Solidarity Across Walls: Building Inside-Outside Relationships to Fight Carceral Infrastructure

Solidarity Across Walls: Building Inside-Outside Relationships to Fight Carceral Infrastructure is a handbook for anti-expansion organizers and groups who are developing their cross-walls collaboration. 

Recent expansions of cages have accompanied intensified repression of community organizing and worsening economic conditions. As increasing numbers of people become the targets of supercharged carceral expansion, millions are still held captive within existing carceral facilities. The lineage of abolition has been built by these captives and their communities, inside prisons, jails, detention centers, involuntary commitment, juvenile detention, military bases, and all other sites of confinement and control. 

It is within this context that this guide offers concrete methods for cultivating inside-outside solidarity that rejects tokenism and superficial representation. It also aims to contribute to increased politicization and coordination of imprisoned people who have not previously participated in social movements, while compelling liberatory movements of all types to grow their capacity for prisoner solidarity. It draws on lessons learned from decades of organizing, both within campaigns to shut down cages and outside of them. 

The resource has three main sections: 

• Part 1: Stopping Carceral Infrastructure Requires Cross-Walls Solidarity focuses on outlining the basics of cross-walls organizing and why it is a key aspect of site fights. 

• Part 2: Cross-Walls Organizing Against Carceral Infrastructure presents examples of assessments that are useful for nurturing inside-outside relationships in site fights. 

• Part 3: Key Considerations for Cross-Walls Organizing in Site Fights focuses on specific ways anti-expansion organizers can leverage inside organizing towards closure. 

The resource also identifies opportunities for increased cross-walls collaboration, while encouraging social movements to see prisoner solidarity work as integral to anti-capitalist and internationalist struggles.