As a Left Abolitionist publication, Scalawag's work is first and foremost dedicated to the end of the global prison industrial complex, and all antiBlack, neoplantation structures of captivity, at the root of our collective exploitation and suffering. This selection of pieces feature analysis of fascist dominance, past and present, commentary on movements for reproductive and gender justice, as well as reflections on the contemporary abolitionist cause, alongside firsthand accounts of prison conditions from currently incarcerated contributors.
This reading list collects entries from our Abolition Week 2025: Borders, as well as the "Politics and the People" section. These pieces offer gripping insights into the everyday experiences of life inside prison and on "the outside," that paint clearly how high the stakes of delaying revolutionary abolition remain for us all. Coverage of local events hosted by southern movements to free political prisoners, alongside essays that critique and resist fascist censorship, abortion bans, and discrimination against trans folks provide a myriad of reasons why all prisons, and systems of captivity must go.
The incarcerated narratives push readers away from consuming the prison and prison lore as spectacle, towards a heightened sense of urgency to organize our communities, and movement's priorities, around the demand to free them all by any means necessary.
Surviving Fascism: Lessons from Jim Crow
"There are elders among us who witnessed the America of the Jim Crow era. We've had far more time as a nation with white supremacist focused government than without it. But that also means we've been given a plethora of battle tested strategies for how to beat it."
"Nostalgia is a convenient form of time travel. A kind of agony that begs for a return to 'something better.' Neo-fascist ideology rests on the concept of white prosperity located somewhere in the past, but it is the promise of somehow restoring this prosperity that fuels its violence. This promise clearly echoes in the rallying cry to Make America Great Again; it reverberates in the modern Confederate mantra that 'The South will rise again."'
"Enslaved women were so committed to each other that hostage-takers were unable to determine the frequency of abortions that occurred on the plantation. This revolutionary detail would prove that Black women navigated the institution of enslavement with full awareness of their wombs as a conduit for white profitability and relied upon kinship and community to self-determine the degree of their participation."
"Fetal personhood, under the Trump Administration, extends and intensifies the state's ongoing project of reproductive governance, deepening the legal and social forces that regulate reproductive autonomy. By enshrining fetal personhood in federal policy, the Executive Order reaffirms the commodification of reproduction, ensuring that only certain forms—those aligned with cisgender, heteronormative ideals—are deemed legitimate. This mirrors the historical regulation of Black and Indigenous reproduction, where the state determined who could bear children, under what conditions, and with what degree of surveillance or state-sanctioned violence."
"The Student Voice published everything—SNCC meeting recaps, poetry, mutual aid support for expelled students, comics, activist-written demonstration reports, and incidents of police repression and voter suppression. Editors even used the paper to thoroughly explain the philosophy of nonviolent action and the electoral process.
Today's average news organization is so captured by concerns of 'objectivity' that it avoids telling stories that encourage readers to take vital action."
"The imagined 'freak generation' represents a horizon the state cannot assimilate: futures that are queer, trans, Black, disabled, and economically 'unproductive'… because these futures cannot be folded into normative visions of citizenship or value, they must be preemptively contained—or, better yet, prevented entirely."
"Don't doctors who need to administer abortions get to use their faith to challenge such laws? And if the other side can claim conscientiousness to prohibit abortion, then why can't doctors claim conscientiousness to protect their right to perform abortions?"
"'Safeguard the Flame' took place in the Houston community space WonderlikeWander on March 21, 2025. A collaboration between organizations Palestine Solidarity TX, Al Awda Houston, and the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, the event drew on lessons from political prisoners in the U.S. and Palestine. It made clear that in all revolutionary movements, political prisoners are leaders, the beating heart of resistance—and their liberation is tied to ours."
"However, the publication's manufacturing consent for a wider use of state force in response to a moral panic its publishing sensationalizes is not new. It is symptomatic of the AJC's long history of co-signing police terror and inciting racist vigilantism for the sake of maintaining 'public order.' In 1906, publishing by the AJC's predecessors—The Atlanta Journal and The Constitution—leveraged white fears of Black presence post-emancipation during a contentious gubernatorial race between the former's publisher Hoke Smith and the latter's editor Clark Howell, where Black political enfranchisement and prohibition were central political issues, sparked the Atlanta Race Massacre."
"Institutional facilities have become so decrepit that door locks no longer function throughout entire complexes. From 2018 to 2023, 142 homicides occurred inside Georgia's prisons. Between 2018 and 2022, an additional 150 inmates died by suicide. Despite the horror of these findings, Georgia Department of Corrections Commissioner Tyrone Oliver brushed these deaths aside, commenting, 'One is bad. But it's not as bad when you look at the population we're dealing with.'
Worse: A growing accumulation of circumstantial evidence indicates that behind this horror is a chilling possibility: Georgia's government, led by Governor Brian Kemp, has allowed this prison crisis to fester to falsely justify to the tax-paying public that building new, harsher prisons is the only remedy. But government policies ignore all the data supporting rehabilitation and decarceration as the best methods for reducing crime."
In collaboration with the authors of The Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause, this three-part series on menopause, incarceration, and the climate crisis opens with a potent Abolitionist call-to-action from currently incarcerated Scalawag contributor Kwaneta Harris.
"Most of us learn to suffer in silence because visibility makes us targets. When the guards get angry with us, they turn the heating system on. It's their secret weapon—invisible, deniable, and devastating."
"To understand the depth of this experience, we must confront how reproductive aging is pathologized, how Black caretaking becomes a form of resistance behind bars, and how these harms remain tethered to the afterlife of slavery.
