If They Build It: Organizing Lessons & Strategies Against Carceral Infrastructure

If They Build It: Organizing Lessons & Strategies Against Carceral Infrastructure is a resource from Community Justice Exchange for generating abolitionist struggles against the construction and expansion of cages.  It draws on experiences of fighting jail expansion across the US, and particularly on the experiences of campaigns within the No New Jails Network, to offer lessons learned and recommendations for current and future efforts against carceral infrastructure. 

For the scope of this resource, carceral infrastructure refers primarily to physical facilities and sites of detention and imprisonment, with the acknowledgement that there are many other kinds of structures, tools, and technologies which can be termed ‘carceral infrastructure.’ This document aims to connect fights against all forms of caging, including prisons, jails, detention centers, military bases, cop cities, psychiatric facilities, at the county, state, and federal levels, through a broad framework that resituates site fights amidst a larger movement to prevent carceral system expansion, abolish the PIC, and defeat fascism. 

It is intended for any group, campaign, coalition, or organizer who is trying to prevent a new cage from being constructed or stop an old one. 

The resource has five sections: 

• Section 1 historicizes jails as a site of struggle, as well as the lineages of activism that have grounded anti-jail organizing and resources predating this publication.

• Section 2 details the structure, composition, and internal dynamics of the NNJN.

• Section 3 goes over the collective learnings of the campaigns within the NNJN, as well as lessons from the network development process. 

• Section 4 offers strategic recommendations against flattening, co-optation, and net-widening for anti-infrastructure campaigns. 

• Section 5 uses those learnings, as well as the recommendations from section 4, to present a tool organizers can use to assess their own landscape and develop their organizing campaigns.