Reflections
Juneteenth and Black Liberation
Our government’s history of oppression compels us to free those Black revolutionaries aging in our prisons.
Juneteenth 2025
a reading list on the theme of liberation
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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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interventions
Changing Courts from the Ballot Box
In Los Angeles, judges are elected, and most are lifelong prosecutors. Community members are now fighting this carceral status quo by working to elect career public defenders.
poetry
An Essay in Acrostic: P.O.L.I.C.E.
“They tell us we have the right to take up / space. But they come in armor and shields / that say otherwise.”
A closer look
Against Abandonment
When the social safety net gets shredded, incarceration increases. We can’t just count on mutual aid; the most vulnerable among us need government benefits.
collection
Freedom Writers
Inquest’s landing page for writing by our incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors. Finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Awards.
interventions
More Violence at the Door
Domestic violence survivors shouldn’t have to survive police violence, too. It is time to follow the evidence to interventions that actually work.
interventions
Free Books
Programs that send literature to incarcerated people provide a vital lifeline, facilitating personal growth and imaginative escape.
In Depth
Just Learning
Incarcerated people are eligible for Pell Grants again—but will prisons actually allow us to flourish as college students?
interventions
Expert Guides
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.
advocacy
The Right to Be Called Workers
Language of ‘trafficking’ and ‘slavery’ disempowers migrant sex workers while directing attention away from state violence.
Criminalizing Dissent
The Tools of Repression
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.
In Depth
Everything Old Is New Again
Policymakers claim to have turned away from the “old” war on drugs—but everything about their “new” approach is still focused on punishment and surveillance.
Criminalizing Dissent
Criminalized for Obeying a Higher Law
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.
first person
What’s in a Name?
Being forced by prison authorities to publish anonymously caused me to reflect on the long history of Black authors choosing names in response to state violence.
first person
39 Years
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.
organizing
Build Your Fortress
Now more than ever communities must protect our own, even as we prepare for a long battle.
Politics
The Terrain of Struggle
Leaving no one behind, abolitionists plan for a transformed future—even as we attempt to address pain points in the here and now.
activism
Back to the Basics
At a time of political realignment, progressive movements need to get back to building relationships, across differences, and growing their base.
Life Inside
Death by Design
There are no good prisons—but even minor design changes could make them less awful to be trapped inside.
Essay
A Lethal Upbringing
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.
public health
The Prescription Police
Placing criminal system tools in health-care providers’ hands causes irreparable damage to patient care and public trust.
books
Raising Abolitionists
A new anthology invites parents into the work of building a world without prisons.
Beyond Reform
No More Pretrial Punishment
In my many years as a public defender, I accepted the legal rationales for pretrial detention. But I can’t anymore.
culture
Survival Art
“Art is not a leisure activity. Art is a redemptive, powerful, meditative, actionable force within a person—within a human being.”
abolition
Transformative Justice Is Global
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.
A closer look
Playing with Originalism
Should advocates looking to unwind our nation’s punitive excesses engage a Supreme Court that set them in motion?
Local jails
Reforming Sheriffs
Electing progressive sheriffs only goes so far toward curbing the structural forces that sustain mass incarceration.
Policing
A Nation of Cop Cities
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.
A closer look
Whitewashing Police Violence
‘Excited delirium syndrome’ is a tool the state invented to evade accountability whenever people of color die at the hands of police.
excerpt
No Good Prison
An incarcerated writer and advocate in California implores: “Don’t waste my time trying to make it more comfortable for me in here.”
law & policy
Breaking the Chains
Ending prison slavery and giving fair wages to incarcerated workers are necessary steps on the pathway to justice.
abolition
A Thousand Possibilities
Abolition requires the world-building work of imagining all the many life-affirming alternatives to incarceration.
Life Inside
The Last Breakfast
I kept my promise to break bread with my friend Dobie one last time, right before the state of Louisiana put him to death.
abolition
The Transformation of Justice
What does genuine safety look like? And what will it take to prioritize it rather than simply managing inequality and other injustices?
organizing
People-Powered Defense
Participatory defense gives families and communities an opportunity to protect their own in courtroom spaces that have long robbed them of power.
racial capitalism
Bad Credit
Credit scoring is control by another name. It keeps marginalized people from the means of survival and exposes them to punishment.
advocacy
Remedying Wrongs
The administrative remedy process is a roadblock to challenging inhumane prison conditions. With the help of advocates, people in prison are fighting back.
Surveillance
For the Public Good
While on parole in Oregon, homelessness, unemployment, and lack of services kept me in survival mode. This is not public safety.
Series
Carceral Geographies
Essays exploring how mass incarceration shapes, and is shaped by, our shared world and built spaces.
abolition
Community Is a Verb
Defund gives us a platform and pathway to reimagine a society with less police, more care, and services that meet the needs of all.
Futures
Abolition as Human Liberation
A hopeful, practical new book shows how abolitionist organizers today are building the world anew.
culture
A Narrative of Control
Mass incarceration rests on false narratives that carceral institutions themselves control. But some of us are fighting back.
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.
activism
Gay Liberation and the Carceral State
Recovering a vision of queer solidarity with incarcerated people may just be what people disaffected by the gay rights movement need today.
organizing
A Safer, Healthier Boston
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
Asymmetrical Partners
Activism must involve incarcerated people—but few outside advocates really understand the dangers and limitations that imprisoned organizers face.
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