When a new carceral facility is proposed or built, how can organizers respond effectively? In 2025 the Community Justice Exchange (CJE) released If They Build It: Organizing Lessons and Strategies Against Carceral Infrastructure. The toolkit offers a strategic framework for organizers fighting the construction, expansion, reopening, or repurposing of carceral infrastructure—including jails, prisons, detention centers, police facilities, and other sites of confinement. Rather than prescribing a single model, the resource emphasizes contextual analysis, long-term organizing capacity, and abolitionist strategy.
In this interview, Institute to End Mass Incarceration attorney Joan Steffen and CJE’s Mon M. discuss the politics and practice of organizing against carceral infrastructure and the thinking that went into If They Build It. As part of IEMI’s Carceral Infrastructure project, Joan works with the Building Community Not Prisons (BCNP) coalition fighting new federal prison construction in Eastern Kentucky and the No New Prisons Illinois (NNP-IL) campaign opposing two state prison rebuild projects in her home state.
Joan Steffen: What inspired CJE to put together the If They Build It toolkit?
Mon M.: CJE wanted to capture the experiences of organizers, inside and outside facilities, to create something that reflects the recent history and current state of carceral infrastructure expansion. My perspective as an author was shaped by coordinating No New Jails, a network of twelve campaigns active from 2021 to 2023. I hoped to surface the challenges that made sustaining the network difficult and draw big-picture takeaways for other projects.
By the time we started writing If They Build It, many of the no-new-jails-style campaigns had ended, closed, lost, or achieved some goals, even as jail and pretrial facility expansion was accelerating. In 2024 and 2025, it felt like a massive wave of fights—local jails, state and federal prisons, detention centers, and other carceral infrastructure—was coming. CJE wanted the guide to provide both analysis and collective history to help organizers navigate this evolving terrain, and also to spark theoretical shifts: showing the carceral state as entwined with authoritarian power and highlighting how strategies to fight it have long been siloed.
Organizers fighting state prisons rarely connect with those opposing jails, juvenile detention, or migrant detention; broader alliances with labor, environmental, and disability justice campaigns are still very limited. We hoped this project could encourage more connections.
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JS: The first recommendation in the toolkit is that organizers see decarceration as a strategic step toward dismantling the carceral system, rather than a goal in and of itself. Can you speak more about how pursuing decarceration uncritically can sometimes lead to net widening?
MM: The racist, fascist, imperialist state has never been interested in reducing the number of people caught in the carceral dragnet; that would be counter to the purposes of settler-colonial expansion. So when communities fight to get their people out or improve conditions, the state often treats that advocacy as an opportunity for expansion, innovation, or optimization through reform. Decarceration demands get absorbed, retooled, and redirected in ways that ultimately preserve or even strengthen the system.
In addition to that constant cooptation, some of the mechanisms used to secure releases can themselves create new pathways back into state control. For example, in detention fights, there’s often a strong focus on due process—the idea that if people had better access to hearings, transportation, or legal procedures, fewer people would end up detained. And while due process advocacy can absolutely lead to individual releases, lack of due process is not why this administration is pursuing mass deportation. Due process advocacy definitely might result in some releases, but it also expands the overall reach and capacity of the system in ways that are not aligned with abolitionist goals.
You also see this with prisons and jails. There’s often advocacy for mechanisms that lead to some releases in the short term, but ultimately are used against us, or simply move people from one custodial or social-control setting into another. People have, for example, advocated for involuntary commitment and mandated treatment to get people out of prisons and into so-called “health care” institutions. But involuntary commitment is notoriously inhumane and has been opposed for decades by disabled and mad communities. And yet, liberal support of this maneuver has manufactured consent for involuntary commitment, which the authoritarian state is now embracing at the federal, state, and city levels.
JS: I think what connects those examples is that they don’t fundamentally question the logic of putting people under state control in the first place. They shift the focus to who is under control and how they get there, rather than challenging the legitimacy of the system itself.
MM: There’s a really useful term Issa Kohler-Hausmann uses for this: managerial justice, which describes the way people are continually cycled through courts, jails, prisons, and other systems of control.
JS: The second recommendation in If They Build It is for organizers to question replacements, alternatives, and solutions for carceral infrastructure. What’s the relationship between carceral devolution, soft policing, and net widening in the context of so-called alternatives to incarceration?
MM: This is a core aspect of If They Build It, and one of the main reasons we worked on the resource. The rise of mass incarceration has long moved in tandem with the defunding of social services, though we’re seeing that happen in an accelerated way right now. That’s not to say that all social services are non-carceral—many aren’t. But it is important to name how deeply programs that alleviate poverty, houselessness, and medical need have been hollowed out, and not incidentally. There’s a reason that Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act that funded detention expansion also came with massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. The outcome is that more people are pushed into reliance on the kinds of resources they can only access through criminalization. So this isn’t just net widening; it’s the cultivation of dependency as a substitute for care.
