abolition
For the People’s Health
Abolition and public health go hand in hand. Organizers are embracing both as they pursue decarceral projects that center everyone’s well-being.
organizing
30 posts in ‘organizing’
Futures
Abolition as Human Liberation
A hopeful, practical new book shows how abolitionist organizers today are building the world anew.
advocacy
Back to Appalachia
They were incarcerated in Eastern Kentucky, far from home. Now they’re free and back, hoping the region won’t build a new prison there.
organizing
Building Community
For many years, Kentuckians have been fighting the construction of a federal prison. They’ve been winning, but their fight isn’t over.
abolition
How We Rode the Storm
After Hurricane Katrina, law enforcement criminalized sex work and Black women like never before. We fought back—and won.
campaigns
Disrupting Carceral Narratives
There can be justice beyond punishment. To realize it, we must challenge the narrative that carceral violence is the only response to other forms of violence.
book review
Outsmarting a Monster
Jails are everywhere, trapping people and resources belonging to communities. And everywhere, there are organizers contesting that reality.
activism
No Killing Revolutionary Hope
The oral histories of political prisoners shed light on their true character—and expose the darkness of the state.
activism
Asymmetrical Partners
Activism must involve incarcerated people—but few outside advocates really understand the dangers and limitations that imprisoned organizers face.
campaigns
Beauty on the Inside
A look at how decarceral, abolitionist filmmaking can help us envision new worlds.
campaigns
Renewing New Orleans
Anti-jail organizers scored important wins in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But their fight isn’t over.
abolition
In Defense of Hopelessness
Even among abolitionists, there's room for those who lack hope.
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.
roundtable
From Reformism to Revolution
As organizers in Illinois know well, it is necessary to engage with criminalizing institutions to better learn how to defeat them.
roundtable
A Constellation of Tactics
Radical acts of justice can happen within the confines of the system. Or well outside it, as demonstrated by the organized resistance to Atlanta's Cop City.
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.
activism
Quashing Dissent
Critical infrastructure laws are cynical attempts by corporations to manipulate public fears of terrorism to protect their own profits.
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.
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.
Crimmigration
Exploited No More
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.
activism
Alabama Rising
For the past decade, people incarcerated in Alabama have led successful national worker strikes. Could a new prisoners’ rights movement be underway?
Beyond Reform
Why Incarcerated People Work
A new research project seeks to understand present prison labor conditions—and build a path toward lasting freedom.
legal history
A Spirit, Unbroken
How Martin Sostre’s ‘single act of resistance’ stood for a broader struggle for bodily autonomy and collective liberation.
collective action
An End to Bread and Water
When the state of Virginia starved them, the author and his incarcerated comrades banded together to gain recognition of their right as citizens to access the courts.
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.
voices
Caring Collectively
Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.
public health
Unwell in a Cell
Co-opting the language of mental health and treatment, jail expansion is taking root in several cities and localities. But these are cages all the same.
Essay
Beyond Private Prisons
Simply targeting the corporations caging migrants and other people for profit won’t create a future without mass incarceration.
interventions
Abolition Is Public Health
The largest public health professional organization in the U.S. took a stand against carceral systems as fundamentally antithetical to public health. Here’s why that matters.
interventions
Saying Their Names
How public defenders in New York City organized to speak up for those who have died on Rikers — and to keep others from going there.