War Resisters League in Solidarity with No New Jails NYC

The War Resisters League stands in solidarity with our comrades in No New Jails, who have been organizing to stop Mayor Bill de Blasio’s jail expansion plan and are holding it down at City Hall today. Join us in Abolition Square & tell your city council members that we don’t need new jails!

Through our Facing Tear Gas campaign (2012-2014) – in response to calls to end US-made tear gas exports used against protestors in Egypt, Bahrain, and Oakland, CA – we organized for the end of tear gas use inside US prisons. Five years later, we worked with No New Jails and other anti-militarist comrades to bring testimonies from prisoners who have experienced tear gas to the forefront of Decolonize This Place’s campaign to pressure Safariland CEO Warren Kanders to resign from the board of the Whitney Museum.

As a group that strives to end war and its root causes, we believe that all carceral institutions are a form of warfare against Black and brown people globally. These institutions – jails, prisons, police, homeland security, and defense contractors – exist to repress, traumatize, and dehumanize communities who have organized for their self-determination. War and incarceration – both distinct and overlapping forms of state violence – do not keep our communities safe. Our world will be demilitarized, and abolitionist organizing will win!

Close Rikers Now. No New Jails.

#NoNewJails #CloseRikers