Beginnings
A Torture Among Tortures
Even in ancient societies not known for their delicacy about violence, solitary confinement stood out as a horror. In our own time we are far less clear-eyed about its violent…
TOPICS
Foundations
EXPLORING THE ROOTS OF THE CARCERAL STATE
51 posts in ‘Foundations’
racial capitalism
Extracting Police
Violent policing is not a bug of capitalist societies but a feature. To end our dependence on it, we must first understand its connection to exploitation.
Beginnings
Feminisms Against the Carceral State
Seventies-era anti-carceral feminism opposed “tough on crime” policymaking and played an important role in the making of today’s prison abolition movement.
excerpt
A Nation of Imprisoned Immigrants
Jails have been foundational to immigration enforcement for over a century—and have always operated with a staggering absence of oversight and public awareness.
In Depth
Beyond Carceral Eugenics
The United States has long treated street and corporate wrongdoing differently. Looking beyond this dichotomy can help us end mass incarceration.
activism
A Radical Genealogy
A recent anthology offers an accessible political education in the long history of seeking to abolish U.S. prisons.
racial capitalism
Mass Criminalization as Religion
The deification of whiteness and property has long legitimized the containment of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples.
Policing
A Nation of Cop Cities
The push by Atlanta and other cities to build large police training facilities follows on a long history of armories as both symbols and manifestations of the state’s power.
public history
Imprisoned by War
Racialized and violent, modern U.S. warmaking is inextricably linked with our history of mass incarceration.
activism
Gay Liberation and the Carceral State
Recovering a vision of queer solidarity with incarcerated people may just be what people disaffected by the gay rights movement need today.
excerpt
Unmaking Prison Walls
Reacquainting ourselves with practices that made prisons more permeable can be a step toward ending mass incarceration.
Futures
Abolition Can Mend Our Democracy
How might we reimagine our rights and liberties in the absence of incarceration?
public history
The Suburban Drug War
How white, middle-class youth in the suburbs experienced the war on drugs is a largely untold chapter in the arc of mass incarceration.
book review
Cages Without Borders
A new book centers prisons in the history of U.S. empire, reminding us of the need for international solidarity in the fight for freedom.
public history
The Promise of Marronage
Stories of Black flight from enslavement continue to offer lessons for radically rethinking public safety beyond policing.
public history
The Long Revolt
Attica represents far more than a historic rebellion about prison reform. Its revolutionary abolitionist vision endures today.
collective action
Imprisoned but United
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
public history
Urban Warfare and Corporate-Funded Armies
Atlanta’s Cop City is another chapter in the long history of U.S.-based colonialism. The second installment in a two-part series.
excerpt
The Embodied Observers
Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.
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?
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.