A closer look
No More Shame
Sex offender–specific treatment can leave you feeling humiliated. Or it can ground you, help you grow, and remind you of your worth.
culture
The Prison They Let You See
The San Quentin Film Festival offered a feel-good image of prison life—one far removed from the reality faced by most incarcerated Californians.
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.
in conversation
Decarceral Judges
Most judges in Los Angeles are former prosecutors. But a leadership academy there is helping a pair of public defenders to challenge that status quo.
law & policy
Don’t Talk to the Cops
Your right against self-incrimination is not safe in a criminal system that cares more about coercing convictions than about finding the truth.
culture
Survival Art
“Art is not a leisure activity. Art is a redemptive, powerful, meditative, actionable force within a person—within a human being.”
Photo Essay
Resisting Creatively
In Pittsburgh, a collective of incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists is dreaming of a world without mass incarceration.
racial capitalism
Mass Criminalization as Religion
The deification of whiteness and property has long legitimized the containment of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples.
public health
The Prescription Police
Placing criminal system tools in health-care providers’ hands causes irreparable damage to patient care and public trust.
advocacy
Preparing for the Worst
Ahead of the election, immigrants' rights advocates are working hard to be ready, no matter who wins.
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?
In the States
The People v. the Prison
California is discovering the hard way that you can’t leave decarceral reforms in the hands of prison officials.
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.
interventions
Lawyerless No More
Once a person is imprisoned, indigent defense stops. But the gravity of mass incarceration demands legal representation to the very end.
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.
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.
abolition
A Thousand Possibilities
Abolition requires the world-building work of imagining all the many life-affirming alternatives to incarceration.
collective action
Making Labor Work
Today’s labor movements must see the carceral state not just as a related progressive battle, but as central to the struggle for workers’ rights.
law & policy
Breaking the Chains
Ending prison slavery and giving fair wages to incarcerated workers are necessary steps on the pathway to justice.
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.”
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.
in conversation
Returning to Freedom
A PBS series on reentry is exposing audiences to how people leaving prison grow, heal, and thrive despite their past.
Essay
A Forgiving Society
Only by approaching each person as a member of society—rather than an outcast—will we begin to unwind the punitive turn of the past sixty years.
interventions
Announcing the creation of the Movement Media Alliance
Inquest joins over a dozen progressive media organizations to build power and create accountability based on social justice.
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?
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.
In Their Words
Poems on Policing
Poetry has the power to help us grow past the stale and rote ways of thinking about safety that tend to characterize policy discussions.
A closer look
A Pattern of Injustice
The Ferguson report was a landmark. But the Department of Justice needs to do much more to empower communities in the fight to end police abuse.
Reflections
Growing Up Post-Ferguson
I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed. The uprising set me on the path to abolition.