Imprisoned but United
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
55 posts in ‘abolition’
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
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.
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
Acting within the criminal legal system cannot be the solution, on its own, to the existence of the carceral state.
Organizing and collective acts of resistance allow us to not only imagine new understandings of justice and safety, but to live them out.
The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.
Community-based gun violence prevention is at a crossroads. A group in Chicago shows how abolition may hold the key to its future.
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.
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.
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.
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.
A new research project seeks to understand present prison labor conditions—and build a path toward lasting freedom.
Abolitionist Ruchell Cinqué Magee is the country’s longest-held political prisoner.
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
When academics are read more than incarcerated thinkers, it becomes possible to forget the movement’s radical roots.
How Martin Sostre’s ‘single act of resistance’ stood for a broader struggle for bodily autonomy and collective liberation.
Du Bois’s ‘Black Reconstruction’ is widely embraced by decarceral activists, but it celebrates state violence in a way few would now accept.
The criminal legal system heaps more violence on victims of gender-based violence. Abolishing these structures is the only way to protect them.
A close analysis of prison data can help us think concretely, and strategically, about the tradeoffs of different approaches to decarceration and prison closures.
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.
As 2022 draws to a close, we reflect on books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to envision a world without mass incarceration.
There is a place for desire in an abolitionist world, at least when desire is pleasure and love and freedom.
After years of working in the system, a reformer and believer in government gives up on probation and parole.
Now more than ever, we need a clear understanding of the role of violence, trauma, and survivorship in our harm reduction practice.
Based on 'Goodnight Moon', the 1947 bedtime classic by Margaret Wise Brown.
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
The Reagan administration’s entrenchment of a retaliatory immigration detention regime sowed seeds of resistance that persist to this day.
Why understanding restorative and transformative justice on their own terms, and at their best and worst, will help us build more of both.
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.