Lockdown Unpacked is a zine I created for “Life After Lockdown,” a Graduate Elective with Professor Bryonn Bain, in spring 2015. This course examined concepts of justice, the current state of the prison industrial complex, and the power of pedagogy. Throughout the semester, we facilitated a series of workshops for people currently incarcerated at Rikers Island. Each workshop interrogated the notion of “Life After Lockdown” as both the real and immediate re-entry into society after a person is incarcerated as well as an abolitionist ideology, a society that could move past the prison industrial complex.

Informed by my experiences with the class and our workshops, I wanted to create an educational material that is accessible for all audiences.  I chose the zine format, a self-produced magazine, for its political and grassroots history. It is also a medium that allowed me to reproduce the publication at a low cost and to distribute it to people currently incarcerated as well as to people on the outside. Throughout the semester, I revised this zine several times and printed nearly a hundred copies, which I gave to anybody interested. I want this zine to act as a means for self-education and to spark conversations about justice and the prison industrial complex.

I focused this final zine on the people, organizations, and movements that continue to inspire me to advocate for change in the prison system. I wanted to provide a contextual foundation to the prison industrial complex as well as some incredible creative and artistic responses to the policing and imprisonment that plague our society. I included these creative and artistic responses in hopes to inspire your own acts of envisioning what Life After Lockdown could look like.