Producing the intolerable: Anti-prison struggles, abolitionist genealogies

In this piece, I focus on the interconnected political genealogies of the prison revolts in the US and in France, and on the partially different angles of attack and claims they mobilised, bearing in mind that such struggles took place in a larger world context of prison uprisings. While events were unfolding in the early 1970s, the members of Le groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), or the Prison Information Group, in France referred frequently in their texts to the revolts in the prisons in the US, they supported the Black Panthers, and Michel Foucault himself visited Attica in 1972. Yet, on the US side, the knowledge of what was happening in France was quite limited. This was partly due to linguistic factors – in the US the experience of the GIP was not well known, and their texts were mostly untranslated. Retracing these partially interconnected political genealogies nonetheless enables us to foreground the resonances and mutual influences between struggles that would otherwise remain bounded within national frameworks.