Crimmigration
Exploited No More
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.
TOPICS
Futures
IMAGINING A WORLD WITHOUT MASS INCARCERATION
38 posts in ‘Futures’
collective action
Building Worker Power
How one labor union in New York is organizing and creating solidarity among formerly incarcerated workers—and winning.
Ideas & Essays
The Alchemy of Abolitionisms
When academics are read more than incarcerated thinkers, it becomes possible to forget the movement’s radical roots.
Essay
Gideon Turns Sixty
The Court’s decision must not preempt questions about the role public defenders can play in ending mass incarceration.
In Their Words
Remembering Tewkunzi
“All of us who’ve been inside have healing to do. There are so many survivors in prison. And then surviving prison requires its own kind of healing.”
In Depth
Criminalizing Survival
The criminal legal system heaps more violence on victims of gender-based violence. Abolishing these structures is the only way to protect them.
Essay
A New Clarity
We need new words and understandings — not only for crime, freedom, and responsibility, but also for history and spacetime — because it gets us closer to an abolitionist world.
recommendations
The Year in Books
As 2022 draws to a close, we reflect on books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to envision a world without mass incarceration.
advocacy
A Passport to the Future
Pell grant restoration for incarcerated students is long overdue. But without infrastructure and safeguards, higher education, and true freedom, will remain elusive.
Reflections
Reshaping Our Wanting
There is a place for desire in an abolitionist world, at least when desire is pleasure and love and freedom.
Decarceral Pathways
Revoking Probation
After years of working in the system, a reformer and believer in government gives up on probation and parole.
interventions
A Secret Stash of Power
Now more than ever, we need a clear understanding of the role of violence, trauma, and survivorship in our harm reduction practice.
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
Policy
Decarcerating from Within
Here's how imprisoned writers can offer reasoned analysis on policies affecting the carceral state.
A closer look
Growing Justice
Why understanding restorative and transformative justice on their own terms, and at their best and worst, will help us build more of both.
Beyond Reform
Reclaiming Safety
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
Crimmigration
Court-Assisted Expulsions
Immigrants fighting their deportations need lawyers. That doesn’t mean federally funding their defense should be a movement goal.
Beyond Reform
No More Courts
The legal institutions, processes, procedures, and actors implicated in the progression of criminal cases are simply beyond reform.
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.
A closer look
The Evidence-Based Trap
Data-driven approaches to reform can reinforce aspects of a system that’s rotten to the core.
Beyond Reform
Rethinking the State
For criminal law to become truly unexceptional, we must rethink our society, and its legal structures, as a whole.
prison closures
A Punishment Profiteer
A rare instance of state prisoners, state prison administrators, and the governor of California all publicly agreeing that a particular prison ought to be closed.
In Depth
A Future for Susanville
The prison town of Susanville, in California, is about to lose its livelihood. Its economic survival presents a test for abolition.
A closer look
Cops and Counselors
Mental health professionals call the police, work with the police, and act like the police. But even in our ranks, an abolitionist future is possible.
Institutions
A Veneer of Benevolence
For many years, I believed that the child welfare system could be reformed, but no more. It needs to be abolished.
In Depth
Atonement
The American penal system renders invisible the many people in its grip who are working hard to make amends.
interventions
Abolition Is Public Health
The largest public health professional organization in the U.S. took a stand against carceral systems as fundamentally antithetical to public health. Here’s why that matters.
In Depth
Cages in the Coalfields
A growing carceral state has slowly replaced the coal industry in large swaths of Central Appalachia. But even here, a different future is possible.
In Depth
Saving Austin
Emboldened reactionaries tried to get voters to super-fund our city’s police force. But we out-organized them, and they lost badly. Here’s how we did it.