Abolition Everywhere
Despite the stumbling blocks imposed by Republican state governments, abolition is happening in the South and in small towns, with organizing specially tailored to local needs.
Despite the stumbling blocks imposed by Republican state governments, abolition is happening in the South and in small towns, with organizing specially tailored to local needs.
Community-based gun violence prevention is at a crossroads. A group in Chicago shows how abolition may hold the key to its future.
Putting our ideas into practice—allowing ourselves to try, fail, and try again—will be how we move closer to a world without the harms of policing, prisons, and punishment.
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.
Anti-jail organizers scored important wins in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But their fight isn’t over.
Stories of Black flight from enslavement continue to offer lessons for radically rethinking public safety beyond policing.
Every Saturday, we’ll send you a digest with the latest essays from people thinking through and working for a world without mass incarceration.
Sign up for the latest.
The work of tearing down structures of harm while building the world we want can and must start small.
Attica represents far more than a historic rebellion about prison reform. Its revolutionary abolitionist vision endures today.
Life-without-parole sentences hit families especially hard. Yet they fight on, committed to their loved ones’ freedom.
By helping non-incarcerated people to experience a human connection with people inside, volunteering can open a curtain in the mind.
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
To truly provide justice for those with criminal records, we must question harmful binaries that separate “good” from “bad” immigrants.
Series
A collaboration with PEN America, aimed at the plight of carceral censorship and how people in prison are harmed by it.
No one should be made to give up their rights in exchange for being spared from prison.
Even among abolitionists, there’s room for those who lack hope.
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
Radical acts of justice can happen within the confines of the system. Or well outside it, as demonstrated by the organized resistance to Atlanta’s Cop City.
As organizers in Illinois know well, it is necessary to engage with criminalizing institutions to better learn how to defeat them.
Acting within the criminal legal system cannot be the solution, on its own, to the existence of the carceral state.
The fight against police and prisons cannot be separated from the struggle to extend care beyond the limits of the family form.
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
The lives of undocumented immigrants are very much documented—subject to the surveillance that’s endemic to contemporary life in the United States.
A new film reminds us that caring about survivors means working to prevent and respond to all violence—including carceral violence.
What we are reading
A selection of recent books that invite us to imagine a world without mass incarceration.
by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum
by Jocelyn Simonson
by Jane M. Spinak
by CalvinJohn Smiley
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
In order to invest in a vision for a new way of living, we have to believe in our capacity to create something better—together.
Series
A collection of essays at the intersection of labor and the carceral state, in partnership with LPE Blog.
Critical infrastructure laws are cynical attempts by corporations to manipulate public fears of terrorism to protect their own profits.
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
When slain by police, Black women and girls rarely garner the same communal outcry or political response as their fallen Black brothers.
Erasing court costs and fines is a relatively small change that would have an outsize impact on those harmed by mass incarceration.
Life in prison is hard. Transitioning back home through reentry shouldn’t be harder.
Series
A collection of essays examining how—or whether—public defenders can meaningfully contribute to the end of mass incarceration.
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.
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.
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
Incarceration ahead of trial is fundamentally unjust—a form of punishment that makes it virtually impossible to fight for your freedom.
Inquest publishes new, thought-provoking ideas and essays weekly.
Join our mailing list to stay on top of the latest.