The Year in Books
As 2023 draws to a close, a look back at the books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to work for a world without mass incarceration.
52 posts in ‘criminal legal system’
As 2023 draws to a close, a look back at the books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to work for a world without mass incarceration.
The crisis of youth incarceration won’t be solved by cynical attempts to co-opt the language of grassroots organizing.
In the criminal system, having your life constrained and restricted, even after your sentence is over, has become a fact of life.
To truly provide justice for those with criminal records, we must question harmful binaries that separate “good” from “bad” immigrants.
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
Erasing court costs and fines is a relatively small change that would have an outsize impact on those harmed by mass incarceration.
Decarceral ideas and essays that have moved our readers in the past year.
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.
A new film reminds us that caring about survivors means working to prevent and respond to all violence—including carceral violence.
More people impacted by the criminal legal system can and should share their stories through fiction—and through those stories change minds and public policy.
A short film asks how we can offer justice for survivors of sexual violence without perpetuating the harms of mass incarceration.
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.
The carceral state molds and enforces worker compliance, vulnerability, and insecurity—both within and beyond prison walls.
In the history of a shuttered lockup for queer women in New York City, a reminder that incarceration has always been a form of social control.
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
Imagining the decarceral possibilities of plea strikes and defendant unions.
Disentangling medical care from policing, prisons, and other punitive institutions remains an imperative—now more than ever.
As a newly elected judge assigned to misdemeanor court in Los Angeles, a former public defender sees her new role as serving those impacted by the system.
In immigration court and beyond, fair process matters. But fair laws, fair legal systems, and fair societies matter far more.
Gideon v. Wainwright is the wrong cure for the reality that the carceral system is designed to target poor people.
As public defenders, we are not “fighting the system”—we are the system. Because of this, we have power, and the numbers, to change it.
People assigned a public defender are the only ones deprived of the right to choose their lawyer. This often intersects disastrously with racial bias.
The Court’s decision must not preempt questions about the role public defenders can play in ending mass incarceration.
“All of us who’ve been inside have healing to do. There are so many survivors in prison. And then surviving prison requires its own kind of healing.”
A new Minneapolis-area county attorney won’t end mass incarceration. But she has the potential to cause less harm and promote healing.
The criminal legal system heaps more violence on victims of gender-based violence. Abolishing these structures is the only way to protect them.
Mass incarceration hasn’t ended in San Francisco, or anywhere else. To achieve that goal, governments would first have to devolve power to the communities it has harmed the most.
The rule was supposed to prevent prosecutors from hiding evidence. It hasn’t worked—but there’s a better way.
Far from a plan for decarceration, 'Barred' is nonetheless a trenchant look at how the criminal system fails the innocent and guilty alike.