The following are locations for selected Prisoners’ Justice Day events happening in Ontario on Sunday, August 10th:
Toronto: Grange Park at 1:00 pm ET
Kingston: Grounds at the Prison for Women (P4W), 40 Sir John A. Macdonald Blvd at 11:00 am ET
Ottawa: Human Rights Monument, 220 Elgin St at 11:00 am ET
Hamilton: Northwest corner of Barton & Ferguson at 5:00 pm ET
Montreal: Parc Vinet, Coin Lionel Groulx & Vinet at 1:30 ET (rain location at Le Frigo Vert)
Halifax: Seahorse Tavern, 2037 Gottingen St at 7:00 pm AST
Vancouver: Claire Culhane Memorial Beach, Trout Lake Park, 6:00 pm PDT
Please see your local organizing groups for events in other cities and provinces.
Every year on August 10th, people across the country and beyond mark Prisoners’ Justice Day (PJD) as a day of mourning, resistance, and remembrance.
Born inside the walls of a prison, PJD began as an act of collective defiance by incarcerated people following the death of Eddie Nalon in solitary confinement at Millhaven Institution in 1974. In the years that followed, prisoners refused to eat, work, or participate in prison routines to honour those who had died by suicide, medical neglect, or violence inside Canada’s carceral institutions. From there, PJD grew into a national and international movement for abolition led by prisoners and sustained by those on the outside who have answered the call to witness and act in solidarity. This year, August 10th will mark the 50th Prisoners’ Justice Day.
For organizers, abolition means more than opposition to prisons. It is a method of struggle that shapes how we build in the face of violence. It is the daily work of rejecting carceral realism, confronting the state’s organized abandonment of marginalized communities, and organizing toward the material conditions that make freedom possible. In that spirit, we’ve compiled a reading list that draws on the long tradition of prisoner resistance and abolitionist thought in Canada. These texts offer insight into the structures of the carceral system and the movements, both inside and outside prison walls, that seek to dismantle them.
The “Prisons Justice Day” digital archive curated by the University of Toronto Libraries brings together a powerful collection of materials documenting the origins and growth of Prisoners’ Justice Day (PJD) across Canada. The material in this archive exposes how resistance to carceral death was theorized and practiced by prisoners from the inside. Through letters, artwork, poetry, posters, and internal newsletters, it explores how imprisoned people organized their demands to be seen as political actors. The materials represent a diversity in tactics, from individual refusals to coordinated collective actions like hunger strikes. It also shows how prisoners strategically leveraged official publications, like Odyssey and Tightwrire, to amplify their messaging. For anyone organizing around PJD today, the archive offers an insight into the first-hand struggles faced by prisoners in some of Canada’s earliest and most violent carceral institutions.
This guide examines the deep connections between abolitionist struggles, Indigenous sovereignty, and anti-colonial resistance in Canada. It provides a curation of readings, films, music, and other media that explore seven key themes: Indigenous legal orders, the imposition of settler law, policing, colonial incarceration, the role of social work in colonial control, feminist and Two-Spirit justice, and visions for Indigenous futures. It is grounded in an explicitly Indigenous perspective and shows how carceral systems perpetuate colonial violence and facilitate land theft. For organizers in Canada, it underscores the need to dismantle colonial structures while looking to Indigenous knowledge as a foundation for care and governance. By situating abolition within the restoration of land, relationships, and community, it broadens the scope of abolitionist thought in practical and transformative ways.
This book documents the everyday labour of abolition through El Jones’s work with incarcerated people in Nova Scotia through calls, workshops, advocacy, court support, and public pressure. It is a record of relationships built under surveillance, across prison walls, and through the phone. Jones focuses on voice as a site of connection and strategy and how poetry, conversation, and repetition become tools for survival and organizing. The book challenges the idea that abolition is abstract or that it is primarily explored within the confines of academic research in universities. Instead, Jones argues that the work is sustained through commitments rooted in collective care. “Intimacy,” Jones writes, “is both my subject and my research method”. Abolitionist Intimacies shows us what it takes to stay in the work when wins are rare, when justice is deferred, and when relationships are the only infrastructure we have. You can read a more in-depth review here.
This book tackles a key question often sidestepped in abolitionist discourse: not why, but how to dismantle prisons. Piché and Herzing draw on decades of organizing, from Massachusetts’ closure of youth prisons in the 1970s to campaigns in Ontario and California, to show that abolition is a practical and iterative process. The authors discuss strategies like decarceration, diversion, and defunding, while showing how systems adapt to preserve themselves (e.g. closing one prison only to expand another, or repurposing prison buildings into surveillance-heavy institutions or tourist sites). They analyze how even unsuccessful campaigns lay groundwork for future wins by shifting public discourse and building organizing infrastructure. This book offers concrete examples of how to shrink the carceral footprint and resist reformist traps.
This book draws an urgent connection between reproductive justice and prison abolition. Paynter pushes back against the myth that bodily autonomy is guaranteed in Canada, showing how laws and institutions criminalize pregnancy, substance use, sex work, and even parenting. She documents how the same systems that deny people access to abortion also target them through policing and incarceration, particularly impacting poor, Indigenous, and racialized women and gender-diverse people. Drawing from her work as a nurse and advocate, Paynter recounts stories of abortion access denied due to geography or poverty and of parents separated from their children in prison. Reproductive injustice, she shows, is built into the same structures that incarcerate and punish. Dismantling the prison system also requires dismantling the institutional machinery that polices bodies and care.
[TW: Some of the stories recounted in this book are graphic and may be disturbing for readers]
A World Without Cages is a collection of academic essays that frames immigration detention as a central site of carceral power. Some of the essays specifically situate detention within Canada’s broader carceral state and border regime, showing how detention operates through legal opacity and bureaucratic discretion. The collection traces how Canada’s so-called “administrative” detention system quietly normalizes indefinite imprisonment without charge, trial, or meaningful review for racialized migrants and asylum seekers. Contributors draw from legal scholarship, advocacy, and organizing to argue that immigration detention is not a policy failure but a tool of social sorting and racial governance. The book maps how detention is expanding in Canada through the influx of provincial jail contracts, surveillance technologies, and institutional partnerships. Just last week, a subsidiary of a Canadian security company was cleared to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in “emergency detention” services to ICE. The authors also highlight the importance of tackling this carceral web by centering abolitionist strategies like establishing sanctuary cities and creating mutual aid initiatives that seek to dismantle the various forms of incarceration.
This year, as we witness the machinery of carceral and imperial violence at work in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and here at home, these texts remind us that resistance must be global and interconnected. This Prisoners’ Justice Day, let us sharpen our commitment to dismantling every system that confines people, from prison walls to militarized borders, and instead build networks of solidarity rooted in our collective liberation.
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