If we are to talk seriously about abolition, we must interrogate how the State punishes people for bleeding, aging, and surviving. Reproductive aging behind bars is not a marginal issue. It is a central indictment of a system that was never meant to protect us."
"In prison, we intimately know what it means to have our bodies controlled, surveilled, our choices stripped away, and our futures determined by others. Yet…the very movements that claim to fight for bodily autonomy and environmental safety systematically exclude those of us who experience the most extreme violations of both."
"Tennessee law prohibits holding children in seclusion, a term often used interchangeably with solitary confinement, for longer than two continuous hours. But according to source accounts, the center has two solitary confinement units — D-pod and H-pod — where children as young as 13 are confined to their cells for 23 hours or more at a time, for periods of weeks or months."
"A list of community fridges, food pantries, assistance programs, mission centers, and more offering resources to unhoused and food-insecure communities. We will be updating this list as we learn and verify new information."
Our team compiled this regional resource for folks in need of food assistance in the shadow of state abandonment. If you know of any missing from this list hard at work in your community, reach out and let us know! We will continue to update and share the list."
"To tell this history of policing and development in Atlanta, which culminates in the alleged conspiracy against Cop City, it is necessary to start in the years when a modern police force remained a distant fantasy of Atlanta's first post–Civil War mayor.
Atlanta's contemporary police force first developed in the decade after the Civil War from the pre-war 'City Marshall' office. After emancipation, Atlanta's white leaders recognized that the City Marshall, which employed only a handful of deputies with a wide variety of duties, would be insufficient to govern the growing city that they hoped to create."
"In order for this work to be just and equitable, we must fund and listen to Black, Southern collectives and organizations that are rooted in the work and community, especially those who center Black Southerners living with HIV and other health conditions. Our work must center the most marginalized, as a siloed movement not only makes our work harder but also incomplete."
"The future of philanthropy must be built on transformative relationships, trust in communities, and respect for youth leadership. Philanthropy must commit to a fundamental reshaping of how wealth and capital are governed. Our industry cannot exist merely to manage wealth. We must redistribute wealth to reshape the dynamics of injustice that youth organizers are constantly calling our attention to in this country. This means being willing to take transformative steps to reshape how we work, relate, and share power. Anything less perpetuates the very inequities we claim to address."
The Xinachtli freedom campaign continues to organize direct action and political education opportunities dedicated to mobilizing more people around freeing Xinachtli, and all political prisoners. Follow their work on Instagram @/freexinachtlinow and the website for updates on Xinachtli's case and guidance on how to get involved.
"Xinachtli (pronounced she-nawsht-lee) is not only part of a revolutionary history that many of us identify with and struggle alongside, but he is also part of the history we are making today. Xinachtli is the present, and that is one of the most important things about political prisoners currently suppressed by the state. They are still among us; they still have much to share with us, much to say, and much to feel.
A political prisoner is held captive for their political determination, for their resistance against colonial powers and rebellion against inhumane, racist, and unjust systems. Xinachtli stood at the forefront of the Chicano movement in Houston, Texas, leading El Movimiento De La Raza and spearheading the Ricardo Aldape Guerra Defense Committee, which fought to free Mexican national Ricardo Guerra from Texas death row after he was framed for allegedly killing a cop."
"The United States empire was built on the horrific slavery of Africans. Chicanos have suffered a comparable history of colonial crimes, through robbery of their ancestral lands, lynchings, massacres by the Texas Rangers, a police paramilitary militia that still exists today in the service of police terrorism. Both are in the service of an unjust system that alienates humanity in the service of capital—a criminal system that cannot be reformed, but rather, must be dismantled, one limb at a time. And a new equalitarian system of economics and a new revolutionary value system based on a collective ethics of care, love, unity, solidarity, humanism, independence, autonomy, land, liberty, and self-determination must take its place."
"My experience is not unique. While free people can personally research medications online, people incarcerated by the TDCJ do not have this privilege. Instead, we are purposefully left uninformed of prescription risks. With a $13.55 fee for each medical visit, it's easy to understand why thorough care and information are so regularly withheld, especially since people in Texas prisons are forced to work for no pay and many depend solely on family support to pay the fees. It wouldn't be a far reach to believe that money is more valuable to the state than incarcerated people's health. Their treatment of us all but screams it."
"In Texas women's prisons, there is a 'Fight Night' custom, where the officers choose inmates to fight each other in what they call 'the gauntlet.' Bets are made and inmates are pitted against each other for entertainment like gladiators in a coliseum. There must be bloodshed, or the officers beat the fighters and see how long they last before they get knocked out or concede. It's a battle until there's only one person left standing, leaving all the others incapacitated.
This is how I ended up with stress fractures in my knee, a broken finger, and bruised ribs. I'm lucky I made it out—some have died in the gauntlet."
"In the summer of 2025, Otisville, a medium security prison in the New York Carceral State, equipped security staff with body cameras. Following this policy change, prisoners who opted to be strip-frisked instead of body scanned during weekend visitations were captured on video by the guards fitted with their brand new body cameras. This led to video footage of prisoners' naked bodies and cavities, viewed by other persons besides the strip-frisk officer and stored in a database. This is pornographic sexual violence produced by the carceral state.
New York State Department of Correction and Community Supervision (DOCCS) Directive 4910states that strip-frisking incarcerated people for weapons, drugs, and contraband is lawful. However, it's silent on the use of body cameras. Fortunately, two fistfuls of men weren't."
Ain 't sh*t changed… It sits in another toilet, and we are ass out because our elected and unelected governments cracking down on speech is the same as silencing the hanged, and we know that scene has always been for the public to witness what it means when the state has heard enough of what unchannelled, unmobilized power sounds like.