A Point of No Return
Understanding the past of the Cook County Jail is understanding its present.
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75 posts in ‘Culture & Politics’
Understanding the past of the Cook County Jail is understanding its present.
The movement to end police violence has a rich visual history. In Brooklyn, a collective of volunteers is doing its part to preserve it.
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.
Based on 'Goodnight Moon', the 1947 bedtime classic by Margaret Wise Brown.
The tangle of policy responses following the 2020 uprisings over police violence shows that both Republicans and Democrats failed to meet the moment.
As a lifelong public defender, I ran to become Santa Clara County’s next district attorney. I didn’t win, but our movement did.
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
Here's how imprisoned writers can offer reasoned analysis on policies affecting the carceral state.
The Reagan administration’s entrenchment of a retaliatory immigration detention regime sowed seeds of resistance that persist to this day.
Jurors’ conscientious refusal to convict people charged for violating abortion bans is perfectly legal — and what justice demands.
Congress' rush to respond to recent mass shootings will criminalize Black and Brown communities the hardest, repeating historic mistakes that contributed to mass incarceration.
Our government's history of oppression compels us to free those Black revolutionaries aging in our prisons.
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
Beyond electing progressive prosecutors, decarceration requires an ambitious, multifaceted struggle at all levels of governance.
Understanding the democratic appeal of retrenchment and reaction to movements for racial justice has never been more urgent.
For criminal law to become truly unexceptional, we must rethink our society, and its legal structures, as a whole.
Carceral feminists clamored for the Violence Against Women Act. What they got in return was criminalization, incarceration, and more violence.
Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them.
The prison town of Susanville, in California, is about to lose its livelihood. Its economic survival presents a test for abolition.
Racist gang profiling on the street becomes hard data, which then feeds a sprawling detention and deportation machine with the imprimatur of law.
Criminalization of so-called drug-induced homicides is yet another manifestation of the failed war on drugs — and far from an adequate public health response.
We can celebrate the ascent of Ketanji Brown Jackson, while acknowledging that indigent defense remains woefully inadequate in this time of crisis.
The criminal legal system is massively punitive toward people who commit sex offenses. How we treat them jeopardizes their health and safety — and our own.
Librarians have a responsibility to everyone in their communities — including those who are incarcerated.
Writing about prison from prison is a form of freedom-fighting. It is not without risks — and many rewards.
Judge Michelle Childs’ many denials of compassionate release signal a carceralism that should have no place on the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court doesn’t need another Stephen Breyer. It needs someone who can openly confront the immorality of our criminal legal system.
Jails are key drivers of COVID spread. My experience with Chicago’s top jailer shows how politics can often stand in the way of public health.
Since the days of Ferguson, I’ve used my editorial perch to amplify the voices of those crushed by our nation’s system of wealth extraction. If that also makes me an…