This past Wednesday, the Days-Massolo Center hosted a zoom for the Critical Resistance’s Letter Writing Campaign, #WriteThemAll. On the call, students learned about the campaign, which aims to send letters to incarcerated people in the state of Oregon.

The organization Critical Resistance was founded in 1997 to fight against the Prison-industrial complex (PIC) through campaigns and local projects. The prison-industrial complex is used to discuss overlapping interests of government and industry


that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.

In addition to the rules and regulations that our country has gotten used to during the pandemic, prisons also have new guidelines to follow. Currently, because of COVID-19, no visitation is allowed, almost all rehabilitation programs were cut, many shared spaces (i.e. libraries, common rooms, etc) are closed or deeply restricted and many individuals are confined in cells for the vast majority of their day.

In an attempt to build community and support incarcerated people during these challenging times, while also contributing to the movement towards defunding policing and against police violence, Critical Resistance started a letter-writing campaign.

Over the past couple of months, Alma Bradley ’21 and Jessica Sanchez ’23 have been working hard to bring this campaign to Hamilton and to involve students in this organization.

Sanchez began writing letters with Critical Resistance this summer when she saw their #WriteThemAll campaign on Instagram. She realized that she “wanted to do something related to prison abolition work and saw that their campaign focused on connecting people currently incarcerated with abolitionist materials.” Additionally, she was “interested in supporting efforts to build a stronger sense of community between people currently incarcerated and people outside of prisons.”

Bradley and Sanchez met due to a shared interest in prison abolition and seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation that do not place a focus on punishment and government institutionalization. Bradley previously contributed to a campaign similar to this one, so they decided to start a campaign on campus.

In the meeting held this past week, Bradley and Sanchez introduced the campaign to participating students and went over the template and rules students will use to write their letters. Afterward, the participants wrote letters introducing themselves to an incarcerated individual.

The co-organizers hope to meet every week for the rest of the semester and get as many people engaged as possible. Additionally, they “hope that this can be a space to come together and brainstorm other abolitionist projects, and build a stronger community of people taking concrete abolitionist steps on campus” while bringing awareness about prison abolition to campus.

Sanchez has learned the importance of connecting with incarcerated people through her experiences on the campaign. She noted that “people within the prison system are typically disregarded to the point that they begin to lose hope. Therefore, this project offers a safe way during this pandemic to connect with incarnated people and offer them support.”