Episode 1 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Kelsey from Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE).

Show notes, links

Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol)

Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE): website; Instagram @no_more_prisons; their "Defund the prison estate" petition

Abolitionist Futures' abolitionist reading groups

Sisters Uncut

Port Talbot super-prison proposals axed (BBC News)

Transcript

Kat: This is Resist Renew. A UK-based podcast about social movements.

Sami: What we're fighting for, why, and how it all happens.

Ali: The hosts of the show are:

Kat: Me Kat,

Sami: Me, Sami,

Ali: and me, Ali,

Sami: I'm recording this now baby

Ali: Shit it's a podcast.

*Laughter*

Ali: Alright, welcome to the first episode in the resist and renew podcast. Today we are going to be talking about abolishing prisons in the UK. And we are happy to be joined by Kelsey from CAPE. So a little bit about Kelsey. Kelsey is a prison abolitionist, organiser and freelance facilitator based in London, and as part of Community Action on Prison Expansion, which is a network of grassroots groups fighting prison expansion in England, Wales and Scotland. Prior to COVID, Kelsey has been travelling the UK and abroad delivering workshops and trainings to build collective power in resisting and dismantling the prison industrial complex. Kelsey is also part of Cradle, a transformative justice collective, and also happens to be part of Resist and Renew, which is why we're interviewing her first. Thanks for joining us, Kelsey.

Kelsey: Thanks for inviting me.

Ali: We had to.

Kelsey: Great.

Ali: Yeah, I know Sami is dying to jump in straight into things. But before we do that, just a little note to say this episode's gonna be slightly different to our future episodes in that, normally there will be two hosts. But because this is the first one, we're all just excited to jump in. So all three of us myself, Ali, Sami, and Katherine, or Kat, will be here. And you can hear a bit more about us as people in our teaser, if you haven't listened to that.

Sami: Now is it the time to get into it?

Kat: Yeah,

Sami: I think it is. Okay. So to kick us off. Kelsey, could you tell us a bit about the context that you're organising in with CAPE? Like, why is it that you chose this work specifically?

Kelsey: Thank you for that question, I guess. Well, so I, I'm a prison abolitionist, which means that I fundamentally don't think that our society needs or should have prisons or policing or function with these systems of punishment. And, but it also means that I look critically at what violence itself means. And, and so I include state violence within like that analysis. And so I kind of came to this work first through doing feminist anti violence organising. And through that kind of began to further understand the role of the criminal justice system in the supposed support that survivors receive, particularly in this country.

Kelsey: And yeah, and I basically got involved in a local campaign around Holloway prison, which is a campaign that really shows like so many intersections, I think of this work where it was the biggest women's prison in Western Europe. It was closing down, it was closed in 2016. But that doesn't mean that all of the people who are held in that prison were actually released, it means that they were just shipped off to different prisons around the country. And in fact, Holloway, because it was the only women's prison that's actually really in London, you know, it's in Islington and so many people who held there, were actually still quite close to their communities, it's much easier for people to visit prison in London than one in rural Surrey, or elsewhere on the English countryside. Right. And so it the kind of impact that that has on a community. And the way that that is actually tied to what do they want to use that land for?