We are the International Black Cross, a collective of young people from Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas—most of us have been imprisoned, and some are still behind bars. We exist to challenge the oppressive prison system and the authorities that profit from what is called prison.
Prisons don’t make communities safer—they reproduce violence and strip people of dignity. Our focus is on those affected by incarceration: amplifying voices inside and beyond the walls, and imagining a world where justice means accountability, community-based healing, and transformative justice—not control, isolation, or contemporary practices like Cancel Culture. Cancel Culture conflicts with our anti-authoritarian principles, as it often only benefits elites who profit from our mutual destruction.
Transformative justice in non-bourgeois communities believes that people can change—no victim is forever a victim, and no perpetrator is forever a perpetrator. Our abolitionist principles are anti-control: a free and thriving society does not need prisons.
