legal history
Blood in the Borderlands
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.
bookshelf
119 posts in ‘bookshelf’
recommendations
The Year in Books 2022
As 2022 draws to a close, we reflect on books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to envision a world without mass incarceration.
excerpt
A Point of No Return
Understanding the past of the Cook County Jail is understanding its present.
Reflections
Reshaping Our Wanting
There is a place for desire in an abolitionist world, at least when desire is pleasure and love and freedom.
In Depth
To Free Them All
The carceral system criminalizes and retraumatizes survivors at every step. Dismantling these structures is the only way to end this violence.
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.
excerpt
Repression and Backlash
The tangle of policy responses following the 2020 uprisings over police violence shows that both Republicans and Democrats failed to meet the moment.
In Depth
Hidden Transcripts
The Reagan administration’s entrenchment of a retaliatory immigration detention regime sowed seeds of resistance that persist to this day.
Beyond Reform
Reclaiming Safety
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
voices
Caring Collectively
Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.
In Depth
Making Men Pay
For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.
excerpt
The Problem With Innocence
Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.
In Depth
Always a Mother
Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them.
A closer look
Cops and Counselors
Mental health professionals call the police, work with the police, and act like the police. But even in our ranks, an abolitionist future is possible.
Institutions
A Veneer of Benevolence
For many years, I believed that the child welfare system could be reformed, but no more. It needs to be abolished.
excerpt
Sexual Policing
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.
Big Data
Transgressing Borders
Racist gang profiling on the street becomes hard data, which then feeds a sprawling detention and deportation machine with the imprimatur of law.
In Their Words
Finishing Sentences
Writing about prison from prison is a form of freedom-fighting. It is not without risks — and many rewards.
Life Inside
Burn the Spot
Writing about people you encounter in prison carries special responsibilities.
Race and the Law
Reclaiming Whren
How a committed critical race theorist on the bench might have written one of the worst Fourth Amendment cases in history.
Surveillance
A Model City
How e-carceration grabbed a hold of Camden is a cautionary tale for those of us who envision a future without policing.
In Depth
Cages in the Coalfields
A growing carceral state has slowly replaced the coal industry in large swaths of Central Appalachia. But even here, a different future is possible.
Crimmigration
The Border State
Our nation’s turn toward punitiveness for people arriving at the Southwest border coincided with the modern era of mass incarceration.
excerpt
Vulnerable Places
Entire communities are singularly exposed to punishment. Understanding how is central to combating mass incarceration.
excerpt
Copaganda
How pop culture helped turn police officers into rock stars — and Black folks into criminals.
system actors
Resistance Is Futile
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.
excerpt
An American Invention
In the struggle to end mass incarceration, one must understand how the criminalization of violence is largely a modern creation.
Reflections
A Disruptive Innovation
Dismantling the machine that is mass incarceration requires all of us to think outside the box.
excerpt
Fear of the Black Child
American society and its criminal legal system simply won’t let Black kids be kids