A closer look
Stop Cop City’s Deep Roots
For 150 years, Atlanta has endured racist policing that has served the interest of the city’s economic elite. The fight to resist this “Atlanta way” goes back just as far.
A closer look
33 posts in ‘A closer look’
A closer look
Your Call Could Not Be Completed
Under Biden, the FCC made unprecedented progress toward ending price gouging for prison phone calls. Now, Trump’s FCC has undone much of it.
A closer look
Making an Example of Luigi Mangione
The criminal legal system aims to send a message by massively overcharging him: it will defend racial capitalism above all else.
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Leaning In to State Violence
In ‘Enemy Feminisms,’ philosopher Sophie Lewis engages with the feminism of racists, colonizers, fascists, cops, and jailers to better understand what a truly liberatory politics needs to look like.
A closer look
Tech Won’t Fix Eyewitness Identification
Eyewitness identification is a deeply flawed practice. Adding facial recognition technology, with its veneer of objectivity, only worsens the crisis of mass incarceration.
A closer look
Medical Debt Behind Bars
Incarcerated people accrue debt for nearly all of their medical care. This makes a mockery of their right to health care—and saddles them with devastating debt upon release.
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The Work Continues
Revolutionary Black anarchist Martin Sostre spent much of his life as a political prisoner. A vivid new biography reintroduces him to a new generation of decarceral activists.
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The Dystopia of the World’s Tallest Jails
New York City’s plan to replace Rikers with skyscraper jails is a cautionary tale of how decarceral talking points can be misappropriated.
A closer look
United in Hate
White civilians often spontaneously cooperate in acts of racial hatred. It’s a web of racist solidarity that Black people know all too well.
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Not Fit for Human Consumption
Prisons serve bad, inadequate food as a way to cut costs. Providing this inhumane service is now a profitable sector of Wall Street.
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Against Abandonment
When the social safety net gets shredded, incarceration increases. We can’t just count on mutual aid; the most vulnerable among us need government benefits.
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Almost Anti–Death Penalty
Biden’s incomplete slate of commutations saved lives but ultimately lost the moral argument.
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No More Shame
Sex offender–specific treatment can leave you feeling humiliated. Or it can ground you, help you grow, and remind you of your worth.
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Playing with Originalism
Should advocates looking to unwind our nation’s punitive excesses engage a Supreme Court that set them in motion?
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Whitewashing Police Violence
'Excited delirium syndrome' is a tool the state invented to evade accountability whenever people of color die at the hands of police.
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A Pattern of Injustice
The Ferguson report was a landmark. But the Department of Justice needs to do much more to empower communities in the fight to end police abuse.
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Squinting in the Sunlight
Most reentry programs assume a person who is able to work and live on their own. Those of us who are older don’t have that kind of freedom.
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Graying in Prison
There's no aging with dignity for people serving extreme sentences. Freeing them is only a start to a deeper paradigm shift.
A closer look
Our Evidence-Based Obsession
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
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.
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.
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Choice of Counsel
People assigned a public defender are the only ones deprived of the right to choose their lawyer. This often intersects disastrously with racial bias.
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A Prosecutor’s Decarceral Potential
A new Minneapolis-area county attorney won’t end mass incarceration. But she has the potential to cause less harm and promote healing.
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Don’t Believe the Hype
Mass incarceration hasn’t ended in San Francisco, or anywhere else. To achieve that goal, governments would first have to devolve power to the communities it has harmed the most.
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Growing Justice
Why understanding restorative and transformative justice on their own terms, and at their best and worst, will help us build more of both.
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The Evidence-Based Trap
Data-driven approaches to reform can reinforce aspects of a system that’s rotten to the core.
A closer look
The Real Monsters
Sex offender registries don’t make us any safer. Abolishing them would.
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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.
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.
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And a Public Defender for All
We can celebrate the ascent of Ketanji Brown Jackson, while acknowledging that indigent defense remains woefully inadequate in this time of crisis.