Capitalism Is the Prison: All Prisons Must Be Abolished names the deep connection between the cages of the state and the economic system they protect. The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with nearly two million people behind bars. They are overwhelmingly poor, and disproportionately Black, Latino, and Indigenous. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, and in that exception the old system found a new life. Convict leasing after Reconstruction, chain gangs, and the prison labor of today, paid pennies an hour, show how imprisonment has long served as a tool for controlling and exploiting labor.

Abolitionist thinkers and organizers have shown that prisons are not a response to crime so much as a response to the crises of capitalism. In Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore traced how California built dozens of new prisons as deindustrialization left surplus workers, land, and capital with nowhere to go, and as the state abandoned schools, hospitals, and jobs in working-class communities. Angela Davis, herself a former political prisoner, described the prison-industrial complex and asked in Are Prisons Obsolete? how society might be organized without cages. From George Jackson's letters to the work of Critical Resistance, the movement has insisted that prisons protect the property and power of the ruling class while warehousing the people capitalism has no use for.

Abolition is not only about tearing down walls. As Gilmore puts it, abolition is about presence, not absence: building the housing, health care, education, meaningful work, and community safety that make prisons unnecessary. Capitalism imprisons people both inside and outside the walls, through poverty, debt, and dispossession. This print calls for the abolition of all prisons as part of a larger struggle to free humanity from a system built on exploitation, and to create a society where everyone can live in dignity and freedom.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*