How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché

I’m growing concerned with the impossible promise books with “how to” in their title seem to offer. As a reader, there’s a big part of me that is primed to expect a numbered list of steps tailored specifically to me and my context. I know I’m being unreasonable.

In any case, How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment by Justin Piché and Rachel Herzing is a book that embodies care and compassion towards incarcerated people. It is a commitment to a politics that focuses on finding more humane alternatives to imprisonment.

Like so many lessons from my youth, I learned a lot about the justice system from The Simpsons. In one episode, Sideshow Bob asks, in his own defence, whether the justice system is based on the idea that a man can change, upon which the chief of police comments, “Have our boys look into that.” In another episode, Marge becomes a police officer and Lisa says, “Mom, I know your intentions are good but aren’t the police a protective force that maintains the status quo for the wealthy elites? Don’t you think we ought to attack the roots of social problems instead of jamming people into overcrowded prisons?” After a pause, Marge presents a police dog puppet with a slogan that dismisses the nuanced conversation.

One of the highlights to me of Herzing and Piché’s is the way that they extend that conversation. Despite the title of the book being about abolishing prisons, abolition is not for them an all-or-nothing shift and they take to task the people who object to improving prisons since it is not abolition. I really appreciated that perspective. Demanding outright abolition is a noble goal, but while we wait, so many incarcerated people are suffering from inhumane conditions that could be ameliorated. Herzing and Piché focus on the immediate, real-world experiences of prisoners in favour of the idealism that sometimes inhibits change.

In order to keep that focus on material change, abolitionist organizations emphasize direct communication with imprisoned people. It was compelling to hear about the impact of letter writing campaigns and how much they’ve meant to incarcerated folk. Additionally, abolition can look like small-scale actions like driving incarcerated people to and from hearings and getting to know them directly. These small actions promote an understanding of others and give us a direct insight into the conditions of prisons. I really appreciate the way that abolition can take the form of direct connection. It reminds me of the chapter of Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” about getting to know your neighbours as a way of resisting tyranny.

If How to Abolish Prisons doesn’t persuade you to rethink our system on humanitarian grounds, the authors make a compelling case against prisons for a number of reasons: they’re resource-heavy on the climate, they’re exploitative for profit, and they’re not effective in addressing the root causes of issues. The book celebrates a number of successes with communities resisting new prison construction and engaging in other large-scale action against prisons. While it maybe didn’t go as in-depth as I had hoped, the book’s optimism really helped to offset that feeling.

Happy reading and happy reforming!

History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi

    History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi transports the reader to Morocco following the Years of Lead in the 1970s and1980s, focusing on political prisoners Mouline, Leila, and a range of other figures that occupy the jail, suffering torture at the hands of guards and the isolation endemic to their confinement. Marouazi’s work finds itself in a particular literary tradition of prison novels, sidling up beside the likes of Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The House of the Dead, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Herta Müller’s THe Hunger Angel, or even Assata Shakur’s autobiography.

    What History of Ash does, essentially, is demonstrate the impossibility of the prison novel as a genre.

    Prison novels like History of Ash are trapped in a paradox: by definition, prison restricts the agency of its occupants. In order to do justice (as it were) to the nature of prison, it requires characters in the story not to be able to effect changes in their circumstances. Unfortunately, the more accurate the representation is, the less characters are able to drive a narrative—which might, in my mind, explain why so many prison novels are episodic in nature, offering these brief slices of prison life without a grander narrative regarding liberation. To do otherwise might tend toward the glorification of fundamentally inhumane practices.

    Similarly, the characters in the novel are reduced to numbers in the eyes of the state. Marouazi replicates that feeling for the reader, somewhat, in that most of the characters are decontextualized from their circumstances. For instance, the book gives very little information about why the characters are actually imprisoned (perhaps to value their identities and avoid making their crimes the defining feature of their identities). Narratively, it serves some purpose—as a reader with no knowledge Morocco’s Years of Lead, it makes it difficult to connect. As much as it should have felt like an intimate look at their lives, what ended up happening is that the characters often fell flat; I needed more to latch onto so that they didn’t feel like empty signifiers.

    That said, there are some moments that are genuinely beautifully done that provide a glimpse into the hearts of these figures. For instance, the first chapter sees Mouline in his cell being routinely taken out in order to be tortured. When a mouse comes to occupy his cell, he starts screaming in terror, concerned about infection and disease. Over time, though, Mouline starts identifying with the mouse, gives it a name, and treats it as a kind of secret friend. Then, when the guards are interrogating and torturing Mouline, he gives the mouse’s name as a secret informant. It’s a wonderful moment of humour and rebellion—nobody knows the name of Mouline’s mouse (or that it even exists), and then the politicians are sent on a wild goose chase to apprehend this high level leftist that doesn’t exist. There’s also an entertaining scene where the prisoners arrange a heist of sorts to ensure that married prisoners are able to meet surreptitiously to time their sex with the woman’s ovulation to guarantee a child.

    On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, there’s a fracture in a relationship that feels devastating. Mouline fractures his relationship with Leila while in prison—it’s actually darkly funny because the premise seems to be that Mouline would like to be polygamous but hypocritically denies Leila the same opportunities. The sexist hypocrisy isn’t funny, but it’s a little ironic that the man in prison is insisting on having multiple women—it seems amusing and impracticable. In any case, Leila stops visiting him in prison, and Mouline does not know the reason for it immediately. The implications are devastating: he is abandoned for reasons unknown and that lack of knowledge is heartbreaking. The existential implications are somewhat understated—when you’re a prisoner, you don’t have the freedom to see people by your own choice and you have no control in trying to remedy a situation if the relationship has been fractured.

    Stylistically, the novel is often beautifully written. One of my favourite lines I feel can stand on its own without context: “That’s how all beautiful things are in my country … they only come as echoes and rust” (4). Some of the beauty emerges in the discussion of characters, as well. When describing Leila, Mouline says, that “I was constantly putting off trying to catch her, because once you caught this woman, she would just slip away again. Leila would slip away like water from the palm of your hand, or like air you won’t be able to breathe in a second time, or like a wave you can’t dive into twice. [...] Leila was the lily of the soul, and I was the sad desert thorn” (37). It’s a beautifully constructed passage that combines water imagery and floral imagery. The idea of Leila slipping away like water is lovely, and then the idea of him being a “sad desert thorn”, with the implication of being deprived of water, is a powerful turn.

    It’s in these small moments of beauty that History of Ash really shines. In a novel made bleak with isolation, confinement, and torture, it’s as though these poetic moments are what express the indomitable spirit of the characters in the text. Despite their lack of agency and despite their reduction to being numbers, there is still something that remains. 

    In that respect, the ending of the book is an interesting turn. A lot of the time in prison is glossed over and then we are able to witness the return home. It’s a moment with very little fanfare and great anxiety. The moment of the key being used in the lock is a powerful one and the recognition of all that has changed and all that has been preserved is a poignant note on which to end the text.

    Overall, it’s hard to grapple with the paradoxes of prison novels and History of Ash in particular. I feel like I have misunderstood a number of details or missed out on some of the nuances. As an overall text, I think its main highlight is its style and its main detraction is the episodic nature of the text. In some ways, reading the text feels as if I’m as adrift as these prisoners: a sense of the unknown becomes the darkest cloud.