The Profit Motive
A recent book unveils the shockingly long history of for-profit prisons—and the equally long history of incarcerated people demanding compensation for their exploited labor.
A recent book unveils the shockingly long history of for-profit prisons—and the equally long history of incarcerated people demanding compensation for their exploited labor.
“They tell us we have the right to take up / space. But they come in armor and shields / that say otherwise.”
In Los Angeles, judges are elected, and most are lifelong prosecutors. Community members are now fighting this carceral status quo by working to elect career public defenders.
Programs that send literature to incarcerated people provide a vital lifeline, facilitating personal growth and imaginative escape.
A decade of increasingly sexphobic lawmaking has left sex workers worse off, unable to keep themselves safe and more likely to be victims of police violence.
When the social safety net gets shredded, incarceration increases. We can’t just count on mutual aid; the most vulnerable among us need government benefits.
Domestic violence survivors shouldn’t have to survive police violence, too. It is time to follow the evidence to interventions that actually work.
Prisons are sites of pervasive medical neglect, both creating and worsening disability. Never was this more the case than during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Incarcerated people are eligible for Pell Grants again—but will prisons actually allow us to flourish as college students?
Reentry guides supplied by prisons are light on details and heavy on judgement. That’s why formerly incarcerated people are writing a guide for New York filled with their own lived…
ShotSpotter has leveraged gun violence into a multimillion-dollar business that promises safety but delivers only increased policing and drain on the public’s resources.
Policymakers claim to have turned away from the “old” war on drugs—but everything about their “new” approach is still focused on punishment and surveillance.
Language of ‘trafficking’ and ‘slavery’ disempowers migrant sex workers while directing attention away from state violence.
Being forced by prison authorities to publish anonymously caused me to reflect on the long history of Black authors choosing names in response to state violence.
I had one / wish it will be I wish I can / get out of this cuz this is / a suffering pain time I’m doing
“Shower Call Down Below” & “29 L-Building”
The sweeping conspiracy and terrorism indictment of Stop Cop City activists reveals the new playbook for state suppression of protest. But we can still win.
I’m eligible to smoke til I fall clapping my / Hands and feet all the same time / Laffing at all this shit.
Nuclear abolitionists in the Plowshares movement have been imprisoned for bringing attention to the fact that nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal under international law.
Work from poets incarcerated in Parchman’s Unit 29
“Crying Johnny,” “Officer Judy Gives Instructions to the Lock Down Inmates,” & “Holiday Special Meal”
Even in ancient societies not known for their delicacy about violence, solitary confinement stood out as a horror. In our own time we are far less clear-eyed about its violent…
Crimes committed because of financial hardship are a form of labor and should not be subject to criminal legal punishment.
Violent policing is not a bug of capitalist societies but a feature. To end our dependence on it, we must first understand its connection to exploitation.
Convincing New Mexico to stop sentencing children to die in prison required us to let go of “us” versus “them” politics.
During the mid-twentieth century, the Bureau of Prisons ran two “narcotic farms” that muddled medical care with incarceration, part of a growing trend that criminalized addiction.
Efforts to improve incarceration for women ultimately support a system that is worse for all.
I rejected a plea deal and chose instead to go to trial. I would not understand until too late that I had placed a target on my back.
Seventies-era anti-carceral feminism opposed “tough on crime” policymaking and played an important role in the making of today’s prison abolition movement.
This year I passed a grim milestone: I’ve now been in captivity longer than I’d been alive when I was arrested.