Mass Criminalization as Religion
The deification of whiteness and property has long legitimized the containment of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples.
28 posts in ‘excerpt’
The deification of whiteness and property has long legitimized the containment of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples.
Abolition requires the world-building work of imagining all the many life-affirming alternatives to incarceration.
An incarcerated writer and advocate in California implores: “Don’t waste my time trying to make it more comfortable for me in here.”
The D.A.R.E. program turned students into snitches, leading to the arrest and incarceration of friends and loved ones who used drugs.
Reacquainting ourselves with practices that made prisons more permeable can be a step toward ending mass incarceration.
So-called “smart” borders are just more sophisticated sites of racialized surveillance and violence. We need abolitionist tools to counter them.
When slain by police, Black women and girls rarely garner the same communal outcry or political response as their fallen Black brothers.
There are many forms of resistance undertaken by relatives and friends of incarcerated people, but the system renders them invisible.
Only an end to family court can lead to a radical reimagining of how we support children and caregivers.
Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.
The criminal legal system heaps more violence on victims of gender-based violence. Abolishing these structures is the only way to protect them.
How radical lawyers played a key role standing up for survivors of the Attica uprising.
Understanding the past of the Cook County Jail is understanding its present.
The tangle of policy responses following the 2020 uprisings over police violence shows that both Republicans and Democrats failed to meet the moment.
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.
For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.
Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.
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.
Writing about people you encounter in prison carries special responsibilities.
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated.
How e-carceration grabbed a hold of Camden is a cautionary tale for those of us who envision a future without policing.
Our nation’s turn toward punitiveness for people arriving at the Southwest border coincided with the modern era of mass incarceration.
Entire communities are singularly exposed to punishment. Understanding how is central to combating mass incarceration.
How pop culture helped turn police officers into rock stars — and Black folks into criminals.
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.
In the struggle to end mass incarceration, one must understand how the criminalization of violence is largely a modern creation.
American society and its criminal legal system simply won’t let Black kids be kids