Alabama Rising
For the past decade, people incarcerated in Alabama have led successful national worker strikes. Could a new prisoners’ rights movement be underway?
For the past decade, people incarcerated in Alabama have led successful national worker strikes. Could a new prisoners’ rights movement be underway?
How one labor union in New York is organizing and creating solidarity among formerly incarcerated workers—and winning.
A new research project seeks to understand present prison labor conditions—and build a path toward lasting freedom.
Earlier essays from
Essays exploring the intersection of labor and mass incarceration, presented in partnership with LPE Blog.
As a newly elected judge assigned to misdemeanor court in Los Angeles, a former public defender sees her new role as serving those impacted by the system.
Imagining the decarceral possibilities of plea strikes and defendant unions.
Disentangling medical care from policing, prisons, and other punitive institutions remains an imperative—now more than ever.
New series
A collection of essays examining how—or whether—public defenders can meaningfully contribute to the end of mass incarceration.
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
How two formerly incarcerated artists are creating a community for people like them—and exposing mass incarceration through it.
In immigration court and beyond, fair process matters. But fair laws, fair legal systems, and fair societies matter far more.
Fiscal arguments have only led to a reconfigured carceral state—one that replaces one type of punishment for another while still harming millions.
Fearmongering about public safety played a major role in the state’s midterm setback. But we can learn from it how to take control of the political narrative.
Incarceration ahead of trial is fundamentally unjust—a form of punishment that makes it virtually impossible to fight for your freedom.
A new Minneapolis-area county attorney won’t end mass incarceration. But she has the potential to cause less harm and promote healing.
We need more and better data about deaths in custody. But we don’t need this data to know that only decarceration will save lives.
Abolitionist Ruchell Cinqué Magee is the country’s longest-held political prisoner.
The experiences of Michael and Zoharah Simmons show that the fight against the carceral state is embedded in a larger project of building a just world.
A close analysis of prison data can help us think concretely, and strategically, about the tradeoffs of different approaches to decarceration and prison closures.
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
Data-driven approaches to reform can reinforce aspects of a system that’s rotten to the core.
The prison town of Susanville, in California, is about to lose its livelihood. Its economic survival presents a test for abolition.
Now more than ever, we need a clear understanding of the role of violence, trauma, and survivorship in our harm reduction practice.
Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.
What we are reading
A selection of recent books that invite us to imagine a world without mass incarceration.
by Leigh Goodmark
by Dan Berger
by Maya Pagni Barak
by Jarrod Shanahan & Zhandarka Kurti
Sentences
—Joy James, an abolitionist scholar, in “The Alchemy of Abolitionisms”
From our archives
A reading list of past Inquest essays that examine the role of public defense in the machinery of mass incarceration.
One path to ending mass incarceration is ending our modern conception of public defense. And being transparent about our work is one way to start.
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