Prison Break: Imagining Alternatives to Prison in the UK (2021–22) was a research project which aimed to explore imaginative possibilities for radical and transformative change within approaches to criminal justice and harm, and to offer an account of the contemporary movement for prison abolition in the UK, via creative, collaborative research with experts on this topic. As such, and with an interdisciplinary background in the arts and social sciences, I developed creative writing workshops to support activists and scholars involved in the movement for prison abolition in the UK to write short works of science fiction imagining more just futures. The project developed a methodology of ‘collaborative fictioning’ which, drawing on feminist, utopian and poststructuralist scholarship, is conceptualised as the way that writing fiction, particularly with others, can open up ways to imagine our world anew and transform our present practices.

With the acknowledgement that ‘the prison is considered so "natural" that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it’ , and further, that activists often struggle with ‘burnout’ from facing relentless challenges, the project aimed to create a dedicated space for participants to reflect on their knowledge in creative ways, and to explore their ‘anti-carceral imagination’. Science fiction has been argued to be a literary genre defined by ‘cognitive estrangement’ where the reader’s encounter with novel societies and technologies, invites them to dream their own world anew and perhaps, work to change it. 

The project was inspired by the incorporation of creative writing practices (and often speculative fiction) within some contemporary activist practices, exemplified by the collection Octavia’s Brood, an anthology of speculative fiction short stories written by social justice movement organisers and activists in the U.S and edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. While valuing fictioning as an ‘exploring ground’ where activists can engage with difficult issues without serious worldly consequences, the editors stress that they are not proposing creative work as a retreat from activism, but part of a dialectic between imagination and practice.

The key outcome of the project was an open-access collection: Abolition Science Fiction, which contains fourteen stories, a poem and a manifesto written by some of the project participants during the project’s creative writing workshops. These are accompanied by an edited version of our workshop discussions, which link the stories to issues and learning from the movement, reflecting a process of collective and collaborative analysis and knowledge exchange. The book was designed as a learning resource that would outlast the project, so there are discussion prompts throughout and a final section which comprises of creative writing exercises and advice on how to run similar workshops to those we used in the project.

I am grateful to have had many opportunities to speak and write about the project within academia. For example, I was invited to contribute a short chapter on the project to Sarah Truman’s book Researching and Teaching with Speculative Fiction, which grew out of their international project on the potential of speculative and science fiction in young people’s literary education. It has been exciting to see the work engaged with by other scholars. For instance, stories and a manifesto from the book are discussed in a chapter on abolition feminism and utopian justice in a new Law handbook. I was honoured to be invited to give the keynote presentation at the second conference of the AHRC Utopia and Failure Network in Newcastle in 2024 (led by Mathias Thaler, Davina Cooper and Ruth Houghton, event co-organised by the Abolition Feminism for Ending Sexual Violence Collective). This presentation formed the basis of a journal article which focused on the theme of utopian temporalities within the movement for abolition and my project participant’s stories.

Here I argued that the stories reflected the complexity of my participants’ anti-carceral imaginaries, demonstrating that rather than fitting the stereotype of abolitionists as not taking harm seriously, their stories evidence a nuanced engagement with questions of justice, safety, revenge, memory and community. Reflecting on the mistrust towards utopia within the abolitionist movement, I drew on literary scholar Tom Moylan’s concept of the ‘critical utopia’ as a form of utopia that incorporates problems and imperfections rather than denying them. Thus, it is recuperable for activism, allowing us to think with the stories rather than focusing on their failure to realise a perfectly just society.

The project took place during a moment when the movement for the abolition of prisons fleetingly commanded mainstream attention, and when racist police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement had brought questions of state violence, harm and accountability centre stage. Four years on from the end of the project, the world seems very different, and the movement has developed in response to current issues, for example the increased criminalisation of protest. The book has had a reach far beyond what we could have imagined, with 500 free paper copies distributed to homes, radical reading rooms, education and activist spaces. Readers around the world have been in touch to tell us they were moved or inspired by the stories, to share their own stories, to tell us how it made them feel connected to others who share their politics, or to share plans for new reading groups and creative workshops.

We started to self-fund the printing and distribution of the book in 2023 and currently sell the book in some radical bookshops, with sales covering print costs. Unfortunately, it has proved unsustainable to do our own printing and distribution, so we may soon stop printing the book, however the free eBook will continue to be available. We made a low-fi audiobook version in 2023 to increase accessibility, and it was a joy to hear many of the contributors read their own stories.

Parts or the whole of the book have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, Burmese, and Italian by volunteers, and in the forthcoming Italian edition, the translators have included new stories and essays in response. I have stayed in touch with participants in the project, who have performed their stories and poems in public, used them with activist groups or in teaching, and reproduced them in other publications such as a German handbook of transformative justice. The book turns up in unexpected places, and I have heard about it being used in transformative conflict facilitator training and in a project on space colonies, as well as several prison-based reading groups. Perhaps part of the appeal of the book is its playful approach to a serious topic, and that it doesn’t shy away from the complexity of our often-contradictory feelings and beliefs about justice in its bid to convince the reader of the importance of abolition.

I am eternally grateful for being given the opportunity to undertake this project, from which I have learnt so much and met so many brilliant people. In these difficult and often despairing times, it gives me hope that it is possible to do research that connects with people and lights a spark, no matter how small.