The Gun of Incarceration
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
47 posts in ‘bookshelf’
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
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 lives of undocumented immigrants are very much documented—subject to the surveillance that’s endemic to contemporary life in the United States.
For a moment, the George Floyd uprising made the white supremacist power structure tremble. Let's hold on to that and carry it forward.
We must challenge the dominant carceral narrative that one is born an addict and a criminal—rather than constructed as one by those in power.
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.
Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
In immigration court and beyond, fair process matters. But fair laws, fair legal systems, and fair societies matter far more.
Fiscal arguments have only led to a reconfigured carceral state—one that replaces one type of punishment for another while still harming millions.
For many immigrant families, even driving to school or the doctor risks a dangerous encounter with the punitive state.
Ending qualified immunity won’t solve police violence. But making officers feel the sting of their actions in court can get us a step closer to ending it.
The push to increase the state’s power to punish led to more incarceration but failed to create a more just society for victims of sexual violence.
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.
The experiences of Michael and Zoharah Simmons show that the fight against the carceral state is embedded in a larger project of building a just world.
The rule was supposed to prevent prosecutors from hiding evidence. It hasn’t worked—but there’s a better way.
Mexicans and Mexican Americans have long been targets of legal and extralegal violence by the police. Learning this history is a step toward ending abuses that persist to this day.
As 2022 draws to a close, we reflect on books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to envision a world without mass incarceration.
Understanding the past of the Cook County Jail is understanding its present.
There is a place for desire in an abolitionist world, at least when desire is pleasure and love and freedom.
The carceral system criminalizes and retraumatizes survivors at every step. Dismantling these structures is the only way to end this violence.
Now more than ever, we need a clear understanding of the role of violence, trauma, and survivorship in our harm reduction practice.
The tangle of policy responses following the 2020 uprisings over police violence shows that both Republicans and Democrats failed to meet the moment.
The Reagan administration’s entrenchment of a retaliatory immigration detention regime sowed seeds of resistance that persist to this day.
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.