public health
Policing Health
The surprising link between Medicaid expansion and arrests levels suggests that keeping people healthy also keeps them from the reach of the criminal legal system.
In Depth
Making Men Pay
For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.
social control
End Carceral Social Work
To stay true to their professed values, social workers must wholly disavow and remove themselves from systems of harm.
A closer look
Policy
‘Something on Women’
Carceral feminists clamored for the Violence Against Women Act. What they got in return was criminalization, incarceration, and more violence.
Beyond Reform
Rethinking the State
For criminal law to become truly unexceptional, we must rethink our society, and its legal structures, as a whole.
In Depth
A Future for Susanville
The prison town of Susanville, in California, is about to lose its livelihood. Its economic survival presents a test for abolition.
excerpt
The Problem With Innocence
Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.
Past, Present & Future of Mass Incarceration
In Depth
A Pound of Flesh
Fines and fees have a devastating effect on Black women and their communities. Abolishing them is the only option.
public health
Unwell in a Cell
Co-opting the language of mental health and treatment, jail expansion is taking root in several cities and localities. But these are cages all the same.
excerpt
Sexual Policing
Law enforcement of women’s bodies is a structural and systematic form of police violence. All of us are less safe if we don’t end this brutal expression of state-sanctioned power.
In Depth
Always a Mother
Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them.
A closer look
Cops and Counselors
Mental health professionals call the police, work with the police, and act like the police. But even in our ranks, an abolitionist future is possible.
democracy & power
After the Backlash
Understanding the democratic appeal of retrenchment and reaction to movements for racial justice has never been more urgent.
Big Data
Transgressing Borders
Racist gang profiling on the street becomes hard data, which then feeds a sprawling detention and deportation machine with the imprimatur of law.
public health
Drug-Induced Panic
Criminalization of so-called drug-induced homicides is yet another manifestation of the failed war on drugs — and far from an adequate public health response.
Sentences
“I think we’re really in the early stages of figuring out how we challenge this system of e-carceration. We need to have a vision, just in the same way that all people who are fighting a liberation struggle need to have a vision of freedom.”
* * *
—James Kilgore, an advocate against electronic surveillance, in “Deconfiguring the Security State”
Series
INCARCERATION AND THE COURT
A collection of essays on the Supreme Court’s relationship to our crisis of mass incarceration.
A closer look
And a Public Defender for All
We can celebrate the ascent of Ketanji Brown Jackson, while acknowledging that indigent defense remains woefully inadequate in this time of crisis.
public health
A World Without Roe
The loss of the fundamental right to reproductive freedom will only lead to more state surveillance and criminalization of pregnant people.
excerpt
Canaries in the Coalmine
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated.
A closer look
No Compassion
Judge Michelle Childs’ many denials of compassionate release signal a carceralism that should have no place on the Supreme Court.
Institutions
No More Compromisers
The Supreme Court doesn’t need another Stephen Breyer. It needs someone who can openly confront the immorality of our criminal legal system.
ELSEWHERE on INQUEST
In Their Words
Finishing Sentences
interventions
The End of Public Defenders
In Depth
Home Rule
Crimmigration
No End in Sight
public health
Treating Unfreedom
Crimmigration
The Border State
In the States
Moving Forward
campaigns
A New Sheriff in Town
In Depth
Follow the Science
What we are reading
The Inquest bookshelf
Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World
by Dorothy Roberts
The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification
by Anne Gray Fischer
Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond
by Ana Muñiz
Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia
by Judah Schept
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