The Life in This Movement

Jared Ware interviews Maurice Smith (a pseudonym), a prisoner and national organizer with Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, on the state of prisoner movements and the movement for prison abolition from his perspective. Smith discusses the progression of prisoner movements in recent years, as well as the danger he sees in a liberal celebration of the Biden-Harris election, coupled with a retreat from principled anti-carceral and abolitionist organizing.

Smith further emphasizes the necessity of building a popular grassroots movement for abolition among the masses. Ware asks Smith to analyze the ability of the far right to weaponize establishment right wing media to attack abolitionist movements, and Smith notes the lack of a sufficient counterweight to defend against those attacks. Smith also challenges people who call themselves prison abolitionists to be principled in the face of reactionary and carceral liberalism, and lifts up the examples of some recently deceased prison abolitionist organizers.