Imprisoned but United
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
No one should be made to give up their rights in exchange for being spared from prison.
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
Erasing court costs and fines is a relatively small change that would have an outsize impact on those harmed by mass incarceration.
When slain by police, Black women and girls rarely garner the same communal outcry or political response as their fallen Black brothers.
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.
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
There are many forms of resistance undertaken by relatives and friends of incarcerated people, but the system renders them invisible.
Decarceral ideas and essays that have moved our readers in the past year.
Acting within the criminal legal system cannot be the solution, on its own, to the existence of the carceral state.
As organizers in Illinois know well, it is necessary to engage with criminalizing institutions to better learn how to defeat them.
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.
Organizing and collective acts of resistance allow us to not only imagine new understandings of justice and safety, but to live them out.
A new film reminds us that caring about survivors means working to prevent and respond to all violence—including carceral violence.
The fight against police and prisons cannot be separated from the struggle to extend care beyond the limits of the family form.
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.
Only an end to family court can lead to a radical reimagining of how we support children and caregivers.
The lives of undocumented immigrants are very much documented—subject to the surveillance that’s endemic to contemporary life in the United States.
Atlanta’s Cop City is another chapter in the long history of U.S.-based colonialism. The second installment in a two-part series.
Critical infrastructure laws are cynical attempts by corporations to manipulate public fears of terrorism to protect their own profits.
The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.
Community-based gun violence prevention is at a crossroads. A group in Chicago shows how abolition may hold the key to its future.
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.
For a moment, the George Floyd uprising made the white supremacist power structure tremble. Let's hold on to that and carry it forward.
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.
The gendered norms of U.S. settler colonialism subject Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people to the violence of our cisheteropatriarchal carceral state.
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.
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.