Put Children First
Abolishing the child welfare system would create more avenues for protecting children, instead of devoting all of society’s energy to propping up a coercive system of surveillance and punishment.
Abolishing the child welfare system would create more avenues for protecting children, instead of devoting all of society’s energy to propping up a coercive system of surveillance and punishment.
Faced with often deadly medical neglect, incarcerated women form networks of care that provide the life-sustaining support the state fails to give.
Eight Virginia prisons currently have no air-conditioning. We go to sleep in sweat and wake up in sweat, with no respite from dangerous heat.
Inquest, finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, brings you insights from the people working to create a world without mass incarceration.
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futures
In Part 1, we explore how prison abolitionists must attend simultaneously to the scale of U.S. mass incarceration and how it manifests differently in specific regions.
In Part 2, we explore how solidarity between abolitionist and environmental justice organizers doesn’t just happen—but can result from careful work to unearth a shared set of goals.
In Part 3, we pursue the argument that those wishing to abolish prisons must understand the legal and financial mechanisms through which the carceral state organizes itself to hold people against their will.
In Part 4, we discuss how to get people already involved with other progressive causes to support abolition, too.
In Part 5, we argue that attempts by carceral authorities to shield their funding sources from public interference are proof that working to interrupt money flows is an effective way to oppose prisons.
In Part 6, we ask how, when the public shows a desire for change, organizers can capture that energy and channel it into the fight to end mass incarceration.
collection
Inquest’s landing page for writing by our incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors. Finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Awards.
White civilians often spontaneously cooperate in acts of racial hatred. It’s a web of racist solidarity that Black people know all too well.
Prisons serve bad, inadequate food as a way to cut costs. Providing this inhumane service is now a profitable sector of Wall Street.
When released, older incarcerated people have incredibly low recidivism rates—yet are still routinely denied parole and clemency. Organizers in New York are trying to change that.
After Jason Salters was violently attacked by NYPD officers simply for doing his job, he discovered how little accountability exists for non-fatal incidents of police violence.
A recent book unveils the shockingly long history of for-profit prisons—and the equally long history of incarcerated people demanding compensation for their exploited labor.
Incarcerated people are eligible for Pell Grants again—but will prisons actually allow us to flourish as college students?
ShotSpotter has leveraged gun violence into a multimillion-dollar business that promises safety but delivers only increased policing and drain on the public’s resources.
Reentry guides supplied by prisons are light on details and heavy on judgement. That’s why formerly incarcerated people are writing a guide for New York filled with their own lived experience.
The sweeping conspiracy and terrorism indictment of Stop Cop City activists reveals the new playbook for state suppression of protest. But we can still win.
Crimes committed because of financial hardship are a form of labor and should not be subject to criminal legal punishment.
Language of ‘trafficking’ and ‘slavery’ disempowers migrant sex workers while directing attention away from state violence.
Programs that send literature to incarcerated people provide a vital lifeline, facilitating personal growth and imaginative escape.
Nuclear abolitionists in the Plowshares movement have been imprisoned for bringing attention to the fact that nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal under international law.
Domestic violence survivors shouldn’t have to survive police violence, too. It is time to follow the evidence to interventions that actually work.
A decade of victimization landed a Harlem kid in prison. More than three decades later, he has not allowed prison to define his life story.
Placing criminal system tools in health-care providers’ hands causes irreparable damage to patient care and public trust.
A new anthology invites parents into the work of building a world without prisons.
I rejected a plea deal and chose instead to go to trial. I would not understand until too late that I had placed a target on my back.
“Art is not a leisure activity. Art is a redemptive, powerful, meditative, actionable force within a person—within a human being.”
In my many years as a public defender, I accepted the legal rationales for pretrial detention. But I can’t anymore.
Should advocates looking to unwind our nation’s punitive excesses engage a Supreme Court that set them in motion?
Electing progressive sheriffs only goes so far toward curbing the structural forces that sustain mass incarceration.
The sweeping conspiracy and terrorism indictment of Stop Cop City activists reveals the new playbook for state suppression of protest. But we can still win.
A transnational approach to abolition brings a new appreciation for community—both broader and narrower than the nation-state—as the site for care, justice, and democratic self-governance.
An incarcerated writer and advocate in California implores: “Don’t waste my time trying to make it more comfortable for me in here.”
Ending prison slavery and giving fair wages to incarcerated workers are necessary steps on the pathway to justice.
Abolition requires the world-building work of imagining all the many life-affirming alternatives to incarceration.
I kept my promise to break bread with my friend Dobie one last time, right before the state of Louisiana put him to death.
What does genuine safety look like? And what will it take to prioritize it rather than simply managing inequality and other injustices?
Participatory defense gives families and communities an opportunity to protect their own in courtroom spaces that have long robbed them of power.
Credit scoring is control by another name. It keeps marginalized people from the means of survival and exposes them to punishment.
The administrative remedy process is a roadblock to challenging inhumane prison conditions. With the help of advocates, people in prison are fighting back.
While on parole in Oregon, homelessness, unemployment, and lack of services kept me in survival mode. This is not public safety.
Series
Essays exploring how mass incarceration shapes, and is shaped by, our shared world and built spaces.
Defund gives us a platform and pathway to reimagine a society with less police, more care, and services that meet the needs of all.
A hopeful, practical new book shows how abolitionist organizers today are building the world anew.
Mass incarceration rests on false narratives that carceral institutions themselves control. But some of us are fighting back.
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.
Recovering a vision of queer solidarity with incarcerated people may just be what people disaffected by the gay rights movement need today.
In seeking funding for non-carceral mental health crisis response, we’re hoping to bring a small piece of our abolitionist horizon to our city.
Activism must involve incarcerated people—but few outside advocates really understand the dangers and limitations that imprisoned organizers face.
Inquest publishes new, thought-provoking ideas and essays weekly.
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