futures). Leaflets were distributed across the network and shared with family, friends, colleagues, and students as well as put up in community centres, workplaces and even a Garda station. This act of discursive disruption sought, in a small way, to scatter seeds of dissent and challenge the punitive status quo within Irish electoral debate. In the future, IPAN will seek to develop robust policy proposals, informed by both experience and research, to cultivate an abolitionist agenda capable of overgrowing the hegemonic notion of prisons as necessary social institutions.
Additionally, network members have sought to facilitate conversations about prison abolition beyond the election. In July 2024, IPAN members organised a critical criminology stream at the Irish North South criminology conference in Belfast. With a roundtable discussion centred on prison abolition and three parallel sessions, the stream facilitated the inclusion of critical papers and challenging ideas at the conference. In October 2024, Romarilyn Ralston delivered a talk “Knowledge is Power: Justice Education as a Liberatory Practice” in Cork. Romarilyn is the Senior Director of Justice Education Center in California and identifies as a black feminist abolitionist with an incarceration experience. These events point to the way IPAN members are actively nurturing community by tending safe spaces where prison abolition and other radical ideas can flourish. Over time it is hoped these conversations will take place in diverse localities, beyond the confines of academic space, as IPAN continues to grow.
Abolition and beyond
Prison abolition is often couched in destructive terms, with “burn down the prisons” and “smash the walls” being two common phrases associated with the movement. Such terminology points to the justifiable rage abolitionists feel about the oppressive, brutality of imprisonment and the burning desire to reduce prison establishments to rubble. Yet, prison abolition is simultaneously a regenerative project orientated towards doing justice differently and nurturing communal bonds of solidarity and mutual aid. For IPAN then, the aim is not simply to work to halt prison expansion, but to grow prison abolition discourses, communities and policies in the present, in all of the ways we can.
For those interested in finding out more about IPAN and getting involved in the prison abolition movement you can visit our website, and write to us at: irishpenalabolitionnetwork@gmail.com.
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