collective action
Imprisoned but United
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
abolition
55 posts in ‘abolition’
first person
Envisioning Futures
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
interventions
Abolition Everywhere
Despite the stumbling blocks imposed by Republican state governments, abolition is happening in the South and in small towns, with organizing specially tailored to local needs.
public health
Beware the Healthier Cage
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
roundtable
Keeping Each Other Safe
Acting within the criminal legal system cannot be the solution, on its own, to the existence of the carceral state.
roundtable
Radicalized in Service of Others
Organizing and collective acts of resistance allow us to not only imagine new understandings of justice and safety, but to live them out.
advocacy
The Rubik’s Cube of Cop City
The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.
interventions
On Both Sides of the Gun
Community-based gun violence prevention is at a crossroads. A group in Chicago shows how abolition may hold the key to its future.
Essay
Abolition Is Practical
Putting our ideas into practice—allowing ourselves to try, fail, and try again—will be how we move closer to a world without the harms of policing, prisons, and punishment.
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.
Futures
Rejecting Our Fear of Each Other
In order to invest in a vision for a new way of living, we have to believe in our capacity to create something better—together.
Crimmigration
Exploited No More
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.
Beyond Reform
Why Incarcerated People Work
A new research project seeks to understand present prison labor conditions—and build a path toward lasting freedom.
abolition
Slave Rebel or Citizen?
Abolitionist Ruchell Cinqué Magee is the country’s longest-held political prisoner.
organizing
An Organized Community
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
Ideas & Essays
The Alchemy of Abolitionisms
When academics are read more than incarcerated thinkers, it becomes possible to forget the movement’s radical roots.
legal history
A Spirit, Unbroken
How Martin Sostre’s ‘single act of resistance’ stood for a broader struggle for bodily autonomy and collective liberation.
Ideas & Essays
Whose Abolition?
Du Bois’s ‘Black Reconstruction’ is widely embraced by decarceral activists, but it celebrates state violence in a way few would now accept.
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.
In Depth
Data-Driven Decarceration
A close analysis of prison data can help us think concretely, and strategically, about the tradeoffs of different approaches to decarceration and prison closures.
Essay
A New Clarity
We need new words and understandings — not only for crime, freedom, and responsibility, but also for history and spacetime — because it gets us closer to an abolitionist world.
recommendations
The Year in Books
As 2022 draws to a close, we reflect on books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to envision a world without mass incarceration.
Reflections
Reshaping Our Wanting
There is a place for desire in an abolitionist world, at least when desire is pleasure and love and freedom.
Decarceral Pathways
Revoking Probation
After years of working in the system, a reformer and believer in government gives up on probation and parole.
interventions
A Secret Stash of Power
Now more than ever, we need a clear understanding of the role of violence, trauma, and survivorship in our harm reduction practice.
Reflections
Goodnight Jail
Based on 'Goodnight Moon', the 1947 bedtime classic by Margaret Wise Brown.
democracy & power
Culture Wars and Criminalization
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
In Depth
Hidden Transcripts
The Reagan administration’s entrenchment of a retaliatory immigration detention regime sowed seeds of resistance that persist to this day.
A closer look
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.
Beyond Reform
Reclaiming Safety
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.