Culture Wars and Criminalization
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
Urgent action in our nation’s jails and prisons can prevent the kind of mass suffering seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here's how imprisoned writers can offer reasoned analysis on policies affecting the carceral state.
The Reagan administration’s entrenchment of a retaliatory immigration detention regime sowed seeds of resistance that persist to this day.
Why understanding restorative and transformative justice on their own terms, and at their best and worst, will help us build more of both.
Jurors’ conscientious refusal to convict people charged for violating abortion bans is perfectly legal — and what justice demands.
Prosecution, incarceration, and surveillance don’t stop child sexual abuse. But prevention can.
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
Congress' rush to respond to recent mass shootings will criminalize Black and Brown communities the hardest, repeating historic mistakes that contributed to mass incarceration.
Immigrants fighting their deportations need lawyers. That doesn’t mean federally funding their defense should be a movement goal.
Here’s how federal cash assistance for low-income youth impacts whether they come in contact with the criminal legal system.
The legal institutions, processes, procedures, and actors implicated in the progression of criminal cases are simply beyond reform.
Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.
A reflection from the founding editors of Inquest on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the publication.
Data-driven approaches to reform can reinforce aspects of a system that’s rotten to the core.
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.
Our government's history of oppression compels us to free those Black revolutionaries aging in our prisons.
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
Beyond electing progressive prosecutors, decarceration requires an ambitious, multifaceted struggle at all levels of governance.
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.
For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.
To stay true to their professed values, social workers must wholly disavow and remove themselves from systems of harm.
Many progressive prosecutors promised bold change. In Virginia and elsewhere, reformers are realizing that they’re still actors in the same machinery of injustice.
Understanding the democratic appeal of retrenchment and reaction to movements for racial justice has never been more urgent.
Sex offender registries don’t make us any safer. Abolishing them would.
The roots of e-carceration run deep, and we need to articulate digital abolition as the solution.
For criminal law to become truly unexceptional, we must rethink our society, and its legal structures, as a whole.
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.
Carceral feminists clamored for the Violence Against Women Act. What they got in return was criminalization, incarceration, and more violence.
Fines and fees have a devastating effect on Black women and their communities. Abolishing them is the only option.