when we look carefully at who sits in prison cells around the world, we see the boundaries and pressure points in the imperial structure — the specific relationships of land, labor, and resistance that the state finds most threatening to its order. our prsioners are our greatest teachers. gramsci wrote the prison notebooks in a fascist cell, working out how ruling classes maintain power not through force alone but through culture and consent. nelson mandela studied law and political theory on robben island. george jackson, incarcerated at soledad, traced the way racial capitalism uses the prison to discipline and contain the working class. prison gave these people time, and in some cases community, to sit with the hardest questions of their movements and write toward answers. what they produced became foundational to how we understand power, resistance, and liberation. the love and solidarity we owe to people behind bars is owed to our heroes whose thinking, produced under some of the most violent conditions imaginable, shaped the politics we carry today.

every person behind bars is a political prisoner. incarceration is a tool deployed deliberately by capitalist, colonial, and imperialist states to manage the people their violent orders cannot absorb and will not tolerate. from Turtle Island to Palestine to india to france, prisons are an institution of the settler-colonial and imperialist project, and the decision of who fills their cells is a political one.

across the world, the people criminalized most heavily are the people who resist, and the people whose existence challenges the legitimacy of the borders drawn around them. colonial and imperialist states require mechanisms of containment — the plantation, the reservation, the detention center, the prison — to maintain an order built on stolen land and stolen labor. solidarity with prisoners is our way of recognizing that their captivity and our freedom exist within the same political structure, and that structure must be dismantled.