Policing
You Can’t Reform a Traffic Stop
Despite requirements that they undergo bias training and use body‑worn cameras, local police are still leaving Black men bloodied after pulling them over for minor violations.
abolition
Ending Family Policing
The so-called child welfare system is a core plank of the U.S. carceral state. How can we actually make our communities stronger and safer?
Defending Prison Journalism
Destroying the Conditions that Make Speech Possible
Blocking reading materials and censoring writing are both ways that prisons erase expression before it can reach an audience.
public history
How the War on Drugs Packed Jails
Fifty-five years later, the impact of the War on Drugs continues to be felt in how it dramatically expanded the use of pretrial detention and money bail.
democracy & power
The Balance of Power Is on Our Side
A new anthology of writing from influential Black political prisoner Martin Sostre offers lessons from a previous era of mass political imprisonment that can inform resistance in our own.
interventions
The Art of Mothering Through Bars
For incarcerated mothers, sending handmade art to their children can help nurture vital connections—but often even this is hindered by prison officials.
interventions
When the Judge Used to Wear Blue
Data reveals that judges with law enforcement backgrounds are more likely to order pretrial detention and set high bail. In other words, judicial appointments are jail policy.
first person
Getting Short
To imagine closeness to freedom is to invite disappointment. To speak optimism aloud in prison is to make yourself vulnerable.
Defending Prison Journalism
Speaking Power to Power
An increased visibility of prison journalism is vitally necessary, though it alone will not turn the tide of a sclerotic, brutal political system.
Futures
“Hope Is a Discipline”
An abolitionist art installation at the Bedford branch of the Brooklyn Public Library helped patrons to visualize a future free of prisons.
first person
Making Our Own Change
There’s a general disinterest within the prison system in the rehabilitation of incarcerated individuals. This is cruel, and it is shortsighted.
A closer look
The Satanic Panic Was Also a Gay Panic
Periods of intense criminalization and conservative backlash often target sexual minorities—and then that fact gets dropped from popular recollection.
Defending Prison Journalism
No First Amendment for Prison Journalists
The law has constructed a regime in which incarcerated journalists like myself are silenced, punished, and disappeared for telling the truth about what happens behind these walls.
Institutions
Serving Time in Public Schools
Every year, thousands of children are placed in solitary confinement by U.S. public schools as punishment for having a disability. This abuse and abandonment must stop.
Life Inside
Mindfulness Behind Bars
Learning Buddhist meditation and yoga while incarcerated can help people cope with the stresses of prison, prepare them for reentry, and strengthen their abolitionist resolve.
Policing
Force Multipliers
ICE could never have created a large-scale deportation machine if it hadn’t enjoyed the voluntary assistance of local law enforcement.
A closer look
From the Branding Iron to Digital Faceprints
Biometric technologies sold by companies like Clearview AI continue a racist legacy of marking bodies for the purpose of identification and capture.
Defending Prison Journalism
Lighting the Black Box
Prison writing has often been the spark that lights the flame of political awareness among the incarcerated population and their outside allies.
A closer look
West Coast Progressives Did Not Cause This Crisis
A revival of War on Drugs–style punishment aims to score political points against liberal cities—but it won’t make us safer, and it won’t reduce opioid deaths.
first person
A Certain Darkness
Solitary confinement steals bites from the mind, heart, and soul every day, without you even realizing it. Eventually these stolen bites equal a whole piece of you gone.
poetry
Poetry from Incarcerated Washington, D.C., Residents
For National Poetry Month 2026, new work from incarcerated authors Andrew Daniels, Steven Harrison, and Curtis Dickson.
poetry
Into the Light
“No longer will I travel A road that has no end . . .
poetry
Days
I’m up all night looking out of the window. Staring at the moon.
poetry
I Don’t Know Why
“Unexplainable events of joy just blooms . . .”
advocacy
“It means a lot to show people who we really are.”
Beauty Behind Bars exhibits artwork by incarcerated people from the Washington, D.C., area in community spaces. Here, the project’s leaders discuss the power of art in advocacy work.
A closer look
The Algorithmic School-to-Prison Pipeline
With little transparency or oversight, technology is being used to flag youth as risks to public safety and deciding who is surveilled, arrested, and confined.
A closer look
Who Gets to Be a “Good Guy” with a Gun?
Laws governing who can legally own a gun take at face value the racist, incoherent category of “felon”—and thus worsen the crisis of mass incarceration.
Decarceral Pathways
Building Resistance
A key author of the Community Justice Exchange toolkit for organizing against carceral infrastructure discusses the need, now more than ever, to center abolitionist goals.
activism
“Time Is So Precious”
Organizer Pedro Figueroa recounts working while being held in immigration detention, where he earned as little as $1 a day and helped to organize historic labor actions against for-profit prison…
law & policy
What makes someone a gang member? For police, nearly anything.
In most of the country, police can catalog you as a gang member for virtually any reason—and you might never even know until you’re being punished for it.