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? And where is that money going to go? Right? And so, upon learning a bit more about that, and that campaign, realising that this is very much tied to gentrification, like they want to use that land for maximum profit with luxury flats. While the community really wants to have more social housing, you know Islington is a council borough that has over 10,000 people on the council housing list. We know that the money that was going to be made from that site, you know, originally was planned to just go into building more prisons. And so it didn't feel like this was going to be a positive move in any direction, basically.

Kelsey: And it just really started to help me connect a lot of the dots in learning from lots of the people organising around that issue and, and on connected issues. And so while I, you know, I have family who is in the US and is impacted by the criminal justice system, and have seen how that system has worked to impact their lives and the communities over there, firsthand. And started to really see from that moment, kind of how it is and how it was acting out like in in London, and in this place that I wasn't quite at quite as familiar with, you know, and so, basically got involved in the work here, realised that, at the same time, as they were closing Holloway prison, they are announcing that, for the first time the prisoners state transformation programme, which will, which is a government scheme, basically, to build 10,000 new prison places, originally, by 2020. None of those prisons have been built yet so far, which is great news for us. However, you know, that that is still very much their intention, and they have re announced that plan in various forms. You might remember, last summer, Boris was like, we're gonna build 10,000, new prison places, well, those were plans where they were already like, on the way, and then now, with COVID, and the kind of economic recovery scheme, project speed. Now these prisons have been tied up in that as part of a way to, in some way, bolster the economy. Yeah. But I mean, I don't even really know what the logic is, and how they find it to tie that to be honest. But essentially, they just keep re announcing these same prisons, and two of them are in the process of being built in the Midlands. And one of them has been approved through like sort of one set of planning permissions with the local council in East Yorkshire. And then the others are sort of still in the process, potentially, one, two or three more depending on what they can, what they can manage, essentially, and so on.

Kelsey: And so basically, CAPE is an organisation that tries to connect with people local to these new prison sites, and to support the collective power and campaigning, to resist those sites, not because only people local to a prison will be impacted by that prison, people get moved from prisons across the country and end up very incredibly far away from home. It's not the end up just local to you. But because the legacy of community organising that we follow has found strategically that organising with communities local to disrupt things like planning permission and environmental impact assessments and sort of connecting with the people who actually live close by to friends and sites is a really strong strategic move. And also, because obviously, there are often people who will also be impacted and feel strongly about about these things. And so we're not we're not there to just fly in and be like, this is what we think. So, yeah, we've been doing that since sort of 2016 focusing on these mega prisons that they're trying to build around the country, as well as other iterations of prison expansion. So that means new types of prisons for young people, which they're now calling secure schools, they're trying to trying to open one of those up in Kent at the moment, as well as plans for what would be women's prisons but are being called women's residential centres, which are following a slightly different kind of model, but are still prisons.

Ali: Yeah, thanks for that overview is really good to get a picture of like, what the current situation here is in the UK in regards to like expansion. I feel like it's something that I hear about every now and then like I remember hearing about big grand plans for a prison and mega prison in Wrexham. I think it was,

Kelsey: yeah, yeah,

Ali: then it kind of went quiet. So it goes off off my radar. So it's good to get touched back in on that. I had a question around. Yeah, like the context specific to the UK because like you mentioned America, and you mentioned like friends, family and other organisers, you're in touch with their. And I feel like the US is like, the example for abolitionists like, prisons are bad in America, the police kill people more violently with guns and stuff. And I just want to know, like, what's specific to prison contexts in the UK?

Kelsey: Yeah, I think often when we talk about prisons, we often - er people kind of get by by being like, well, at least we're not America, you know, and like, like, that's where they... and they do that with racism, too, right. And they try and kind of like, say that these these are things that are less of an issue as if they aren't issues that were actually created by the British. And in many ways, yeah, things that were exported to the US in their original forms. And what I mean by that is that so in the UK, or, well, so in England, and Wales has its own prison system, and Scotland has its own devolved criminal justice system. However, many of their laws and kind of like the conditions and such are very similar. It's unfortunate that we compare ourselves to America because we have a very different population in the UK as well, like, so we actually have a very white population, you know, and like, particularly, if you look at Scotland, we know that people of colour, maybe like 2% of the population, even so we know that so in England and Wales,