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Foundations

EXPLORING THE ROOTS OF THE CARCERAL STATE

45 posts in ‘Foundations’

Policing

Shattering Broken Windows

For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.

Katherine Beckett

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In Depth

Making Men Pay

For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.

Lynne Haney

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Surveillance

Deconfiguring the Security State

The roots of e-carceration run deep, and we need to articulate digital abolition as the solution.

James Kilgore & Malkia Devich Cyril

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Beyond Reform

Rethinking the State

For criminal law to become truly unexceptional, we must rethink our society, and its legal structures, as a whole.

Benjamin Levin

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excerpt

The Problem With Innocence

Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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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.

Sara Mayeux

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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.

Micere Keels

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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.

Devon Carbado & Jonathan Feingold

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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.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

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Life Inside

‘We Are Men’

On the 50th anniversary of a flashpoint of the American penal system, the cries of Attica still resonate today.

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excerpt

An American Invention

In the struggle to end mass incarceration, one must understand how the criminalization of violence is largely a modern creation.

David Alan Sklansky

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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.

Renaldo Hudson

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Reflections

A Failure of the Imagination

Like torture and the death penalty, mass incarceration is life-destroying. And indefensible.

Charles Fried

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Sentencing

Unfinished Business

Reckoning with the lives of all the men I sent to prison is a necessary, though not sufficient, step to reckon with the untold harm of mass incarceration.

Nancy Gertner

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Beginnings

Welcome to Inquest

A note from our founding editors

Andrew Crespo, Premal Dharia & Cristian Farias

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