In Depth
Turning Death into a Commodity
ShotSpotter has leveraged gun violence into a multimillion-dollar business that promises safety but delivers only increased policing and drain on the public’s resources.
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.
advocacy
The Right to Be Called Workers
Language of ‘trafficking’ and ‘slavery’ disempowers migrant sex workers while directing attention away from state violence.
collection
Freedom Writers
Inquest’s landing page for writing by our incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors. Finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Awards.
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.
racial capitalism
Extracting Police
Violent policing is not a bug of capitalist societies but a feature. To end our dependence on it, we must first understand its connection to exploitation.
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.
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Newsletter
Decarceral Pathways
Just Surviving
Crimes committed because of financial hardship are a form of labor and should not be subject to criminal legal punishment.
Beyond Reform
Pinkwashing Prisons
Efforts to improve incarceration for women ultimately support a system that is worse for all.
first person
On Aging and Dying in Captivity
This year I passed a grim milestone: I’ve now been in captivity longer than I’d been alive when I was arrested.
In Depth
When Fire Is the Only Way Out
At a far-flung prison in Virginia, conditions are so inhumane that those imprisoned there are setting themselves ablaze in protest—and to assert their humanity.
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.
activism
A Radical Genealogy
A recent anthology offers an accessible political education in the long history of seeking to abolish U.S. prisons.
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.
organizing
Build Your Fortress
Now more than ever communities must protect our own, even as we prepare for a long battle.
Politics
This Is How You Win the Culture Wars
Faced with violence and authoritarianism, survival demands prioritizing relationship building over reactivity, and solidarity over silence.
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.
Life Inside
Death by Design
There are no good prisons—but even minor design changes could make them less awful to be trapped inside.
books
Raising Abolitionists
A new anthology invites parents into the work of building a world without prisons.
public health
The Prescription Police
Placing criminal system tools in health-care providers’ hands causes irreparable damage to patient care and public trust.
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.
interventions
A Bridge to Health
Medicaid access, both pre- and post-release, is a promising path to ensuring that reentry is a genuine, lasting return to freedom.
culture
Survival Art
“Art is not a leisure activity. Art is a redemptive, powerful, meditative, actionable force within a person—within a human being.”
democracy & power
Death Qualified
The presidential candidates are worlds apart on the death penalty. The winner could either jolt or sap the energy of the movement to end it.
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.
What we are reading
The Inquest bookshelf
A selection of recent books that invite us to imagine a world without mass incarceration.
The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration
by James Kilgore & Vic Liu
Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care
by Mimi Kim, Cameron Rasmussen & Durrell Washington Sr.
Witness: An Insider’s Narrative of the Carceral State
by Lyle C. May
The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence & the Politics of Policing in America
by Michelle S. Phelps
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