Prison Activist Resource Center

The Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC) provides practical support to educators, activists, and prisoners and their families, building a movement in the United States to combat the prison system. This work includes building networks for action and disseminating information that exposes human rights violations and the realities and ramifications of prisons. We believe that in order to abolish prisons as we know them there must be a mass movement pressing for fundamental social change.

PARC’s three primary goals are:

1. To expose the myths that sustain widespread injustices in prisons and in the communities most affected by mass imprisonment. 2. To inspire and motivate people to take positive action against the mass-incarceration system and for prisoners' human and civil rights. 3. To provide practical support to activists who are taking such action.

We’re working to build a movement for not just prison abolition, but social justice on a larger scale by connecting, supporting, and educating people doing the work. We host a yearly art show, have developed a prison issues curriculum for high school students, maintain the most comprehensive website of progressive and radical information related to prisons in the United States, and coordinate a national Student Prison Activist Network (SPAN). Every year we develop new fact sheets for people to use in their work confronting this system. We currently maintain factsheets on Women in Prison, 10 Things You Should Know About Prisons in the US, Education vs. Incarceration, and Prison Labor, among others. We respond to over 400 letters from individual prisoners each month through our Prisoner Support Program. We also publish a Prisoner Support Directory and a Resource Directory of anti-prison organizations.