Essay
Hip Hop Is My Life
I spit bars on Death Row to preserve the legacy of our people, what’s been done to us, and how we’ve fought back.
advocacy
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.
New series
National Poetry Month
Throughout April, incarcerated poets will offer their art and their hopes for a different future.
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Series
Abolition in Action
A collection of essays exploring how people are practicing abolition in their communities, in partnership with Truthout.
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.
organizing
Building Community
For many years, Kentuckians have been fighting the construction of a federal prison. They’ve been winning, 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.
abolition
How We Rode the Storm
After Hurricane Katrina, law enforcement criminalized sex work and Black women like never before. We fought back—and won.
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.
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.
law & policy
When the Law Is a Trap
The Prison Rape Elimination Act often revictimizes incarcerated survivors by expanding the power of the prison over them.
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.
excerpt
Unmaking Prison Walls
Reacquainting ourselves with practices that made prisons more permeable can be a step toward ending mass incarceration.
book review
Outsmarting a Monster
Jails are everywhere, trapping people and resources belonging to communities. And everywhere, there are organizers contesting that reality.
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.
Essay
‘And They Stripped Him’
The Gospel narrative places on Christians a moral burden to not turn away from the sexual vulnerability of incarcerated people today.
activism
No Killing Revolutionary Hope
The oral histories of political prisoners shed light on their true character—and expose the darkness of the state.
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.
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.
Decarceral Pathways
Decriminalizing Migration
Taking criminal law out of immigration enforcement is a step toward safer, healthier communities. But is it enough?
by Cristian Farias
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.
organizing
An Organized Community
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
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.
A closer look
Our Evidence-Based Obsession
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
public history
The Long Revolt
Attica represents far more than a historic rebellion about prison reform. Its revolutionary abolitionist vision endures today.
What we are reading
The Inquest bookshelf
A selection of recent books that invite us to imagine a world without mass incarceration.
#SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence
by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum
Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration
by Jocelyn Simonson
The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families
by Jane M. Spinak
Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition
by CalvinJohn Smiley
collective action
Imprisoned but United
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
first person
Envisioning Futures
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
Futures
Fractal Abolition
The work of tearing down structures of harm while building the world we want can and must start small.
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
public history
The Suburban Drug War
How white, middle-class youth in the suburbs experienced the war on drugs is a largely untold chapter in the arc of mass incarceration.
social control
Putting Reentry Out of Business
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
campaigns
Do You Know Their Names?
When slain by police, Black women and girls rarely garner the same communal outcry or political response as their fallen Black brothers.
interventions
Books as Decarceral
By helping non-incarcerated people to experience a human connection with people inside, volunteering can open a curtain in the mind.
interventions
A Place to Be Free
Life in prison is hard. Transitioning back home through reentry shouldn’t be harder.
Series
Beyond Gideon
A collection of essays examining how—or whether—public defenders can meaningfully contribute to the end of mass incarceration.
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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