In September 2008, the American abolitionist organization, Critical Resistance (CR), celebrated its 10th anniversary in Oakland, California.  During this event, dozens of conferences, seminars, workshops, performances, expositions, and screenings were put into place.  The Société Elizabeth Fry du Québec, represented by the person in charge of its artistic creation project, Agir par l’imaginaire, three artists involved in this project and the co-director of Engrenage Noir – Levier Project, main partner in Agir par l’imaginaire, all participated. 

Critical Resistance has been working for a decade to create a more healthy society, believing that prisons are not an appropriate solution to the social, economic and political problems facing the United States.  CR works to sensitize the community, fighting against the idea that police, prisons and the penal system are necessary for the safety and security of society.  CR attempts to educate the public at large on the issues of a system it calls the Prison Industrial Complex, painting prison as a complex system that has financial, government or private interests at its center.  The goal of the event held in honour of the 10th anniversary of CR was to demonstrate to the public how prisons serve to enrich private organizations (telephone companies, retailers, construction companies, and companies that profit from inmates work at low rates of pay), separate certain people from society (poor people and those with mental health problems, for example), as well as promoting certain government policies based on fear and security.

The work of an organization such as Critical Resistance is long term, necessitating education of the masses and a change in current thinking.  According to the organization, the solution to criminality is not prison but rather the development of a more healthy society without poverty, racism or drug abuse.

Although CR has long-term objectives, it also proposes short-term solutions to current problems.  Some examples are:  decarceration and decriminalization of those inmates whose offenses are linked to, among others, drugs or prostitution; to stop the construction of prisons and therefore the necessity of filling them; and the putting into place of alternative services and resources that will diminish the need for police and prisons.

The team of the Agir par l’imaginaire project participated in an event of this type for the first time in order to exchange with other people, organizations and communities with the same preoccupations.  Even though our interventions are done specifically through artistic creation, we were able to share our uneasiness concerning incarceration as a recourse, to meet people working in a different political context but who use similar tools and to build relationships that could potentially create exchanges of expertise and even alliances.  Our participation in an event such as CR10 convinced our organization of the need to create national and international networks to better serve our needs.  We hope that the Agir par l’imaginaire project will be able to travel to different meetings in the years to come and contribute to our battle against the systematic recourse to incarceration in response to our most profound social problems.