In Their Words
Ambassadors to Freedom
People condemned to die in prison are telling the world about it—and fighting to free one another in the process.
TOPICS
Decarceral Pathways
TESTING AND SHARING DECARCERAL IDEAS
130 posts in ‘Decarceral Pathways’
campaigns
A Breakthrough on Solitary
Connecting it to the fight for disability rights has helped activists in California to make exciting progress in their effort to end solitary confinement.
book review
Outsmarting a Monster
Jails are everywhere, trapping people and resources belonging to communities. And everywhere, there are organizers contesting that reality.
interventions
Papers, Please
Reparations for historic wrongs require concrete action, and that's no different for the untold harm caused by cannabis criminalization.
activism
Asymmetrical Partners
Activism must involve incarcerated people—but few outside advocates really understand the dangers and limitations that imprisoned organizers face.
Futures
No More Family Policing
Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, and poor children and their families bear the brunt of a system that many now agree should be dismantled.
In Depth
When ‘Community’ Isn’t Actually the Community
The crisis of youth incarceration won’t be solved by cynical attempts to co-opt the language of grassroots organizing.
campaigns
Renewing New Orleans
Anti-jail organizers scored important wins in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But their fight isn’t over.
Reflections
Yearning to Go Home
Life-without-parole sentences hit families especially hard. Yet they fight on, committed to their loved ones’ freedom.
In Depth
How We Ended Wealth-Based Jailing
In Illinois, ending money bond was our target. Pretrial freedom is our goal.
interventions
Books as Decarceral
By helping non-incarcerated people to experience a human connection with people inside, volunteering can open a curtain in the mind.
interventions
A Place to Be Free
Life in prison is hard. Transitioning back home through reentry shouldn’t be harder.
book review
The Gun of Incarceration
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
A closer look
Our Evidence-Based Obsession
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
public health
Beware the Healthier Cage
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
recommendations
Our End-of-Summer Reading List
Decarceral ideas and essays that have moved our readers in the past year.
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.
Beyond Reform
No Place for Families
Only an end to family court can lead to a radical reimagining of how we support children and caregivers.
In Depth
The Carceral Labor Continuum
So many people, on both sides of the prison wall, labor under threat of state violence. This opens a path to more robust, far-reaching worker solidarity.
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?
organizing
An Organized Community
ICE entanglement in local law enforcement is just one iteration of a bigger system meant to police our communities. And we can fight it.
interventions
No Justice, No Pleas
Imagining the decarceral possibilities of plea strikes and defendant unions.
In Their Words
A Community Judge
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.
Beyond Reform
Procedural Justice Isn’t Enough
In immigration court and beyond, fair process matters. But fair laws, fair legal systems, and fair societies matter far more.
organizing
Harnessing Union Power for Public Defense
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.
Essay
Gideon Turns Sixty
The Court’s decision must not preempt questions about the role public defenders can play in ending mass incarceration.