Shattering Broken Windows
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
TOPICS
62 posts in ‘Culture & Politics’
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…
Our movement was born out of our shared grief. Our voices reminded voters that the police should never police themselves.
Emboldened reactionaries tried to get voters to super-fund our city’s police force. But we out-organized them, and they lost badly. Here’s how we did it.
The end of the Cyrus Vance era at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office calls for a reckoning — and opens up opportunities for his successor.
How pop culture helped turn police officers into rock stars — and Black folks into criminals.
In the age of mass incarceration, the president of can and should lead the nation by freeing from prison as many people as possible.
Immigration imprisonment routinely relies on a racist notion of “risk” and should be abolished. A glimpse at how ICE’s pro-detention algorithm is manipulated to incarcerate immigrants shows why.
As demands grow louder for decarcerating and shutting down New York City’s deadly jail complex, judges and prosecutors have escaped accountability. But they’re the ones driving the crisis.
Unless and until mass incarceration is ended, Roe v. Wade, and reproductive freedom writ large, will never be safe.
Here's how a former public defender elected to judicial office in New Orleans works to chip away at mass incarceration.
Dismantling the machine that is mass incarceration requires all of us to think outside the box.
American society and its criminal legal system simply won’t let Black kids be kids
Long a reflection of the American carceral system’s worst excesses, the supermax prison serves no just purpose and must cease to exist.
Incarcerated as children, four gifted poets share their art, their experiences, and themselves.