Critical Resistance

Cages are a major frontline of struggle globally, and all our liberation movements must continue to uplift the organizing and analysis created from the people inside the walls. Support Critical Resistance’s cross-wall organizing today by subscribing and donating to The Abolitionist newspaper.

As we strengthen our connections with folks inside cages, we also offer resources to help organizers in need through The Zachary Project. Consider contributing to The Zachary Project this December!

Read about CR’s cross-wall organizing and mutual aid work at the link in our bio.

Critical Resistance (CR) is hiring a Capital Campaign Director to lead a field‑defining campaign that will anchor abolitionist infrastructure in Oakland.

This full‑time, hybrid role will guide strategy, fundraising, donor engagement, and cross‑movement collaboration for Building People Power—a multi‑year initiative transforming CR’s North Oakland building into a hub for organizing, cultural work, and community‑centered safety and resiliency.

If you’re a strategic fundraiser and movement‑aligned leader excited to help shape a generational investment in abolitionist future‑building, we encourage you to apply. Learn more and submit your application at bit.ly/CRCCDHiring or via the link in our bio.

📝 It’s that time of year again! Critical Resistance’s annual prisoner solidarity postcard writing parties are right around the corner.

Every year, Critical Resistance sends a note of solidarity, hope, and encouragement to all of the 6,500+ subscribers of The Abolitionist newspaper who are currently locked up in jails, detention centers, and prisons.

Since this time of year can be challenging for our loved ones, especially for folks locked up, CR sends messages of love and solidarity to all of our imprisoned comrades each December.
Check out and RSVP for your local chapters event!

RSVP links can be found in our linktree.

CR New York City
Join Critical Resistance NYC for our annual end-of-year event to send cards across prison walls to our imprisoned comrades and loved ones.
🗓️ Friday, December 5th | 6:00-8:00 PM
📍Parole Preparation Project
135 West 20th Street, Suite 302
📬 RSVP at bit.ly/crnycards

CR Oakland
Join Critical Resistance Oakland for our annual Prisoner Solidarity mailing party!
🗓️ Friday, December 5th from 6-9pm PT
📍Understory
3340 International Blvd, Oakland, CA 94601
📲 RSVP: bit.ly/CROAKPostcards

CR Portland
Join CR PDX and comrades from and to write holiday postcards to our imprisoned comrades.
🗓️ Saturday Dec 6, 1-5 pm
📍North Portland Library Room 2A
512 N Killingsworth St
📬 RSVP: bit.ly/CRPDXpostcards

CR Los Angeles
Join CRLA at the amazing SCL archives for postcard writing! Come listen to some great music curated by DJ Jose, enjoy some snacks and refreshments and join us in solidarity, resilience and resistance while writing to comrades inside.
🗓️ Sunday, December 7th | 4-7:00 PM
📍Southern California Library
6120 S Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90044
📬 Please RSVP by Friday, December 5th

📣ATL this weekend! ✨

Join in continuing the conversation about what public safety looks like and build a shared vision on a safer Atlanta.

🗓️ When: September 6th, 2025
📍Location: Westside Motor Lounge 725 Echo St. NW
👥 Who: You. Your neighbors. Your friends. Your family and EVERYONE who believes in building genuine people power, justice, and a thriving Atlanta.

🔥: Join us. Share your vision. Stand up and FIGHT BACK!

RSVP here ➡️➡️ bit.ly/atlpeoplesassembly

Marking 20 years since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. 🖤🕊️

When the levees broke, the state’s violence was laid bare. Thousands of mostly poor and Black people in New Orleans were abandoned in the flood — including those locked inside Orleans Parish Prison, left to drown in their cells.

Rather than provide care or relief, the state built Camp Greyhound, a makeshift jail where over 1,200 people were caged in the weeks after the storm. People were arrested for curfew violations, for “looting” food and water, or simply for surviving. Many spent months and years locked up without trial. Some never made it home


This is how climate disaster meets the prison industrial complex (PIC): communities left to die, then criminalized for living. We see the same patterns today, from wildfires to floods to heat waves, where disaster response is driven by policing and imprisonment instead of care and freedom.

In the aftermath of the storm, waged a national amnesty campaign for prisoners of Katrina. Pictured include fans we used at actions and press conferences for years after, and a number leaflets with stories of imprisoned survivors.

✨Today, we continue to demand Amnesty for the Prisoners of Katrina. That means expunging records, ending the criminalization of survival, and refusing to let disaster be weaponized against our people.

On this anniversary, we remember, we honor, and we organize — for abolition, for freedom, and for a future where survival is met with solidarity, not cages.

✨Calling all Bay Area supporters of Critical Resistance & friends!:

🗓️Come through to CR Oakland’s Mid-year Mixer at Understory’s new location (3340 International Blvd in the Fruitvale) next Wednesday, June 25 from 5-8pm.

We’ll share updates on CR Oakland’s organizing and plan for the rest of the year, connect, politick, dream, scheme and enjoy delicious food together. This is the chapter’s main fundraiser, so come prepared to give & support CR’s work!

📲You can RSVP here: bit.ly/CRMidYearMixer

💸And donate ahead of time online here: bit.ly/sustain_CR (Specify you’re giving to CR Oakland at the bottom of the page!).

See you next week!

The prison industrial complex (PIC) isn’t broken—it’s doing exactly what it was built to do: protect racial capitalism and crush resistance. It is the infrastructure of US fascism. From ICE raids to police repression to prison expansion, we know there’s no fascism without prisons or policing—and no real freedom without abolition. While the state builds cages, we build power. While they invest in death-making systems, we organize for a liberatory future.

