Some thoughts and a plea:

Vaccines in prisons, just like on the outside, are bandages upon systems that function through mass death of people who are disposable for and external to capital.

The struggle should still be for mass release and more broadly for abolition.

A lot of ‘us’ knew that the priority of vaccines would reorient broader struggles from abolition to reform and reaffirm a return to an already deadly normal under the guise of saving the vulnerable from crisis and catastrophe.

That is, the absolute priority of vaccinations over anything else attempts to subsume everyone (who survived) back into the systems of racial, carceral capitalism that caused and exacerbated the deadly outcomes of this pandemic.

Yet, vaccinations (and the logics of who deserves, who is eligible to live or die) are also unevenly distributed (in both the outer and inner colonies) and are perpetuating these same deathly systems while capital carries about its ways with no concern.

But what we’re hearing from inside, that the majority of units are refusing to be vaccinated* while the majority of guards are expected to refuse, it is entirely clear that vaccines might not even be as expected a bandage upon the death that prisons produce.

*Considering the negligent denial of medical care, the commitment to incarceration that has killed thousands, the absolute unconcern for their lives, and being constantly surrounded by death caused by the state who can blame them?

Prisons are normally institutions of death (corporeal, social, civil) and are architecturally and institutionally susceptible to the spread of disease (HIV/AIDS, Hep-C, COVID, etc.).

The problem isn’t COVID, it’s prisons.

The problem isn’t COVID it’s racial and carceral capitalism.

So, when prisoners tell us that they think they’re being fucked with like “smallpox blankets,” when indigenous prisoners tell us that they’re being forced into death camps, we have to listen to them.

Vaccines might slow the deaths (they also might not considering murderous guards and maligned and mistrustful prisoners), but the death is still there.

We don’t want a more equitable distribution of death and disease.

We want freedom, abolition, and love.

(This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be engaging in vaccine outreach or attempts to challenge vaccine restrictions in prisons, it’s just that without release, vaccinations won’t be enough to stave off death.)