Life Inside
Mindfulness Behind Bars
Learning Buddhist meditation and yoga while incarcerated can help people cope with the stresses of prison, prepare them for reentry, and strengthen their abolitionist resolve.
TOPICS
Futures
IMAGINING A WORLD WITHOUT MASS INCARCERATION
93 posts in ‘Futures’
A closer look
From the Branding Iron to Digital Faceprints
Biometric technologies sold by companies like Clearview AI continue a racist legacy of marking bodies for the purpose of identification and capture.
A closer look
The Algorithmic School-to-Prison Pipeline
With little transparency or oversight, technology is being used to flag youth as risks to public safety and deciding who is surveilled, arrested, and confined.
Futures
Precrime Is No Longer Science Fiction
Biometric technologies are increasingly using facial expressions, eye movements, voice patterns, and more to predict whether someone has or will commit a crime.
poetry
Poetry from Louisiana State Penitentiary
For National Poetry Month 2026, new work from incarcerated authors Trevor Reese, Lawson Strickland, and John Corley
poetry
Two poems
“Five/Fourths” & “When Bars as These Won’t Read”
poetry
Two poems
“Whisperings from Old Pompeii” & “God(s) Particle(s)”
poetry
Angola haiku
“in the summer rain fences disappear . . .”
activism
Iron Bars to Iron Will
People ask me now, three years since my release, what freedom feels like. It feels like the protests in Minneapolis.
A closer look
Carceral AI is here. It’s time to fight back.
Facial recognition is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, AI is being used to monitor social media, track ICE targets, and classify swaths of the population as “future” criminals.
advocacy
Ending Felony Disenfranchisement
More than half of states do not automatically restore voting rights upon release from prison. A short film contributes to the effort underway in Georgia to end this anti-democratic practice.
A closer look
My Father’s Cell
When my father was twenty-one—my age—he had already been in prison for two years.
first person
‘You Will Lose Your Teeth’
I aged into adulthood under the violent custody of New York’s Downstate prison. My journey to manhood has required me to prove I’m neither a monster nor a statistic.
first person
I’m in Prison. My Opera Was Performed at Carnegie Hall.
Inside Sing Sing, I turned my twenty-five-year sentence into music fit for one of the world’s greatest stages.
first person
Hope You Get This
My earliest memories of life were being loved by my father. I couldn’t imagine then all the ways Black men’s lives are endangered.
A closer look
The Work Continues
Revolutionary Black anarchist Martin Sostre spent much of his life as a political prisoner. A vivid new biography reintroduces him to a new generation of decarceral activists.
abolition
Finding the Opportunity in Crisis
The public’s appetite for meaningful change ebbs and flows. When it peaks, how do organizers capture that energy and channel it into the fight to end mass incarceration?
abolition
Put Children First
Abolishing the child welfare system would create more avenues for protecting children, instead of devoting all of society’s energy to propping up a coercive system of surveillance and punishment.
abolition
Following the Money
Attempts by carceral authorities to shield their funding sources from public interference are proof that working to interrupt money flows is an effective way to oppose prisons.
abolition
Organizing the Already Mobilized
People involved with labor justice, grassroots community-building, and independent watchdogs make obvious allies for abolitionists—but how do we win them to our cause?
abolition
Custody and Power
Those wishing to abolish prisons must understand the legal and financial mechanisms through which the carceral state organizes itself to hold people against their will.
interventions
Expert Guides
Reentry guides supplied by prisons are light on details and heavy on judgement. That’s why formerly incarcerated people are writing a guide for New York filled with their own lived…
recommendations
The Year in Books 2024
A curated list of 2024 publications that moved us to continue working toward a world without mass incarceration.
activism
Back to the Basics
At a time of political realignment, progressive movements need to get back to building relationships, across differences, and growing their base.
books
Raising Abolitionists
A new anthology invites parents into the work of building a world without prisons.
abolition
Transformative Justice Is Global
A transnational approach to abolition brings a new appreciation for community—both broader and narrower than the nation-state—as the site for care, justice, and democratic self-governance.
abolition
A Thousand Possibilities
Abolition requires the world-building work of imagining all the many life-affirming alternatives to incarceration.
collective action
Making Labor Work
Today’s labor movements must see the carceral state not just as a related progressive battle, but as central to the struggle for workers’ rights.
Essay
A Forgiving Society
Only by approaching each person as a member of society—rather than an outcast—will we begin to unwind the punitive turn of the past sixty years.
Reflections
Growing Up Post-Ferguson
I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed. The uprising set me on the path to abolition.