Towards A Prisonless Society

From the publisher:

"I first stumbled across the title of my great-aunt Eileen's 1980 article, "Toward a Prisonless Society," with a kind of shock. Like REALLY, TOWARDS A PRISONLESS SOCIETY?? In Homemaker's Magazine? 

What a banger of a title. Like something pulled from an anarchist abolitionist zine in the 2000s, not from my great-aunt in a Toronto women's magazine long before I was ever born. And yet there it was, on the (very 80s, rainbow-tastic) cover, alongside travel tips, casserole recipes and career advice for young women. 

It's the sheer mainstream-ness of it all. 

Angela Davis had been publishing abolitionist writing for about a decade, the ideas were gathering traction, and here were those ideas appearing as a FEATURE in the November issue of Homemaker's, a fairly influential Canadian women's magazine that had begun mixing politics in with its shopping lists. 

My family isn't particularly political, or radical. Here was this unexpected lineage, a connection to a struggle I thought I had arrived at on my own, that I felt like a black sheep about my commitment to. And yet the questions raised in 1980 remain urgent today.

These ideas shouldn't be fringe. We're still circling the same terrain, still caught on the idea of disposability, still asking what to do with people who make us uncomfortable. 

And still asking, how the hell do you make a casserole?"