social control
Safety from Surveillance
In their fight to get ShotSpotter out of Chicago, organizers have emphasized the ways that for-profit technology can never deliver on its promises to make communities safer.
Essay
Soft Boiled
Most crime novels make detectives into heroes and offer resolution through punishment. Could a different kind of crime novel help us imagine a decarceral future?
advocacy
Remedying Wrongs
The administrative remedy process is a roadblock to challenging inhumane prison conditions. With the help of advocates, people in prison are fighting back.
A closer look
Squinting in the Sunlight
Most reentry programs assume a person who is able to work and live on their own. Those of us who are older don’t have that kind of freedom.
Life Inside
Unsettled People
Prison transfers are routinely used to punish, disorient, and isolate incarcerated people, disconnecting them from family, friends, community, and all sense of place.
abolition
Community Is a Verb
Defund gives us a platform and pathway to reimagine a society with less police, more care, and services that meet the needs of all.
conclusion
All of the Above
Prosecutors alone won’t end mass incarceration. But their interventions can mean the world to people staring down the many harms of criminalization.
advocacy
Not a Fix-All
Electing progressive prosecutors is but one tool in a multifaceted, collaborative approach to ending mass incarceration.
system actors
The Best Prospect
Not all so-called progressive prosecutors are doing enough to dismantle mass incarceration. But they’re better than the alternative.
Politics
Power to the Voters
Progressive prosecutors have delivered tangible and rapid wins to a grassroots movement seeking to end mass incarceration.
Beyond Reform
Maybe, If . . .
Believing that prosecutors can play a role in ending mass incarceration requires imagining a prosecutor whose goal is non-reformist reforms.
interventions
The Problem Solvers
Prosecution can be redefined to focus on effective problem-solving through policies and initiatives that make us a safer, healthier community.
lead essay
The Prosecutor Paradox
Can a prosecutor, even a progressive or reform-minded one, really help dismantle mass incarceration?
Crimmigration
Immobilized Immigrants
Hardened, remote detention centers shape the experience of immigration imprisonment. Yet even there, a radically different future is possible.
Film review
Big-Screen Abolition
Films that imagine decarceral futures are a cultural antidote for the carceral messages and aesthetics so prevalent in popular media.
Futures
Abolitionist Social Work
Social work must be anti-carceral, against oppression, and committed to ending the systems, structures, and ideologies that cause people harm.
Policing
Safety Without Police
Even before the uprisings in Minneapolis, communities have been radically reimagining a world that doesn’t depend on policing.
In the States
The Phantom Prison
Incarcerated people who work as firefighters have not escaped the prison; the prison has merely followed them outdoors.
Q&A
Picturing the Crisis
A new book uses art to make the horrors of mass incarceration as visual, and visceral, as possible.
organizing
A Safer, Healthier Boston
In seeking funding for non-carceral mental health crisis response, we're hoping to bring a small piece of our abolitionist horizon to our city.
Institutions
Building Carcerality
Architects and designers must reckon with their role in the past and future of mass incarceration.
organizing
Letcher Is Us
A new prison won’t fix the many problems that afflict our community. Only a vision for, and investment in, a different future will.
culture
A Narrative of Control
Mass incarceration rests on false narratives that carceral institutions themselves control. But some of us are fighting back.
Surveillance
For the Public Good
While on parole in Oregon, homelessness, unemployment, and lack of services kept me in survival mode. This is not public safety.
in conversation
Unlocking Learning
Education is integral to centering the holistic well-being of incarcerated people.
first person
Hell Is Real and It Is Beige
Some of the greatest violence of prisons is hidden, in plain view, within their banality.
Beyond Reform
Disability Justice Demands Abolition
When people need care, then the solution should be to get them care, not increase the risk of police violence.
Policing
‘I’m Just Different, That’s All’
We embrace nonconformity in principle—but not for Black men, whose quirks can provoke fear, policing, and punishment.
voices
National Poetry Month: Wayne Grant
“The Names They Call Us”
first person
The Banality of Mandatory Surcharges
In New York and elsewhere, exploitative court-ordered fees shouldn't saddle a person who is already poor and criminalized.