A closer look
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.
A closer look
47 posts in ‘A closer look’
A closer look
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.
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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.
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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.