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excerpt

28 posts in ‘excerpt’

racial capitalism

Mass Criminalization as Religion

The deification of whiteness and property has long legitimized the containment of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples.

Andrew Krinks

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abolition

A Thousand Possibilities

Abolition requires the world-building work of imagining all the many life-affirming alternatives to incarceration.

Bill Ayers

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No Good Prison

An incarcerated writer and advocate in California implores: “Don’t waste my time trying to make it more comfortable for me in here.”

Paula Lehman-Ewing

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Dare to Report

The D.A.R.E. program turned students into snitches, leading to the arrest and incarceration of friends and loved ones who used drugs.

Max Felker-Kantor

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Unmaking Prison Walls

Reacquainting ourselves with practices that made prisons more permeable can be a step toward ending mass incarceration.

Reiko Hillyer

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Big Data

Borders and Bytes

So-called “smart” borders are just more sophisticated sites of racialized surveillance and violence. We need abolitionist tools to counter them.

Ruha Benjamin

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campaigns

Do You Know Their Names?

When slain by police, Black women and girls rarely garner the same communal outcry or political response as their fallen Black brothers.

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

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The Women at the Prison Gates

There are many forms of resistance undertaken by relatives and friends of incarcerated people, but the system renders them invisible.

Gwenola Ricordeau

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Beyond Reform

No Place for Families

Only an end to family court can lead to a radical reimagining of how we support children and caregivers.

Jane Spinak

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The Embodied Observers

Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.

Michelle Daniel Jones

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In Depth

Criminalizing Survival

The criminal legal system heaps more violence on victims of gender-based violence. Abolishing these structures is the only way to protect them.

Leigh Goodmark

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Defending Attica

How radical lawyers played a key role standing up for survivors of the Attica uprising.

Luca Falciola

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A Point of No Return

Understanding the past of the Cook County Jail is understanding its present.

Melanie Newport

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Repression and Backlash

The tangle of policy responses following the 2020 uprisings over police violence shows that both Republicans and Democrats failed to meet the moment.

Elizabeth Hinton

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Beyond Reform

Reclaiming Safety

In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.

Mariame Kaba & Andrea J. Ritchie

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voices

Caring Collectively

Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.

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In Depth

Making Men Pay

For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.

Lynne Haney

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The Problem With Innocence

Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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Sexual Policing

Law enforcement of women’s bodies is a structural and systematic form of police violence. All of us are less safe if we don’t end this brutal expression of state-sanctioned power.

Anne Gray Fischer

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Life Inside

Burn the Spot

Writing about people you encounter in prison carries special responsibilities.

Piper Kerman

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Canaries in the Coalmine

We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated.

Sonia Sotomayor

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Surveillance

A Model City

How e-carceration grabbed a hold of Camden is a cautionary tale for those of us who envision a future without policing.

James Kilgore

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Crimmigration

The Border State

Our nation’s turn toward punitiveness for people arriving at the Southwest border coincided with the modern era of mass incarceration.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

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Vulnerable Places

Entire communities are singularly exposed to punishment. Understanding how is central to combating mass incarceration.

Jessica T. Simes

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Copaganda

How pop culture helped turn police officers into rock stars — and Black folks into criminals.

Mark Anthony Neal

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system actors

Resistance Is Futile

In ways large and small, defendants who try to assert their voice in the criminal legal system see their agency denied — including, sometimes, by their own lawyers.

Matthew Clair

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An American Invention

In the struggle to end mass incarceration, one must understand how the criminalization of violence is largely a modern creation.

David Alan Sklansky

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Fear of the Black Child

American society and its criminal legal system simply won’t let Black kids be kids

Kristin Henning

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