When you go to prison, you don’t just lose your freedom—you lose your ability to dream. The loss of agency isn’t confined to what you wear, eat, or when you’re allowed to sleep. It’s the erosion of your right to imagine a future, to aspire, to pursue a life you choose for yourself. It is a state-sanctioned theft of ambition.
Prison is often framed as a temporary interruption, a place where people are sent to be “corrected,” “rehabilitated,” “reformed.” But this framing is a lie. The impact, the systemic violence, doesn’t end at the prison gates. When you leave, the steel bars remain—paper-thin but iron-strong. They appear in the form of police checks, the denial of working with children clearances, the jobs you’re deemed “unsuitable” for, the pathways you’re told are “unrealistic.” Your future narrows into a corridor with no doors.
You might have once dreamed of being a teacher, a nurse, an artist working with young people, a business owner. But now, the state’s response is to tell you to “find something more suitable.” That “suitable” job might be cleaning the floors of a building you’re not allowed to walk through as an equal. It might be warehousing, factory work, traffic controlling, or labouring—roles deemed appropriate for “someone like you.” Someone who, in the eyes of the state, has forfeited the right to dream.
This isn’t just exclusion. It’s a form of civil death. It’s the slow suffocation of imagination. Imprisonment doesn’t end when the sentence ends. It follows you, shadow-like, reducing the world to something you must navigate with caution, never confidence. You’re expected to be grateful for survival. For “opportunity” that is stripped of meaning, dignity, or purpose.
What does that do to a person’s spirit—to live a life where your role is to make do, to tread water? What does it mean for the criminalised body to be denied the possibility of flight, of reinvention, of dreaming? When you are always watched, always judged, always limited by the worst thing you’ve ever done—or simply the worst assumptions people make about you—it becomes impossible to imagine a life outside that frame.
The prison doesn’t just punish. It robs us of future. It locks down the imagination, the radical power of dreaming otherwise. It says: stay in your place. Know your lane. Don’t dream beyond your class, your trauma, your past, the worst thing you have ever done. Don’t imagine yourself as worthy of joy, freedom, complexity, contradiction.
But we must. We must dream anyway. We must demand a world where dreaming is not a privilege but a right. Abolition is not just about closing prisons—it’s about opening a portal into a dreaming space. It’s about making it possible again to live, love, create, and imagine beyond the sentence.
Because we are more than what they say we are. We are not just survivors. We are future-builders. We are world-makers. And our agency, our aspirations, our dreaming—those are revolutionary acts.
By Tabitha Lean & Debbie Kilroy
