Intro to Prison Abolition & How to Enact it on Campus

Please join OPIRG Toronto & the Disability Justice Network of Ontario’s Prison Project for an interactive educational workshop on Prison & Police Abolition

***This workshop is aimed at students, faculty & staff at U of T, and anyone who studies or works on a university or college campus in the GTA.

***Dinner will be provided: Vegan and gluten free options will be available. Please let us know if you have any other serious allergies.

***In accordance with OPIRG Toronto’s Health and Safety Policy, to minimize risk for all participants, folks will be asked to wear masks. Exemptions will be made for medical or human rights reasons.

Abolition: It’s a big idea, but how do we get there? Why is it so important? And how can we start enacting it on campus?

DJNO’s Prison Project has been supporting prisoner organizing, providing concrete support to prisoners, and doing community-driven research around the intersections of race, disability, and prisons for the last year. Join us for a discussion around why abolition – not reform – is the only solution we support, and dream with us around how to get there!

We’ll discuss practical ways to engage in abolition on campus and provide some concrete takeaway tools. This workshop and discussion is meant both as an introduction the idea of abolition and how to enact it. Anyone can join!

Facilitated by: Trish (they/she) is a long-time community organizer and mobilizer based in Hamilton, ON, who is neurodivergent, queer, and disabled. They have a passion and responsibility for defending the land and water and have been criminalized for it. They use their experiences in the criminal legal system to help others make empowered choices about risk and initiate discussions around power, fear, courage, and resilience. Trish has experienced incarceration and forced psychiatric institutionalization: Those – and other experiences in the community – have left them committed to enacting non-carceral, inclusive approaches to accountability and justice in the community. Since its inception, Trish has volunteered with DJNO’s prison project and believes wholeheartedly in the dream (and work) of total abolition

READ MORE ABOUT PRISON AND POLICE ABOLITION ON CAMPUS

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

DJNO’s Prison Project aims to hear, document, and amplify the experiences of individuals who have been imprisoned and live at the intersection of being racialized and disabled in order to push against carceral logics.

We are prison abolitionists who believe in care and a community-centered approach to accountability and justice. The criminal legal system overwhelmingly targets, surveils, prosecutes and imprisons people who are disabled – in particular those who are also Black, Brown, or Indigenous. It is a system which is heavily reinforced through an interconnected network of racist and ableist agencies and systems: the school to prison pipeline, social service and child welfare agencies, social housing, private security forces, and more.

MORE INFORMATION: https://www.djno.ca/prison-project

OPIRG Toronto is an intersectional grassroots volunteer-based group at the University of Toronto, with a mandate for action, education, and research on environmental and social justice issues.

We seek to empower and educate students and community members by building connections and providing opportunities for students to connect with community activism and vice versa. We also provide a forum for learning and sharing skills, and give people the tools and opportunity to work co­operatively for social and environmental change. We are an independent student funded organization, we are not funded or beholden to any administrative or governmental body. This means that we are not associated with UofT’s administration or any level of government (federal, provincial or municipal). We are a member of a provincial network of Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), with eleven others in Ontario.

MORE INFORMATION: https://opirgtoronto.org/