Surveillance
Deconfiguring the Security State
The roots of e-carceration run deep, and we need to articulate digital abolition as the solution.
TOPICS
Foundations
EXPLORING THE ROOTS OF THE CARCERAL STATE
43 posts in ‘Foundations’
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.
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.
Beginnings
Welcome to Inquest
A note from our founding editors