campaigns
Renewing New Orleans
Anti-jail organizers scored important wins in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But their fight isn’t over.
public history
The Promise of Marronage
Stories of Black flight from enslavement continue to offer lessons for radically rethinking public safety beyond policing.
Politics
A Defense of Public Defender Funding
Unless Congress acts, funding for federal public defenders will take a serious hit, with disastrous consequences for the people they represent.
Reflections
Yearning to Go Home
Life-without-parole sentences hit families especially hard. Yet they fight on, committed to their loved ones’ freedom.
In Depth
How We Ended Wealth-Based Jailing
In Illinois, ending money bond was our target. Pretrial freedom is our goal.
interventions
Books as Decarceral
By helping non-incarcerated people to experience a human connection with people inside, volunteering can open a curtain in the mind.
public history
The Long Revolt
Attica represents far more than a historic rebellion about prison reform. Its revolutionary abolitionist vision endures today.
Essay
On Resilience
In the criminal system, having your life constrained and restricted, even after your sentence is over, has become a fact of life.
Futures
Fractal Abolition
The work of tearing down structures of harm while building the world we want can and must start small.
first person
Censoring Women’s Health
In prison, even learning about your own reproductive health is met with repression.
first person
Misadventures in Mail Censorship
An incarcerated writer’s grievances against a sad new normal of censorship and mail obstruction in a Pennsylvania prison.
Institutions
The Surreal Prison Censorship Regime
Society isn’t being done any favors keeping literature out of the hands of incarcerated people.
campaigns
Ending Carceral Censorship
Censorship should not be the mechanism by which prisons ensure security or any other goal they purport to have.
interventions
A Place to Be Free
Life in prison is hard. Transitioning back home through reentry shouldn’t be harder.
Crimmigration
Deconstructing Immigrant Binaries
To truly provide justice for those with criminal records, we must question harmful binaries that separate “good” from “bad” immigrants.
activism
Surveil and Conquer
The state spies upon and infiltrates social movements to keep people on guard, afraid, and second-guessing their every move.
abolition
In Defense of Hopelessness
Even among abolitionists, there's room for those who lack hope.
collective action
Imprisoned but United
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
book review
The Gun of Incarceration
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
law & policy
Exceptional Punishments
No one should be made to give up their rights in exchange for being spared from prison.
A closer look
Our Evidence-Based Obsession
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
first person
Envisioning Futures
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
advocacy
Chained by Debt
Erasing court costs and fines is a relatively small change that would have an outsize impact on those harmed by mass incarceration.
campaigns
Do You Know Their Names?
When slain by police, Black women and girls rarely garner the same communal outcry or political response as their fallen Black brothers.
interventions
Abolition Everywhere
Despite the stumbling blocks imposed by Republican state governments, abolition is happening in the South and in small towns, with organizing specially tailored to local needs.
public health
Beware the Healthier Cage
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
excerpt
The Women at the Prison Gates
There are many forms of resistance undertaken by relatives and friends of incarcerated people, but the system renders them invisible.
recommendations
Our End-of-Summer Reading List
Decarceral ideas and essays that have moved our readers in the past year.
roundtable
Keeping Each Other Safe
Acting within the criminal legal system cannot be the solution, on its own, to the existence of the carceral state.
roundtable
From Reformism to Revolution
As organizers in Illinois know well, it is necessary to engage with criminalizing institutions to better learn how to defeat them.