first person
The Banality of Mandatory Surcharges
In New York and elsewhere, exploitative court-ordered fees shouldn't saddle a person who is already poor and criminalized.
TOPICS
Institutions & Practices
UNDERSTANDING HOW CARCERALISM OPERATES
105 posts in ‘Institutions & Practices’
first person
Closed Doors
Prison is no place for grief and closure. Yet even as I mourned, glimmers of love and life surrounded me.
excerpt
Dare to Report
The D.A.R.E. program turned students into snitches, leading to the arrest and incarceration of friends and loved ones who used drugs.
Policing
The ‘Bad Guys’
Police academies socialize officers into an us-versus-them mentality—particularly when it comes to activists—and harden them to any attempts at reform.
law & policy
When the Law Is a Trap
The Prison Rape Elimination Act often revictimizes incarcerated survivors by expanding the power of the prison over them.
A closer look
Graying in Prison
There's no aging with dignity for people serving extreme sentences. Freeing them is only a start to a deeper paradigm shift.
Policing
Unsafe on Campus
Policing on college campuses falls hardest on formerly incarcerated students, leaving them and the broader community unprotected.
Big Data
Borders and Bytes
So-called “smart” borders are just more sophisticated sites of racialized surveillance and violence. We need abolitionist tools to counter them.
Essay
‘And They Stripped Him’
The Gospel narrative places on Christians a moral burden to not turn away from the sexual vulnerability of incarcerated people today.
book review
Cages Without Borders
A new book centers prisons in the history of U.S. empire, reminding us of the need for international solidarity in the fight for freedom.
Essay
On Resilience
In the criminal system, having your life constrained and restricted, even after your sentence is over, has become a fact of life.
first person
Censoring Women’s Health
In prison, even learning about your own reproductive health is met with repression.
Institutions
The Surreal Prison Censorship Regime
Society isn’t being done any favors keeping literature out of the hands of incarcerated people.
campaigns
Ending Carceral Censorship
Censorship should not be the mechanism by which prisons ensure security or any other goal they purport to have.
activism
Surveil and Conquer
The state spies upon and infiltrates social movements to keep people on guard, afraid, and second-guessing their every move.
book review
The Gun of Incarceration
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
A closer look
Our Evidence-Based Obsession
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
advocacy
Chained by Debt
Erasing court costs and fines is a relatively small change that would have an outsize impact on those harmed by mass incarceration.
public health
Beware the Healthier Cage
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
excerpt
The Women at the Prison Gates
There are many forms of resistance undertaken by relatives and friends of incarcerated people, but the system renders them invisible.
Film review
Reframing Our Outrage
A new film reminds us that caring about survivors means working to prevent and respond to all violence—including carceral violence.
Surveillance
In the Shadows, on the Radar
The lives of undocumented immigrants are very much documented—subject to the surveillance that’s endemic to contemporary life in the United States.
advocacy
The Rubik’s Cube of Cop City
The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.
public health
The Essentialism of Addiction
We must challenge the dominant carceral narrative that one is born an addict and a criminal—rather than constructed as one by those in power.
public health
The Pain of Punishment
Criminalizing pain medicine has led patients to despair while the carceral state forces their medical decisions. But it has also opened avenues for solidarity between pain sufferers and incarcerated people.
social control
Putting Reentry Out of Business
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
excerpt
The Embodied Observers
Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.
Crimmigration
Exploited No More
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.
Beyond Reform
Why Incarcerated People Work
A new research project seeks to understand present prison labor conditions—and build a path toward lasting freedom.
public history
The Buried Roots of Carceral Labor
The U.S. history of coerced prison work is older—and more northern—than its popular origin story tends to acknowledge.