Skip to main content

abolition

55 posts in ‘abolition’

collective action

Imprisoned but United

How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.

Thomas Dichter

Read More

first person

Envisioning Futures

The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.

Maria Gaspar & Gina Dent

Read More

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.

Meghan Krausch

Read More

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.

Mark Spencer

Read More

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.

Jocelyn Simonson

Read More

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.

Jocelyn Simonson

Read More

advocacy

The Rubik’s Cube of Cop City

The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.

Joy James & Kalonji Jama Changa

Read More

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.

Cristian Farias

Read More

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.

Rachel Herzing

Read More

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.

Sonya Huber

Read More

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.

Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba

Read More

Crimmigration

Exploited No More

How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.

Lisa Knox, Hamid Yazdan Panah & Serafin Andrade

Read More

Beyond Reform

Why Incarcerated People Work

A new research project seeks to understand present prison labor conditions—and build a path toward lasting freedom.

Stephen Wilson, Minali Aggarwal, Jacqueline Groccia & Lydia Villaronga

Read More

abolition

Slave Rebel or Citizen?

Abolitionist Ruchell Cinqué Magee is the country’s longest-held political prisoner.

Joy James & Kalonji Jama Changa

Read More

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.

Felicia Arriaga

Read More

Ideas & Essays

The Alchemy of Abolitionisms

When academics are read more than incarcerated thinkers, it becomes possible to forget the movement’s radical roots.

Joy James

Read More

legal history

A Spirit, Unbroken

How Martin Sostre’s ‘single act of resistance’ stood for a broader struggle for bodily autonomy and collective liberation.

Garrett Felber

Read More

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.

Quinn Lester

Read More

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

Read More

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.

Ben Grunwald

Read More

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.

Katharine Blake

Read More

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.

Read More

Reflections

Reshaping Our Wanting

There is a place for desire in an abolitionist world, at least when desire is pleasure and love and freedom.

El Jones

Read More

Decarceral Pathways

Revoking Probation

After years of working in the system, a reformer and believer in government gives up on probation and parole.

Cristian Farias

Read More

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.

Shira Hassan

Read More

Reflections

Goodnight Jail

Based on 'Goodnight Moon', the 1947 bedtime classic by Margaret Wise Brown.

El Jones

Read More

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

Kay Whitlock

Read More

In Depth

Hidden Transcripts

The Reagan administration’s entrenchment of a retaliatory immigration detention regime sowed seeds of resistance that persist to this day.

Kristina Shull

Read More

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.

Cameron Rasmussen & Sonya Shah

Read More

Beyond Reform

Reclaiming Safety

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

Mariame Kaba & Andrea J. Ritchie

Read More