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.
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.
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
A short film asks how we can offer justice for survivors of sexual violence without perpetuating the harms of mass incarceration.
Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.
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.
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.
For the past decade, people incarcerated in Alabama have led successful national worker strikes. Could a new prisoners’ rights movement be underway?
How one labor union in New York is organizing and creating solidarity among formerly incarcerated workers—and winning.
A new research project seeks to understand present prison labor conditions—and build a path toward lasting freedom.
The U.S. history of coerced prison work is older—and more northern—than its popular origin story tends to acknowledge.
Calling incarcerated people 'workers' displaces the gravity of their situation and obscures the nature of carceral violence.
The carceral state molds and enforces worker compliance, vulnerability, and insecurity—both within and beyond prison walls.
In the history of a shuttered lockup for queer women in New York City, a reminder that incarceration has always been a form of social control.
Abolitionist Ruchell Cinqué Magee is the country’s longest-held political prisoner.
How two formerly incarcerated artists are creating a community for people like them—and exposing mass incarceration through it.
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
Imagining the decarceral possibilities of plea strikes and defendant unions.
Disentangling medical care from policing, prisons, and other punitive institutions remains an imperative—now more than ever.
For the scores of people who have suffered on Rikers Island, their experiences, and scars, of living through it remain long after release.
As a newly elected judge assigned to misdemeanor court in Los Angeles, a former public defender sees her new role as serving those impacted by the system.
In immigration court and beyond, fair process matters. But fair laws, fair legal systems, and fair societies matter far more.
“Including incarcerated people in national debates is not just about changing policies. It’s about creating a transformative learning experience.”
Fiscal arguments have only led to a reconfigured carceral state—one that replaces one type of punishment for another while still harming millions.
When academics are read more than incarcerated thinkers, it becomes possible to forget the movement’s radical roots.