In my many years as a public defender, I accepted the legal rationales for pretrial detention. But I can’t anymore.

Defense lawyers should be open to advising their clients about systemic oppression, laying bare the ways that mass incarceration ensnares.

A new anthology invites parents into the work of building a world without prisons.

Placing criminal system tools in health-care providers’ hands causes irreparable damage to patient care and public trust.

Biden’s incomplete slate of commutations saved lives but ultimately lost the moral argument.

Medicaid access, both pre- and post-release, is a promising path to ensuring that reentry is a genuine, lasting return to freedom.

Electing progressive sheriffs only goes so far toward curbing the structural forces that sustain mass incarceration.

The push by Atlanta and other cities to build large police training facilities follows on a long history of armories as both symbols and manifestations of the state’s power.

‘Excited delirium syndrome’ is a tool the state invented to evade accountability whenever people of color die at the hands of police.

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.

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.