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?
TOPICS
Foundations
EXPLORING THE ROOTS OF THE CARCERAL STATE
32 posts in ‘Foundations’
public history
The Buried Roots of Carceral Labor
The U.S. history of coerced prison work is older—and more northern—than its popular origin story tends to acknowledge.
public history
The House of D
In the history of a shuttered lockup for queer women in New York City, a reminder that incarceration has always been a form of social control.
abolition
Slave Rebel or Citizen?
Abolitionist Ruchell Cinqué Magee is the country’s longest-held political prisoner.
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.
Ideas & Essays
Whose Abolition?
Du Bois’s ‘Black Reconstruction’ is widely embraced by decarceral activists, but it celebrates state violence in a way few would now accept.
excerpt
Defending Attica
How radical lawyers played a key role standing up for survivors of the Attica uprising.
activism
Black Power Meets Police Power
The experiences of Michael and Zoharah Simmons show that the fight against the carceral state is embedded in a larger project of building a just world.
legal history
Blood in the Borderlands
Mexicans and Mexican Americans have long been targets of legal and extralegal violence by the police. Learning this history is a step toward ending abuses that persist to this day.
excerpt
A Point of No Return
Understanding the past of the Cook County Jail is understanding its present.
Photo Essay
Archives of Resistance
The movement to end police violence has a rich visual history. In Brooklyn, a collective of volunteers is doing its part to preserve it.
democracy & power
Culture Wars and Criminalization
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
In Depth
Hidden Transcripts
The Reagan administration’s entrenchment of a retaliatory immigration detention regime sowed seeds of resistance that persist to this day.
voices
Caring Collectively
Looking back on 25 years of abolitionist feminism and organizing in California.
Reflections
Inquest: Year One
A reflection from the founding editors of Inquest on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the publication.
Reflections
Juneteenth and Black Liberation
Our government's history of oppression compels us to free those Black revolutionaries aging in our prisons.
Policing
Shattering Broken Windows
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
In Depth
Making Men Pay
For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.
Surveillance
Deconfiguring the Security State
The roots of e-carceration run deep, and we need to articulate digital abolition as the solution.
Beyond Reform
Rethinking the State
For criminal law to become truly unexceptional, we must rethink our society, and its legal structures, as a whole.
excerpt
The Problem With Innocence
Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.
A closer look
And a Public Defender for All
We can celebrate the ascent of Ketanji Brown Jackson, while acknowledging that indigent defense remains woefully inadequate in this time of crisis.
In Depth
Train Up a Child
Many kids learn violent behaviors through intergenerational harm — and are then met with more harm by the state. Things don’t have to be this way.
Race and the Law
Reclaiming Whren
How a committed critical race theorist on the bench might have written one of the worst Fourth Amendment cases in history.
Crimmigration
The Border State
Our nation’s turn toward punitiveness for people arriving at the Southwest border coincided with the modern era of mass incarceration.
Life Inside
‘We Are Men’
On the 50th anniversary of a flashpoint of the American penal system, the cries of Attica still resonate today.
excerpt
An American Invention
In the struggle to end mass incarceration, one must understand how the criminalization of violence is largely a modern creation.
Life Inside
Learning and Liberation
One year after a governor's clemency, Renaldo Hudson, who spent 37 years incarcerated, reflects on violence, prisons, and the vital importance of education and support for those incarcerated.
Reflections
A Failure of the Imagination
Like torture and the death penalty, mass incarceration is life-destroying. And indefensible.