“Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons.” ― Ruth Wilson Gilmore
In conjunction with global financial capital, mass incarceration, in all its forms and varieties, has been showing steady growth. In this manner, talking about abolition transforms into a conversation about justice -- and justice systems -- at the same time. Imprisonment is linked to justice systems and systematic injustice. An accepted default institution of punishment for injustice, it is punishment for demanding justice; taken to provide safety and freedom from injustice. It is a spacetime perpetuating active subjugation, eradicating the necessary condition to be and become a citizen of one’s community and the world -- a structured destruction of our capacity in participating in the world.
This lecture by Dr. Shokoufeh Sakhi invites us to think and talk about prison and abolition, through a closer understanding of imprisonment as a phenomenon and its position within the world we live in. It considers prisons not just as warehouses storing unwanted, defected, harmful human products of our social and political conditions, but also as actively participating in safeguarding those very conditions. Looking at case studies in Syria and Iran, and counterposing those to cases here, closer to 'home', the talk engages with abolition, not as a reaction to blatant injustice and cruelty of imprisonment, but as an ongoing response to our historical condition, an active participation in imagining a different social structure.
Short Biography: Dr. Shokoufeh Sakhi is an independent scholar and researcher who is currently a research associate with
Off-Site Ethnography of Post-revolution Iran, a project hosted by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Her study and research are rooted in and benefited from her experience of eight years of political imprisonment, from 1982 to 1990, under the Islamic Republic State of Iran. Dr. Sakhi acted as Executive Committee Director (2013-2014) of the Iran Tribunal Foundation investigating the Iranian state's crimes against humanity in the 1980s. She also testified as an ex-political prisoner at the Iranian People’s Tribunal hearings held at the Hague (2012). Among many documentaries, she participated in
The Tree That Remembers, directed by Mr. Masoud Raouf, an award-winning NFB documentary film on the experiences of Iranian political prisoners in the first decade after the 1979 revolution. Her publications include: “Witness statement of Shokoufeh Sakhi,” in
Speaking for the Dead: Survivor’s Account of Iran’s1988 Massacre. New Haven, CT: Iran’s Human Rights Documentation Centre. 26-43, “Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry” in
Death and Other Penalties, Fordham: 2015, "Ethical-Political Praxis: Social Justice and the Resistant Subject in Iran" in
Iran's Struggle for Social Justice (2017), and "A Taste of Mortadella" and "Iran Tribunal: Justice in Making" in
Voices of a Massacre (2020), “Self-isolation as imprisonment”
https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/blog/self-isolation-as-imprisonment/, and “There Is Life Out There,” (2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U21HsA3Vso.
