Local jails
Pretrial Injustice
Incarceration ahead of trial is fundamentally unjust—a form of punishment that makes it virtually impossible to fight for your freedom.
excerpt
Defending Attica
How radical lawyers played a key role standing up for survivors of the Attica uprising.
activism
Black Power Meets Police Power
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.
interventions
Brady ’s Failure
The rule was supposed to prevent prosecutors from hiding evidence. It hasn’t worked—but there’s a better way.
legal history
Blood in the Borderlands
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.
book review
Bars and Barriers
Far from a plan for decarceration, ‘Barred’ is nonetheless a trenchant look at how the criminal system fails the innocent and guilty alike.
Reflections
Inquest: Year One
A reflection from the founding editors of Inquest on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the publication.
Essay
A New Clarity
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.
Policy
Serial Injustices
Millions rallied behind Adnan Syed, whom the system gave a second look. Many others serving extreme sentences deserve a second look, too.
Past, Present & Future of Mass Incarceration
Policy
Decarcerating from Within
Here’s how imprisoned writers can offer reasoned analysis on policies affecting the carceral state.
advocacy
Face to Face
The Visiting Room offers an intimate glimpse into the stories of Louisianians serving life without parole.
A closer look
Don’t Believe the Hype
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.
Beyond Reform
Reclaiming Safety
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
A closer look
Growing Justice
Why understanding restorative and transformative justice on their own terms, and at their best and worst, will help us build more of both.
Institutions
Pretty and Punitive
For all its aesthetically pleasing attributes, Norway’s Halden Prison is still a prison for the men who must endure it.
legal history
Litigious Zeal
One might say incarcerated Muslims sue religiously. And true enough, a deep belief in justice is what moves them to resist oppression this way.
Media
Justice and Journalism
How we’re helping journalists report more deeply, more precisely, and more carefully on the law, on the criminal system, and towards justice.
democracy & power
Culture Wars and Criminalization
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
campaigns
Meeting the Moment
As a lifelong public defender, I ran to become Santa Clara County’s next district attorney. I didn’t win, but our movement did.
A closer look
The Evidence-Based Trap
Data-driven approaches to reform can reinforce aspects of a system that’s rotten to the core.
interventions
A Secret Stash of Power
Now more than ever, we need a clear understanding of the role of violence, trauma, and survivorship in our harm reduction practice.
excerpt
The Problem With Innocence
Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.
voices
Caring Collectively
Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.
What we are reading
The Inquest bookshelf
Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction
by Shira Hassan
This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration
by Melanie D. Newport
Abolitionist Intimacies
by El Jones
Detention Empire: Reagan’s War on Immigrants & the Seeds of Resistance
by Kristina Shull
Sentences
“There are so many ways that survivors of violence are punished by the criminal legal system. No matter their age, from police interactions to prosecution to the courts to the pain of imprisonment, survivors’ trauma is compounded at every step of the carceral process.”
* * *
—Leigh Goodmark, a law professor and author in Maryland, in “To Free Them All”
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
system actors
Busting the Myth
campaigns
A New Sheriff in Town
In Depth
Follow the Science
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