Campaigns that use language like housing not handcuffs or care not cages should be cautious. It’s important to be able to separate demands for something not to exist from demands for what we actually want to build. When those get collapsed, campaigns risk reproducing forms of carceral provisioning or carceral welfare.
JS: I remember someone I worked with saying: No one should have to be arrested to access mental health care or get drug treatment. One alternative that’s come up is what you might call front-end economic alternatives—efforts to make the prison obsolete. For the BCNP coalition’s work in Kentucky, that’s taken the form of advocating for economic opportunities in the community where a new federal prison is proposed, since the prison is being sold as a source of jobs and growth in an extremely impoverished area. In the NNP-IL campaign, the focus has been on shifting state investment away from prison construction and toward housing, transportation, health care, and education in the most criminalized and incarcerated communities—before people ever enter the system.
In both cases, the demand is that these investments be made outside the carceral system entirely.
MM: The challenge is that a lot of smaller campaigns don’t have access to this kind of strategy. No New Jails New York City could have said, Invest in these communities, instead. But we didn’t have the political relationships or power to actually make that happen.
JS: Your point moves us into the third recommendation in If They Build It, which urges resisting one-size-fits-all approaches, emphasizing the need to contextualize each infrastructure fight rather than treating campaigns as interchangeable.
One example is in the ongoing fight against a proposed federal prison in eastern Kentucky. At IEMI, where I work, we represented the Appalachian Rekindling Project (ARP) in its purchase of privately owned land that falls in the proposed site of a new federal prison. ARP has a beautiful plan to bring bison back to the land, put it under Indigenous stewardship, and begin land rematriation work. The BCNP coalition supported and continues to support ARP in the purchase and rematriation efforts while organizing against the proposed prison continues.
However, I think this example is also useful because it isn’t broadly transferable. In the current wave of immigration detention expansion, some organizers have succeeded in halting private warehouse sales to ICE without actually purchasing the property. And most state and local carceral infrastructure is built on government land. Even when private land is considered, the government usually picks sites where there’s already strong landowner support for the project.
MM: I think the ARP example is so powerful because it was so specific to context. I’ve been on a lot of calls where people hear about that campaign and immediately ask, “Should we buy the land?” And my response is usually: Do you have access to the land? Do you have an Indigenous organization with the capacity to purchase and steward it?
ARP’s tactic is so inspiring and amazing because it’s so creative. If a campaign hasn’t done the investigation to understand why a facility expansion or reopening has support in their region, or who holds power over the land, then borrowing tactics from another context only gets in the way of being materially responsive to the fight they’re in. At that point, it’s not just ineffective—it’s bad strategy.
JS: The fourth recommendation in If They Build It is to resist the shallow politics of representation and instead move toward solidarity. Related to that, I want to ask a question connected to the fight to close Logan Correctional Center which IEMI has supported in Illinois. As part of the NNP-IL campaign, organizers have released a rapid response plan for people incarcerated at Logan, working closely with them and encountering the tensions the toolkit highlights: some want the prison closed immediately, others prefer to stay despite its conditions, and some support a new facility and want to remain until it’s ready. There’s not one monolithic view or response to the proposal to close Logan. So what guidance can If They Build It offer organizers in Illinois and others doing inside–outside work in this kind of context?
MM: Honestly, I think the work happening around Logan is strides ahead of where things usually are. In many cases, there aren’t even relationships with people inside, so the fact that there are multiple perspectives and ongoing debate is itself a major achievement.
People are never going to be on the same page 100 percent of the time. That’s true inside facilities and it’s true outside of them as well. There’s obviously a role for political education, for cultivating organizing skills inside, and for creating structures that support consciousness development over time. All of that is incredibly important. But there also has to be an acceptance that not everyone is going to be on the same page. If fighting carceral infrastructure required everyone to be on the same page, nothing would ever happen.
If They Build It is responding to a dynamic where people inside haven’t been meaningfully engaged at all. When they have been engaged, it has frequently been in an incredibly tokenistic way. Often, the people inside are asked to say whatever the campaign thinks, and are incentivized with money, media appearances, or other benefits to participate in this very specific way. Treating inside organizers as equal stakeholders—to the best of their ability, even given the very real constraints they face—is really important.
JS: One of the core themes in If They Build It is how to maintain abolitionist principles in the work, and why that’s actually strategic. Can you talk about why it can be hard to hold abolitionist commitments in these infrastructure fights? How does the practice of abolition vary across different campaign contexts?
MM: It is incredibly difficult to adhere to abolitionist principles in site-specific fights, and a lot of that has to do with political context. It looks very different depending on the kind of facility you’re organizing against. If you’re organizing against a prison that does not yet exist—especially a federally proposed facility that is already locally unpopular—there’s often more room to hold abolitionist demands. There’s already opposition, and organizers can build abolitionist political education from that starting point.
For people organizing against detention, abolition can look like actively cultivating solidarity with people who are criminalized. It’s not just free them all because they’re not criminals—it’s free them all because we are in solidarity with everyone who is incarcerated. That orientation fundamentally shapes how people organize against detention expansion.
