Dear friends and supporters of Critical Resistance (CR), 

This year, CR has been working steadily and tirelessly to advance our campaigns and projects, share analysis and organizing tools, and building the movement for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. Amidst rapidly intensifying conditions of repression and criminalization, CR strives to grow our organizing and the impact of PIC abolition – through our campaigns, our inside-outside solidarity efforts, the political education and analysis we offer, media, and connections we make across movements. 

As we transition from Summer to Fall, we bring an offering of hope exemplified in sustained strategy and action. We are glad to share invigorating campaign wins and movement-building updates, tangible organizing tools we have created, and a standing invitation to plug into our ongoing work with your time, effort, attention, and funds. Keep reading to see all of our summer 2025 campaign news, project updates, and new materials! 

Campaign Updates

This year, CR Oakland and CR Los Angeles have continued to organize with the Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) Coalition to close California prisons. CR members continue to contribute to coalition planning, community outreach, legislative strategy, and media and communications efforts, in addition to building intentional relationships with people inside California prisons and their loved ones through our prisoner correspondence infrastructure. 

Campaign partners convened this summer to strategize what the next period of organizing toward prison closures will look like, integrate strategies that are responsive to intensifying conditions of immigrant detention, and foster deeper organizing alongside formations combating the caging of immigrants. 

During this time when the federal government has shown interest in transforming California prisons into immigrant detention centers, CR and our comrades are highlighting the connected systems of policing, from ICE to LAPD, and imprisonment, from state prisons to detention centers - and bolstering calls to support our movement partners in these fights.

To celebrate the announced closure of CRC Norco and connect prison closures to migrant defense work happening in Los Angeles and Southern California, and invite community to continue supporting CR’s long-term strategy and rapid response work, CR Los Angeles hosted a community event in August, “Beats Beyond Borders”. This allowed CR LA chapter organizers and community comrades to take a breath amidst their work in the campaign to close California prisons, inside-outside organizing with imprisoned comrades and their loved ones, amplification of the work to end CoreCivic's usage of California City Correctional Facility for caging migrants, and rapid response community patrols and community defense trainings the chapter has been contributing to with the Community Self Defense Coalition. 

Efforts against Policing Budget Increases: CR Portland 

Dignity Not Detention New York: CR New York City with Abolish ICE NY/NJ coalition 

In addition to CR New York City continuing its media and outreach work within the Dignity Not Detention New York (DND NY) campaign to end immigrant detention across the state - as part of the Abolish ICE New York/New Jersey Coalition – the chapter also recently contributed heavily to a coalition campaign strategy retreat in August. The chapter and our movement partners within the campaign look forward to this next phase of advancing efforts to end immigrant detention in New York, and we invite you to stay tuned for upcoming calls to action including regular phone zaps. 

Internal Strategy

CR understands the need for strong strategy to guide all our movement building work, including our campaigns and projects, political education opportunities, and other community-building efforts. We regularly assess our effectiveness and the political landscape and determine how to adjust to make our work even more powerful. We do this across our chapters, national workgroups, and the organization at-large. CR ensures the campaigns we are part of regularly assess how our campaigns are moving and plan out our work to be responsive to shifting conditions. 

In addition to regularly planning our work within campaigns like DND NY, it is also part of CR’s practice to regularly hold workplanning for our chapters. In May, CR NYC held a multi-day retreat to reground in the chapter’s historical impact, current conditions, and the movement-building work ahead. In September, CR LA held a two-day retreat to breathe, take stock of the current state of Los Angeles (and Southern California), acknowledge the many ways CR LA showed up in community this past year, and tighten efforts for the year to come.  

Prisoner Solidarity and Resources

In August 2025, movement organizations and comrades from across the country came together in Oakland for a multi-day Cross-Wall retreat, shaped by inside participants through letters, calls, recordings, and artwork, to strengthen support across prison walls. The retreat was a step toward cohered collective strategy, support, and shared direction in the face of ever-increasing censorship and repression, from mail filtering to restrictions on reading material, aimed at cutting off lifelines of care, study, and strategy. To hear the testimonies of our comrades behind prison walls, visit our Prisoner Speak Out page here, and stay tuned for fuller report backs from the retreat. 

In June, The Abolitionist Editorial Collective published Issue 43 of The Abolitionist, titled “Seeds Through Concrete”, which focused on censorship and repression. Shout out to our Oakland and Los Angeles chapters, who have held launch events and volunteer reading groups for the paper this year! Read an article from the issue— “Calculating Risks in the Belly of the Beast” by imprisoned Editorial Collective member Stevie Wilson— and learn more about becoming a paid subscriber to The Abolitionist, and how paid subscriptions enable us to provide the paper to over 5,000 imprisoned subscribers for free.  

Events and Movement Partner Gatherings

This summer, CR was honored to co-sponsor the first of a multi-part virtual series on organizing against rising authoritarianism in the U.S being held by our longtime comrades at the Center for Political Education (CPE). Watch the first session, featuring Robin D.G. Kelley and CR co-founder Rachel Herzing in an illuminating conversation about how criminalization is fundamental to the fascist program, and hear from CR Los Angeles and CR Central Appalachia members who shared recent campaign updates and calls to action. The second installment of the virtual series also highlighted another CR Los Angeles member organizing with Detention Watch Network and connecting migrant defense with PIC abolition. 

Chapter members also attended the Challenging Carceral Surveillance Gathering in San Francisco bring together national researchers, organizers, and advocates to track and share strategies to combat increased surveillance against our communities. CR Oakland with CCWP gathered former No New SF Jails Coalition members and key groups challenging criminalization in San Francisco to strategize how to resist increasing criminalization and the re-opening of CJ 3 Annex in San Francisco.

“Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.” For CR, organizing for PIC abolition is long-haul work that requires both intentional strategy and responsiveness. Throughout this year, we have responded to intensifying criminalization, while continuing our ongoing work of advancing multi-year campaigns in coalition, cohering movement partners and imprisoned comrades to collectively develop strategies to combat worsening conditions of censorship and repression, and offering ongoing analysis and action that connect movements for liberation. 

In a time of constant crisis, CR remains responsive, steadfast, and grounded in our strengths as a movement resource for strategic analysis and action. Thank you for seeing the value in our work in the long-haul organizing toward liberation. Thank you for showing up for our events, campaign mobilizations, volunteer opportunities, and workshops – and for supporting us with your time, effort, and funds! Please continue supporting and sharing PIC abolition with those around you. We send our deepest gratitude for your support of our organizing and cannot wait to share our future victories with you, our comrades, without whom this work would not be possible. 

Onward in struggle and care,
- Critical Resistance

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