A closer look
Cracking the Black Box
One way to keep prosecutors accountable and check their carceral impulses is by shedding some light on their vast discretion to charge crimes. Here’s a start.
Reflections
A Disruptive Innovation
Dismantling the machine that is mass incarceration requires all of us to think outside the box.
excerpt
An American Invention
In the struggle to end mass incarceration, one must understand how the criminalization of violence is largely a modern creation.
Institutions
Making Penal Bureaucrats
Now more than ever, legal education must come to grips with its role in shaping the minds of those who might help to dismantle — or strengthen — carceral institutions and practices.
excerpt
Fear of the Black Child
American society and its criminal legal system simply won’t let Black kids be kids
Life Inside
Learning and Liberation
One year after a governor’s clemency, Renaldo Hudson, who spent 37 years incarcerated, reflects on violence, prisons, and the vital importance of education and support for those incarcerated.
Past, Present & Future of Mass Incarceration
Policing
The Other Gun Violence
Shifting the narrative and policies on gun violence to include killings by police may spare many families from the pain of losing loved ones.
Sentencing
Unfinished Business
Reckoning with the lives of all the men I sent to prison is a necessary, though not sufficient, step to reckon with the untold harm of mass incarceration.
Decarceral Pathways
Choosing Freedom
Would you rather have your wallet stolen on the street or spend two weeks in jail? How people answer this question can shed light on whether our detention policies make sense.
Big Data
The Feature Is the Bug
For all the criticism they get, algorithms can be unlikely allies in exposing deep, structural injustices that entrench mass incarceration.
Beyond Reform
Unraveling Carceral Reach
The work of addressing harm without more prisons, police, and punitiveness is daunting. But it can be done. And it’s happening now.
ELSEWHERE on INQUEST
DOJ
Keeping Them Home
Institutions
Maxed Out
Decarceral Pathways
The Entrenched Carceralism of Forensics
Institutions
A Most Carceral Friend
Crimmigration
Immigration Imprisonment Is a Choice
Institutions
Where Reform Goes to Die
In the States
A ‘Warm’ Closure
Politics
Carceral Democrats
Reflections
A Failure of the Imagination
Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.
—Angela Y. Davis
beginnings
welcome to inquest
a forum for advancing bold ideas to end mass incarceration
Our Mission
Is to create a space where the voices of those doing the hard thinking and work of decarceration can come together to share ideas and be heard.
A Note From Our Founding Editors
On why Inquest exists, and what we hope it will help to achieve.
What we are reading
The Inquest bookshelf
America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence
By Elizabeth Hinton
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
“Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration
By Victoria Law
Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court
By Matthew Clair
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