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.
roundtable
A Constellation of Tactics
Radical acts of justice can happen within the confines of the system. Or well outside it, as demonstrated by the organized resistance to Atlanta's Cop City.
roundtable
Radicalized in Service of Others
Organizing and collective acts of resistance allow us to not only imagine new understandings of justice and safety, but to live them out.
Film review
Reframing Our Outrage
A new film reminds us that caring about survivors means working to prevent and respond to all violence—including carceral violence.
abolition
Abolishing the Family
The fight against police and prisons cannot be separated from the struggle to extend care beyond the limits of the family form.
Essay
The Power of Fiction
More people impacted by the criminal legal system can and should share their stories through fiction—and through those stories change minds and public policy.
Beyond Reform
No Place for Families
Only an end to family court can lead to a radical reimagining of how we support children and caregivers.
Surveillance
In the Shadows, on the Radar
The lives of undocumented immigrants are very much documented—subject to the surveillance that’s endemic to contemporary life in the United States.
public history
Urban Warfare and Corporate-Funded Armies
Atlanta’s Cop City is another chapter in the long history of U.S.-based colonialism. The second installment in a two-part series.
activism
Quashing Dissent
Critical infrastructure laws are cynical attempts by corporations to manipulate public fears of terrorism to protect their own profits.
advocacy
The Rubik’s Cube of Cop City
The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.
interventions
On Both Sides of the Gun
Community-based gun violence prevention is at a crossroads. A group in Chicago shows how abolition may hold the key to its future.
Essay
Abolition Is Practical
Putting our ideas into practice—allowing ourselves to try, fail, and try again—will be how we move closer to a world without the harms of policing, prisons, and punishment.
book review
What the Rebellion Taught Us
For a moment, the George Floyd uprising made the white supremacist power structure tremble. Let's hold on to that and carry it forward.
public health
The Essentialism of Addiction
We must challenge the dominant carceral narrative that one is born an addict and a criminal—rather than constructed as one by those in power.
abolition
Stories That Wound
The gendered norms of U.S. settler colonialism subject Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people to the violence of our cisheteropatriarchal carceral state.
public health
The Pain of Punishment
Criminalizing pain medicine has led patients to despair while the carceral state forces their medical decisions. But it has also opened avenues for solidarity between pain sufferers and incarcerated people.
Futures
Rejecting Our Fear of Each Other
In order to invest in a vision for a new way of living, we have to believe in our capacity to create something better—together.
social control
Putting Reentry Out of Business
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
Essay
The Recall: Reframed
A short film asks how we can offer justice for survivors of sexual violence without perpetuating the harms of mass incarceration.
excerpt
The Embodied Observers
Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.
In Depth
The Carceral Labor Continuum
So many people, on both sides of the prison wall, labor under threat of state violence. This opens a path to more robust, far-reaching worker solidarity.
Crimmigration
Exploited No More
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.
activism
Alabama Rising
For the past decade, people incarcerated in Alabama have led successful national worker strikes. Could a new prisoners’ rights movement be underway?
collective action
Building Worker Power
How one labor union in New York is organizing and creating solidarity among formerly incarcerated workers—and winning.
Beyond Reform
Why Incarcerated People Work
A new research project seeks to understand present prison labor conditions—and build a path toward lasting freedom.
public history
The Buried Roots of Carceral Labor
The U.S. history of coerced prison work is older—and more northern—than its popular origin story tends to acknowledge.
social control
Against ‘Work’
Calling incarcerated people 'workers' displaces the gravity of their situation and obscures the nature of carceral violence.