Pretrial Injustice
Incarceration ahead of trial is fundamentally unjust—a form of punishment that makes it virtually impossible to fight for your freedom.
Incarceration ahead of trial is fundamentally unjust—a form of punishment that makes it virtually impossible to fight for your freedom.
How radical lawyers played a key role standing up for survivors of the Attica uprising.
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.
The rule was supposed to prevent prosecutors from hiding evidence. It hasn’t worked—but there’s a better way.
Mexicans and Mexican Americans have long been targets of legal and extralegal violence by the police. Learning this history is a step toward ending abuses that persist to this day.
Far from a plan for decarceration, ‘Barred’ is nonetheless a trenchant look at how the criminal system fails the innocent and guilty alike.
A reflection from the founding editors of Inquest on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the publication.
We need new words and understandings — not only for crime, freedom, and responsibility, but also for history and spacetime — because it gets us closer to an abolitionist world.
Millions rallied behind Adnan Syed, whom the system gave a second look. Many others serving extreme sentences deserve a second look, too.
Here’s how imprisoned writers can offer reasoned analysis on policies affecting the carceral state.
The Visiting Room offers an intimate glimpse into the stories of Louisianians serving life without parole.
Mass incarceration hasn’t ended in San Francisco, or anywhere else. To achieve that goal, governments would first have to devolve power to the communities it has harmed the most.
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
Why understanding restorative and transformative justice on their own terms, and at their best and worst, will help us build more of both.
For all its aesthetically pleasing attributes, Norway’s Halden Prison is still a prison for the men who must endure it.
One might say incarcerated Muslims sue religiously. And true enough, a deep belief in justice is what moves them to resist oppression this way.
How we’re helping journalists report more deeply, more precisely, and more carefully on the law, on the criminal system, and towards justice.
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
As a lifelong public defender, I ran to become Santa Clara County’s next district attorney. I didn’t win, but our movement did.
Data-driven approaches to reform can reinforce aspects of a system that’s rotten to the core.
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.
Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.
What we are reading
by Shira Hassan
by Melanie D. Newport
by El Jones
by Kristina Shull
Sentences
—Leigh Goodmark, a law professor and author in Maryland, in “To Free Them All”
Series
A collection of essays on the Supreme Court’s relationship to our crisis of mass incarceration.
We can celebrate the ascent of Ketanji Brown Jackson, while acknowledging that indigent defense remains woefully inadequate in this time of crisis.
The loss of the fundamental right to reproductive freedom will only lead to more state surveillance and criminalization of pregnant people.
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated.
Judge Michelle Childs’ many denials of compassionate release signal a carceralism that should have no place on the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court doesn’t need another Stephen Breyer. It needs someone who can openly confront the immorality of our criminal legal system.
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