Big-Screen Abolition
Films that imagine decarceral futures are a cultural antidote for the carceral messages and aesthetics so prevalent in popular media.
TOPICS
125 posts in ‘Culture & Politics’
Films that imagine decarceral futures are a cultural antidote for the carceral messages and aesthetics so prevalent in popular media.
A new book uses art to make the horrors of mass incarceration as visual, and visceral, as possible.
Mass incarceration rests on false narratives that carceral institutions themselves control. But some of us are fighting back.
“I applaud, your / Frankenstein’s monster, forevermore.”
“What does it mean to be an / incarcerated poet?”
I spit bars on Death Row to preserve the legacy of our people, what’s been done to us, and how we’ve fought back.
“The cotton field / is replaced by walls of steel . . . ”
Poetry can help incarcerated authors to reclaim the story of their life.
“Paralyzed in shock / by slave raid tactics, / my trembling hands on the wall . . .”
From sex work to sex offender registries, a queer politics requires that we end state practices of sex exceptionalism.
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.
Racialized and violent, modern U.S. warmaking is inextricably linked with our history of mass incarceration.
Recovering a vision of queer solidarity with incarcerated people may just be what people disaffected by the gay rights movement need today.
Public skepticism about scientific research, coupled with echoes of the war on drugs, have hindered our city’s ability to respond to our overdose crisis.
Taking criminal law out of immigration enforcement is a step toward safer, healthier communities. But is it enough?
Jails are everywhere, trapping people and resources belonging to communities. And everywhere, there are organizers contesting that reality.
The oral histories of political prisoners shed light on their true character—and expose the darkness of the state.
A look at how decarceral, abolitionist filmmaking can help us envision new worlds.
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.
How white, middle-class youth in the suburbs experienced the war on drugs is a largely untold chapter in the arc of mass incarceration.
Anti-jail organizers scored important wins in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But their fight isn’t over.
Unless Congress acts, funding for federal public defenders will take a serious hit, with disastrous consequences for the people they represent.
Censorship should not be the mechanism by which prisons ensure security or any other goal they purport to have.
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
When slain by police, Black women and girls rarely garner the same communal outcry or political response as their fallen Black brothers.
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.
Atlanta’s Cop City is another chapter in the long history of U.S.-based colonialism. The second installment in a two-part series.
Critical infrastructure laws are cynical attempts by corporations to manipulate public fears of terrorism to protect their own profits.