Surveillance
For the Public Good
While on parole in Oregon, homelessness, unemployment, and lack of services kept me in survival mode. This is not public safety.
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Newsletter
From ‘Abolition in Action’:
For the People’s Health
From our series exploring how people are practicing abolition in their communities, a look at how public health is now central to decarceral efforts.
Decarceral Pathways
Back to Appalachia
They were incarcerated in Eastern Kentucky, far from home. Now they’re free and back, hoping the region won’t build a new prison there.
by Katie Myers
Beyond Reform
Disability Justice Demands Abolition
When people need care, then the solution should be to get them care, not increase the risk of police violence.
Policing
‘I’m Just Different, That’s All’
We embrace nonconformity in principle—but not for Black men, whose quirks can provoke fear, policing, and punishment.
first person
The Banality of Mandatory Surcharges
In New York and elsewhere, exploitative court-ordered fees shouldn’t saddle a person who is already poor and criminalized.
New series
National Poetry Month
Throughout April, incarcerated poets will offer their art and their hopes for a different future.
voices
Ink from Honey
In the introduction to our National Poetry Month series, an incarcerated poet reflects on how writing is helping him reclaim the story of his life.
In Depth
Sticking with the Sex
From sex work to sex offender registries, a queer politics requires that we end state practices of sex exceptionalism.
A closer look
Graying in Prison
There’s no aging with dignity for people serving extreme sentences. Freeing them is only a start to a deeper paradigm shift.
campaigns
Disrupting Carceral Narratives
There can be justice beyond punishment. To realize it, we must challenge the narrative that carceral violence is the only response to other forms of violence.
Policing
The ‘Bad Guys’
Police academies socialize officers into an us-versus-them mentality—particularly when it comes to activists—and harden them to any attempts at reform.
advocacy
Philly’s Safe Consumption Fight
Public skepticism about scientific research, coupled with echoes of the war on drugs, have hindered our city’s ability to respond to our overdose crisis.
excerpt
Unmaking Prison Walls
Reacquainting ourselves with practices that made prisons more permeable can be a step toward ending mass incarceration.
activism
Gay Liberation and the Carceral State
Recovering a vision of queer solidarity with incarcerated people may just be what people disaffected by the gay rights movement need today.
campaigns
A Breakthrough on Solitary
Connecting it to the fight for disability rights has helped activists in California to make exciting progress in their effort to end solitary confinement.
activism
Asymmetrical Partners
Activism must involve incarcerated people—but few outside advocates really understand the dangers and limitations that imprisoned organizers face.
campaigns
Renewing New Orleans
Anti-jail organizers scored important wins in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But their fight isn’t over.
excerpt
Dare to Report
The D.A.R.E. program turned students into snitches, leading to the arrest and incarceration of friends and loved ones who used drugs.
activism
No Killing Revolutionary Hope
The oral histories of political prisoners shed light on their true character—and expose the darkness of the state.
Series & Collections
Since our launch, we have published a number of essay series and collections examining drivers of and solutions to our crisis of mass incarceration. Find them all here.
interventions
Papers, Please
Reparations for historic wrongs require concrete action, and that’s no different for the untold harm caused by cannabis criminalization.
In Depth
How We Ended Wealth-Based Jailing
In Illinois, ending money bond was our target. Pretrial freedom is our goal.
In Depth
When ‘Community’ Isn’t Actually the Community
The crisis of youth incarceration won’t be solved by cynical attempts to co-opt the language of grassroots organizing.
What we are reading
The Inquest bookshelf
A selection of recent books that invite us to imagine a world without mass incarceration.
Abolition, Vol. 1: Politics, Practices, Promises
by Angela Y. Davis
Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South
by Laura McTighe & Women With a Vision
The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration
by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs & Judah Schept
Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien”
by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
Crimmigration
Decriminalizing Migration
Taking criminal law out of immigration enforcement is a step toward safer, healthier communities. But is it enough?
Big Data
Borders and Bytes
So-called “smart” borders are just more sophisticated sites of racialized surveillance and violence. We need abolitionist tools to counter them.
Surveillance
In the Shadows, on the Radar
The lives of undocumented immigrants are very much documented—subject to the surveillance that’s endemic to contemporary life in the United States.
Policing
Unsafe on Campus
Policing on college campuses falls hardest on formerly incarcerated students, leaving them and the broader community unprotected.
abolition
Abolishing the Family
The fight against police and prisons cannot be separated from the struggle to extend care beyond the limits of the family form.
public history
The Long Revolt
Attica represents far more than a historic rebellion about prison reform. Its revolutionary abolitionist vision endures today.
Series
CAPTIVE LABOR
A collection of essays at the intersection of labor and the carceral state, in partnership with LPE Blog.
Past, Present & Future of Mass Incarceration
book review
Cages Without Borders
A new book centers prisons in the history of U.S. empire, reminding us of the need for international solidarity in the fight for freedom.
first person
Learning to Live
For incarcerated people, prison education programs can offer not only knowledge but also hope that a different future is possible.
Reflections
Yearning to Go Home
Life-without-parole sentences hit families especially hard. Yet they fight on, committed to their loved ones’ freedom.
social control
Putting Reentry Out of Business
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
Futures
No More Family Policing
Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, and poor children and their families bear the brunt of a system that many now agree should be dismantled.
Sentences
“All of this work is about showing what is actually at the core of what we’re trying to shift, which is this set of relationships that necessitates prisons, that necessitated slavery, that necessitates all of these other exploitative arrangements. There is a certain set of relationships that needs to be undone.”
* * *
—Adamu Chan, an abolitionist filmmaker, in “Beauty on the Inside”
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