Futures
The Fight Over Prison Flipping
As shuttered jails and prisons become luxury venues, a growing movement is calling for community-led alternatives that honor the sites’ violent histories.
A closer look
Indentured Citizens
Making incarceration profitable—for both the state and corporations—generates untold hardship not only for incarcerated people but also for their families and communities.
Defending Prison Journalism
A series in which incarcerated journalists across the nation, alongside experts and activists working to support them, share essential insights into the challenges at hand and the path forward.
Defending Prison Journalism
When Reporting Is a Crime
States have restricted, surveilled, and punished prison journalism for decades, with dire consequences—for incarcerated people and for democracy.
A closer look
Stop Cop City’s Deep Roots
For 150 years, Atlanta has endured racist policing that has served the interest of the city’s economic elite. The fight to resist this “Atlanta way” goes back just as far.
first person
I’m in Prison. My Opera Was Performed at Carnegie Hall.
Inside Sing Sing, I turned my twenty-five-year sentence into music fit for one of the world’s greatest stages.
racial capitalism
From Chain Gangs to the “Modern” Southern Prison
Over the course of the twentieth century, southern moderates claimed to pursue growth and modernization, even as they more permanently enshrined a racialized carceral state.
A closer look
Your Call Could Not Be Completed
Under Biden, the FCC made unprecedented progress toward ending price gouging for prison phone calls. Now, Trump’s FCC has undone much of it.
In Depth
The Myth of Forever Sleep
A new book examines why states continue to sell the American people on the utility of lethal injection—despite its well-documented, monstrous failings.
first person
Hope You Get This
My earliest memories of life were being loved by my father. I couldn’t imagine then all the ways Black men’s lives are endangered.
A closer look
Making an Example of Luigi Mangione
The criminal legal system aims to send a message by massively overcharging him: it will defend racial capitalism above all else.
first person
I Walked Past Him
In prison, a cancer diagnosis might as well be a death sentence.
Defending Prison Journalism
Prison Journalism Is a Disinfecting Light. That’s Why Prisons Suppress It.
A new initiative on prison journalism from the Institute to End Mass Incarceration aims to restore prison transparency and First Amendment rights for incarcerated journalists.
A closer look
Leaning In to State Violence
In ‘Enemy Feminisms,’ philosopher Sophie Lewis engages with the feminism of racists, colonizers, fascists, cops, and jailers to better understand what a truly liberatory politics needs to look like.
interventions
Patients Need Care, Not Policing
Providing hospital inpatients who use drugs with safe ways to do so is a critical part of what it means to “do no harm.”
Beyond Reform
Punishment in All but Name
Drug diversion programs are hyped by reformists as alternatives to prison—but they function just like punishment and people often end up incarcerated anyway.
activism
Fighting for Relief
A new memoir details how Calvin Duncan became one of the nation’s foremost experts in post-conviction relief, helping hundreds incarcerated in Louisiana to fight for their rights, even as he…
A closer look
Tech Won’t Fix Eyewitness Identification
Eyewitness identification is a deeply flawed practice. Adding facial recognition technology, with its veneer of objectivity, only worsens the crisis of mass incarceration.
democracy & power
The Canary in the Coal Mine
A number of factors—including a willingness of law enforcement to collude with federal authorities—make Los Angeles a distressing bellwether of a country succumbing to authoritarianism.
first person
Never Forget Attica Day
Decades of policy failures, including a culture of impunity for correctional officers, have eroded many of the gains that the Attica uprising’s incarcerated leaders fought and died to secure.
A closer look
Medical Debt Behind Bars
Incarcerated people accrue debt for nearly all of their medical care. This makes a mockery of their right to health care—and saddles them with devastating debt upon release.
A closer look
The Work Continues
Revolutionary Black anarchist Martin Sostre spent much of his life as a political prisoner. A vivid new biography reintroduces him to a new generation of decarceral activists.
collective action
Strike!
A collective, nationwide, complete refusal to work in prison would make the carceral status quo impossible to maintain.
A closer look
The Dystopia of the World’s Tallest Jails
New York City’s plan to replace Rikers with skyscraper jails is a cautionary tale of how decarceral talking points can be misappropriated.
abolition
Finding the Opportunity in Crisis
The public’s appetite for meaningful change ebbs and flows. When it peaks, how do organizers capture that energy and channel it into the fight to end mass incarceration?
abolition
Put Children First
Abolishing the child welfare system would create more avenues for protecting children, instead of devoting all of society’s energy to propping up a coercive system of surveillance and punishment.
abolition
Following the Money
Attempts by carceral authorities to shield their funding sources from public interference are proof that working to interrupt money flows is an effective way to oppose prisons.
Life Inside
Reclaiming Health Worthiness
Faced with often deadly medical neglect, incarcerated women form networks of care that provide the life-sustaining support the state fails to give.
abolition
Organizing the Already Mobilized
People involved with labor justice, grassroots community-building, and independent watchdogs make obvious allies for abolitionists—but how do we win them to our cause?
first person
108 Degrees
Eight Virginia prisons currently have no air-conditioning. We go to sleep in sweat and wake up in sweat, with no respite from dangerous heat.