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.
TOPICS
Foundations
EXPLORING THE ROOTS OF THE CARCERAL STATE
51 posts in ‘Foundations’
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.
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