Jail fights are much harder. County and local jails are framed as inevitable, and communities are often backed into a corner. The city may say that people are dying because a current facility is old, or unsafe, or overcrowded—and that the only way to get more care, more staffing, and more resources for those inside is through new construction.
Because of this, jail fights, especially pretrial jail fights, often look very different. Some organizers hold a line of no new beds—only fewer beds. Others argue that any new bed, any new facility at all, runs counter to abolitionist principles. And others might say: if we can’t stop a new jail but win a diversion program that gets hundreds of people out, then we’ve materially moved closer to abolitionist goals.
In my experience, campaigns that hold a strong abolitionist ethos tend to build more durable organizing formations. They’re less easily coopted, less likely to be destabilized by state maneuvering, and better positioned to outlast the disorganizing effects of specific fights. And at a movement level, that clarity strengthens our collective lines—around what we will and won’t accept—without forcing every fight to relitigate what counts as abolition.
Abolitionist organizers also have to navigate maintaining strong internal commitment to abolitionist values while finding ways to work with reformist community organizations. There are ways to collaborate with different kinds of groups while staying clear about your perspective and goals, and without automatically conceding. This requires a dedication to building grassroots power and support for abolitionist perspectives, along with the willingness to leave a coalition if it moves in a direction that conflicts with your principles. Discernment, ongoing assessment, and political clarity are essential.
Some organizations may simply oppose expansion without opposing the existing system. This dynamic isn’t unique to prisons, jails, and detention centers: not all opposition to land grabs, pipelines, or data centers, for example, comes from people who oppose fracking, AI, or corporate power. It’s the job of abolitionist organizers to figure out how to channel that oppositional energy toward collective liberation and transformation. Fights against carceral infrastructure are not liberatory in and of themselves; they are occasions for many kinds of people to come together to grapple with political and economic conditions.
Abolitionist organizing, however, has a much broader scope.
JS: Since CJE published If They Build It in May 2025, the federal government has aggressively expanded immigration detention infrastructure in that time. Are there new lessons that have emerged from anti-expansion organizing over the past year, particularly in response to detention expansion?
MM: Definitely. We’re living through an unprecedented expansion of mandatory detention due to the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act and the Laken Riley Act. This is funding upward of $38 billion in investments into ICE warehouses, space leasing contracts for prisons and jails, and private contracting for detention management. Many of the ways organizers and communities are responding to this onslaught of expansion are not new, and the tactics they’re deploying are built on what has been tried and developed through decades of anti-expansion efforts. For example, pressuring developers and property owners to refuse to sell warehouses to ICE—as people have successfully done in Hutchins, Texas, and Ashland, Virginia—is a tactic honed from organizing against private ownership of correctional properties.
Several of the recommendations in If They Build It around rejecting reformism, replacement carcerality, and getting specific with your approach still apply toward resisting the scope of detention expansion. But what is different is that the political and economic circumstances have evolved rapidly, compelling people to discover different versions of old tools and tactics. One example of this is that it’s even harder to reach people held inside detention facilities than it used to be, with deportations taking place faster and faster, and there are far fewer pathways to release, so more people are organizing from where they’ve been deported to. Another example is that organizers are having to learn about the minute details of urban planning and city administration to cut off utilities and sewage to ICE facilities in ways that might not have been required were there more avenues to stopping expansion. Similarly, organizations that have focused on criminalization are having to skill up in working on migrant detention due to how the systems are converging. This is all to say, there are many deep lessons about the machine of the carceral state being learned right now—about zoning, NEPA laws, land use, building construction, permitting—that will undoubtedly strengthen the overall regional movement networks that could sustain long-term efforts to abolish ICE and end detention.
JS: The arc of carceral infrastructure campaigns is often very, very long. So the toolkit also warns against celebrating premature victories or hollow wins. Something might appear to be a win, until the carceral system expands or transforms in response. At the same time, the resource cautions against hanging on to losing battles and not knowing when to walk away. And it encourages organizers to recognize the gains that are made, even in the context of an overall campaign loss. What advice can you offer abolitionists who are navigating this current wave of expansion, while also thinking about the long arc of carceral infrastructure organizing?
MM: I think one key point is that organizers shouldn’t underestimate the importance of sustaining long-term struggle in a particular region, even if they lose individual fights.
In infrastructure campaigns, yes, it matters if a facility is sold, built, opened, or closed. But given that organizers often lose more than they win, we have to take seriously that “win” and “loss” are not the only metrics for measuring success in the long run. When people are in rapid-response mode to a new construction project, they forget they’re participating in a much longer struggle. Even with Rikers, for example, when we were organizing against the expansion of the borough-based jails, the fight to shut down Rikers had actually begun in the 1970s.
So the question is how to situate yourself within that long history—how to understand your work as part of a longer arc, rather than mistaking any single moment for a final victory or defeat.
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