Support Critical Resistance this June and help us dismantle the PIC, across walls and across generations. All donations go directly to fuel our campaigns and projects to abolish the PIC. 💸

This month we aim to raise:

· $1,500 for CR’s Oakland chapter

· $1,000 for CR’s Los Angeles chapter

· $600 for CR’s New York City chapter

· $500 for CR’s Portland chapter

· $500 for The Zachary Project

· $1,000 for The Abolitionist newspaper (Each paid subscription sponsors free subscriptions for multiple people inside prisons, jails, and detention centers)

· $10,000 for CR’s Cross-Wall Strategy & Power Building Retreat.
📲Donate now: bit.ly/CrosswallFund

· $6,000 for the organization at-large
💸 bit.ly/sustain_CR

NEW YORK: This Saturday, June 7th from 1–4, join P***o Magazine , Take Back the Bronx & Critical Resistance for an afternoon of reading and conversation around the reissue of our book AFTER ACCOUNTABILITY, with narrators from the book, P***o editors, and community members.

The event will be in conversation with prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionists from the Bronx who laid the foundations of what it means to put abolition in practice, and an “abolition regrounding” as we continue building autonomous community formations striving towards collective liberation. We will also be honoring Sammy Crea 150 of Critical Resistance, Community In Unity, La Asociación Ñeta, one of our dearest guerreros who is resting in power.

Narrator & Critical Resistance member Pilar Maschi will be joined by Kim Diehl, Esteban Kelly & P***o collective member ME O’Brien, as well as by Darcy Gill, Jaime Rivera, Lisa Ortega, Sache’l Thompson, and Trevor Nicholas.

🗓️ Saturday, June 7th
⏰ 1–4 PM
📍Andrew Freedman Home
1125 Grand Concourse, The Bronx, New York

📖Books will be available for purchase

Accessibility:
The facility has a ramp. Masks will be provided at the door.

📣 Support Cross-Wall Organizing this Black August ✊🏿✊🏽✊🏾✊🏼✨

Prison repression is intensifying—from digitizing mail censorship to surveillance crackdowns and criminalizing collectivity inside.

Prisons are blocking books. Targeting organizers. Retaliating against political thought. This isn’t just about repressing individuals—it’s a strategy to control and defang our movements by disconnecting us from our loved ones, comrades and leaders who are locked up.

Prison censorship isn’t only an attack on people inside cages. It’s an attack on all of us.

When prisons block books, letters, and political education, they’re not just trying to isolate imprisoned people—they’re trying to break cross-wall organizing, disrupt movement-building, and silence resistance at its root.

If we’re building toward collective liberation, we must be clear:

✊🏿Our strategies are incomplete without imprisoned leadership.

✊🏾Our ideas are weaker when inside thinkers are silenced.

✊🏽And our movements are complicit if we ignore censorship or repression because it’s happening behind bars.

This summer for Black August, Critical Resistance (CR) is organizing a “Cross-wall” Strategy & Power Building Retreat as one way we’re fighting back—bringing together close movement partners to build strategy across cages with people directly impacted by censorship, surveillance, and political retaliation.

While the retreat is invite-only so that we can generate and sharpen shared strategies to move our projects and campaigns forward collectively, anyone and everyone can support by donating to our mutual aid fund to support organizers across walls coast-to-coast to come together for a weekend to build power.

Support this vital work. Help us raise $10,000 by July 5.

💸Donate today & help build the infrastructure to keep abolitionist strategy and organizing alive—inside and out.

📲bit.ly/CrosswallFund

As May 2025 comes to a close, we at Critical Resistance (CR) offer some of our reflections this month as political grounding and inspiration for the road ahead.

This May, we honor the revolutionary legacies of Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama—comrades who shared a May 19 birthday and whose lifelong commitment to dismantling racial capitalism, imperialism, and state violence remains urgent and necessary. Their deep political clarity, unwavering internationalism, and cross-racial solidarity remind us that liberation is built collectively—across borders, walls, and generations.

This month also marks five years since police killed George Floyd, whose public ex*****on ignited a global rebellion, when millions rose up to demand defunding of police, an end to racist state violence, and investment in community care during a global pandemic—not cages and control.

In the years since, the state has responded with backlash—expanding police budgets, escalating surveillance, intensifying prison censorship, and deepening border violence.

This is the terrain we are organizing on—
and why abolition must be our guide.

Malcolm taught us that there is no capitalism without racism. Yuri showed us that solidarity must be lived through action—finding each other across walls and borders and never ceasing to organize with those the system discards. Together, they remind us that liberation is a global project—and that the PIC is one of fascism’s most entrenched frontlines…

📲Read full post on our website (link in bio too): criticalresistance.org/updates

🗞️ The next issue of our cross-wall newspaper prints next month—check out the sneak peek, an early release of imprisoned columnist, Stevie Wilson’s 9971 column

💸 And support by donating to CR’s Cross-wall Fund to support organizers across the US come together for a strategy retreat to strengthen cross-wall power against censorship & repression AND give to 9971’s fundraiser to support prisoner-led organizing and study groups behind the wall in Pennsylvania.

More updates & links in our post ✨

・・・
NEW YORK: Join our next letter writing session to get connected to folks in detention ✊🏽 Thursday May 29. Register for more info bit.ly/DnDMayLetterWriting

・・・
📣‼️BREAKING NEWS‼️📣

From California’s , released today:

“Given the state’s fiscal situation and the projected decline in the prison population, the May Revision proposes to close one additional prison by October 2026. Upon full closure, the state will achieve an estimated savings of about $150 million General Fund annually.”