A closer look
How Did American Police Get So Powerful?
A new Inquest series traces how police unions built political power over decades—and what that history means for progressive elected officials today.
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58 posts in ‘A closer look’
A closer look
The Commissary Giant That Won’t Open Its Books
Lucrative public contracts and high-priced commissary goods let corporations like Keefe profit from incarcerated people’s hunger—and leave taxpayers in the dark.
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In Trump’s America, Kitsch Kills
How the Department of Homeland Security marshals sappy images of a white settler past to campaign for ethnic cleansing.
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Diversion as Punishment
Diversion programs are often hailed as non-punitive alternatives to the traditional court process. But how different are they, really?
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“We Have These Beautiful Dreams”
How a literary prize judged by incarcerated readers builds connection across prison walls and nurtures imagination in the face of oppression.
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A Somber Peace in Angola
In response to our 9/11 coverage, a contributor shares his memory of watching the attacks unfold from inside Louisiana State Penitentiary.
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Pathways Beyond Criminalized Crisis
This week, Inquest presents three short films from Represent Justice’s 2026 Ambassador Films collection, each exploring the far-reaching harms of incarceration.
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“Muslims Were the Enemies at That Time”
In New York prisons, Islam offered Black men discipline, dignity, and a path away from violence. After 9/11, it also made us targets.
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“I Want to Know Who’s Responsible for This Man’s Health”
In Missouri prisons, people with cancer say lifesaving treatment is often delayed and denied by a private contractor, leaving incarcerated patients and their families to shoulder the caregiving.
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The Elderly “7-Ups” Enduring Indefinite Incarceration
Nearly 200 people are serving indefinite sentences in California. These are some of their stories.
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The Satanic Panic Was Also a Gay Panic
Periods of intense criminalization and conservative backlash often target sexual minorities—and then that fact gets dropped from popular recollection.
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From the Branding Iron to Digital Faceprints
Biometric technologies sold by companies like Clearview AI continue a racist legacy of marking bodies for the purpose of identification and capture.
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West Coast Progressives Did Not Cause This Crisis
A revival of War on Drugs–style punishment aims to score political points against liberal cities—but it won’t make us safer, and it won’t reduce opioid deaths.
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The Algorithmic School-to-Prison Pipeline
With little transparency or oversight, technology is being used to flag youth as risks to public safety and deciding who is surveilled, arrested, and confined.
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Who Gets to Be a “Good Guy” with a Gun?
Laws governing who can legally own a gun take at face value the racist, incoherent category of “felon”—and thus worsen the crisis of mass incarceration.
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The Epstein Sleight of Hand
Calling Jeffrey Epstein a child abuser comfortably demonizes him while overlooking how our culture normalizes straight men’s everyday coercion and abuse of women and girls.
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Inside America’s Most Secretive Supermax Prison
Colorado’s ADX is designed to hold people under conditions of the most extreme deprivation. Despite this, the men imprisoned there continue to fight for their rights and freedom.
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Inside Georgia’s Youth Detention Crisis
Even as crime falls in Georgia, the state pours vast resources into abusive youth facilities that disproportionately harm Black children, according to our investigation.
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Punishing Through Bureaucracy
An obscure policy claimed to reward me for doing the work of rehabilitation—by sending me back to a high-security prison.
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Carceral AI is here. It’s time to fight back.
Facial recognition is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, AI is being used to monitor social media, track ICE targets, and classify swaths of the population as “future” criminals.
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The Myth of Pro-Family America
Trump’s allies incite moral panic about shrinking white families, even as the state dismantles families of color—a paradox rooted in slavery and eugenics.
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My Father’s Cell
When my father was twenty-one—my age—he had already been in prison for two years.
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Reentry Never Ends
When reincarceration rates are treated as the sole measure of success, we undervalue the work formerly incarcerated people do to heal and confront their traumas.
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In the Dayroom
When Rikers furniture proves so unwieldy that her inside–outside book group can’t even form a circle, the author goes on a search to understand why U.S. prison furnishings are so…
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Indentured Citizens
Making incarceration profitable—for both the state and corporations—generates untold hardship not only for incarcerated people but also for their families and communities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.