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.
Sex offender–specific treatment can leave you feeling humiliated. Or it can ground you, help you grow, and remind you of your worth.
The San Quentin Film Festival offered a feel-good image of prison life—one far removed from the reality faced by most incarcerated Californians.
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.
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.
Your right against self-incrimination is not safe in a criminal system that cares more about coercing convictions than about finding the truth.
“Art is not a leisure activity. Art is a redemptive, powerful, meditative, actionable force within a person—within a human being.”
In Pittsburgh, a collective of incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists is dreaming of a world without mass incarceration.
The deification of whiteness and property has long legitimized the containment of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples.
Placing criminal system tools in health-care providers’ hands causes irreparable damage to patient care and public trust.
Ahead of the election, immigrants' rights advocates are working hard to be ready, no matter who wins.
Should advocates looking to unwind our nation’s punitive excesses engage a Supreme Court that set them in motion?
California is discovering the hard way that you can’t leave decarceral reforms in the hands of prison officials.
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.
Once a person is imprisoned, indigent defense stops. But the gravity of mass incarceration demands legal representation to the very end.
'Excited delirium syndrome' is a tool the state invented to evade accountability whenever people of color die at the hands of police.
Electing progressive sheriffs only goes so far toward curbing the structural forces that sustain mass incarceration.
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 requires the world-building work of imagining all the many life-affirming alternatives to incarceration.
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.
Ending prison slavery and giving fair wages to incarcerated workers are necessary steps on the pathway to justice.
An incarcerated writer and advocate in California implores: “Don’t waste my time trying to make it more comfortable for me in here.”
I kept my promise to break bread with my friend Dobie one last time, right before the state of Louisiana put him to death.
A PBS series on reentry is exposing audiences to how people leaving prison grow, heal, and thrive despite their past.
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.
Inquest joins over a dozen progressive media organizations to build power and create accountability based on social justice.
What does genuine safety look like? And what will it take to prioritize it rather than simply managing inequality and other injustices?
Credit scoring is control by another name. It keeps marginalized people from the means of survival and exposes them to punishment.
Poetry has the power to help us grow past the stale and rote ways of thinking about safety that tend to characterize policy discussions.
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.
I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed. The uprising set me on the path to abolition.