Crimmigration
Court-Assisted Expulsions
Immigrants fighting their deportations need lawyers. That doesn’t mean federally funding their defense should be a movement goal.
Decarceral Pathways
Welfare Check
Here’s how federal cash assistance for low-income youth impacts whether they come in contact with the criminal legal system.
Beyond Reform
No More Courts
The legal institutions, processes, procedures, and actors implicated in the progression of criminal cases are simply beyond reform.
voices
Caring Collectively
Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.
Reflections
Inquest: Year One
A reflection from the founding editors of Inquest on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the publication.
A closer look
The Evidence-Based Trap
Data-driven approaches to reform can reinforce aspects of a system that’s rotten to the core.
advocacy
Virginians on My Mind
Everyone is redeemable. For that reason, I won’t stop fighting for those people our governor and the legislature have left to die in our prisons.
Reflections
Juneteenth and Black Liberation
Our government's history of oppression compels us to free those Black revolutionaries aging in our prisons.
Policing
Shattering Broken Windows
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
democracy & power
Changing Everything
Beyond electing progressive prosecutors, decarceration requires an ambitious, multifaceted struggle at all levels of governance.
public health
Policing Health
The surprising link between Medicaid expansion and arrests levels suggests that keeping people healthy also keeps them from the reach of the criminal legal system.
In Depth
Making Men Pay
For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.
Institutions
End Carceral Social Work
To stay true to their professed values, social workers must wholly disavow and remove themselves from systems of harm.
system actors
Busting the Myth
Many progressive prosecutors promised bold change. In Virginia and elsewhere, reformers are realizing that they’re still actors in the same machinery of injustice.
democracy & power
After the Backlash
Understanding the democratic appeal of retrenchment and reaction to movements for racial justice has never been more urgent.
A closer look
The Real Monsters
Sex offender registries don’t make us any safer. Abolishing them would.
Surveillance
Deconfiguring the Security State
The roots of e-carceration run deep, and we need to articulate digital abolition as the solution.
Beyond Reform
Rethinking the State
For criminal law to become truly unexceptional, we must rethink our society, and its legal structures, as a whole.
prison closures
A Punishment Profiteer
A rare instance of state prisoners, state prison administrators, and the governor of California all publicly agreeing that a particular prison ought to be closed.
Policy
‘Something on Women’
Carceral feminists clamored for the Violence Against Women Act. What they got in return was criminalization, incarceration, and more violence.
In Depth
A Pound of Flesh
Fines and fees have a devastating effect on Black women and their communities. Abolishing them is the only option.
excerpt
The Problem With Innocence
Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.
In Depth
Always a Mother
Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them.
In Depth
A Future for Susanville
The prison town of Susanville, in California, is about to lose its livelihood. Its economic survival presents a test for abolition.
A closer look
Cops and Counselors
Mental health professionals call the police, work with the police, and act like the police. But even in our ranks, an abolitionist future is possible.
Institutions
A Veneer of Benevolence
For many years, I believed that the child welfare system could be reformed, but no more. It needs to be abolished.
excerpt
Sexual Policing
Law enforcement of women’s bodies is a structural and systematic form of police violence. All of us are less safe if we don’t end this brutal expression of state-sanctioned power.
Big Data
Transgressing Borders
Racist gang profiling on the street becomes hard data, which then feeds a sprawling detention and deportation machine with the imprimatur of law.
public health
Unwell in a Cell
Co-opting the language of mental health and treatment, jail expansion is taking root in several cities and localities. But these are cages all the same.
public health
Drug-Induced Panic
Criminalization of so-called drug-induced homicides is yet another manifestation of the failed war on drugs — and far from an adequate public health response.