Always a Mother
Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them.
Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them.
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.
For many years, I believed that the child welfare system could be reformed, but no more. It needs to be abolished.
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.
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.
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.
How e-carceration grabbed a hold of Camden is a cautionary tale for those of us who envision a future without policing.
Imprisonment violently separates us from those we love most. Even those we come to love on the inside.
How government agencies and private companies trap and profit off incarcerated people and their loved ones.
Writing about people you encounter in prison carries special responsibilities.
The American penal system renders invisible the many people in its grip who are working hard to make amends.
I finished my sentence more than seven years ago. But I’m still trapped in an immigration prison, where the punishment endures.
The criminal legal system is massively punitive toward people who commit sex offenses. How we treat them jeopardizes their health and safety — and our own.
Librarians have a responsibility to everyone in their communities — including those who are incarcerated.
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.
ELSEWHERE on INQUEST
What we are reading
by Dorothy Roberts
by Anne Gray Fischer
by Ana Muñiz
by Judah Schept
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