Beyond Reform
No More Courts
The legal institutions, processes, procedures, and actors implicated in the progression of criminal cases are simply beyond reform.
Policing
Shattering Broken Windows
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
democracy & power
Changing Everything
Beyond electing progressive prosecutors, decarceration requires an ambitious, multifaceted struggle at all levels of governance.
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.
Past, Present & Future of Mass Incarceration
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.
Reflections
Juneteenth and Black Liberation
Our government’s history of oppression compels us to free those Black revolutionaries aging in our prisons.
system actors
Busting the Myth
Many progressive prosecutors promised bold change. In Virginia and elsewhere, reformers are realizing that they’re still actors in the same machinery of injustice.
A closer look
The Real Monsters
Sex offender registries don’t make us any safer. Abolishing them would.
In Depth
Making Men Pay
For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.
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.
Policy
‘Something on Women’
Carceral feminists clamored for the Violence Against Women Act. What they got in return was criminalization, incarceration, and more violence.
democracy & power
After the Backlash
Understanding the democratic appeal of retrenchment and reaction to movements for racial justice has never been more urgent.
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.
Sentences
“Politicians point to data, culled from databases, that show astounding numbers of immigrant gang members in the U.S. But this clean statistical output conceals the process that leads to the allegations; a process that is shot through with equal parts incoherence, absurdity, and nefarious racial stereotypes.”
* * *
—Ana Muñiz, a scholar at UC Irvine, in “Transgressing Borders”
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
public health
Drug-Induced Panic
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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