Hell Is Real and It Is Beige
Some of the greatest violence of prisons is hidden, in plain view, within their banality.
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137 posts in ‘Institutions & Practices’
Some of the greatest violence of prisons is hidden, in plain view, within their banality.
We embrace nonconformity in principle—but not for Black men, whose quirks can provoke fear, policing, and punishment.
In New York and elsewhere, exploitative court-ordered fees shouldn't saddle a person who is already poor and criminalized.
Prison is no place for grief and closure. Yet even as I mourned, glimmers of love and life surrounded me.
The D.A.R.E. program turned students into snitches, leading to the arrest and incarceration of friends and loved ones who used drugs.
Police academies socialize officers into an us-versus-them mentality—particularly when it comes to activists—and harden them to any attempts at reform.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act often revictimizes incarcerated survivors by expanding the power of the prison over them.
There's no aging with dignity for people serving extreme sentences. Freeing them is only a start to a deeper paradigm shift.
Policing on college campuses falls hardest on formerly incarcerated students, leaving them and the broader community unprotected.
So-called “smart” borders are just more sophisticated sites of racialized surveillance and violence. We need abolitionist tools to counter them.
The Gospel narrative places on Christians a moral burden to not turn away from the sexual vulnerability of incarcerated people today.
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.
In the criminal system, having your life constrained and restricted, even after your sentence is over, has become a fact of life.
In prison, even learning about your own reproductive health is met with repression.
Society isn’t being done any favors keeping literature out of the hands of incarcerated people.
Censorship should not be the mechanism by which prisons ensure security or any other goal they purport to have.
The state spies upon and infiltrates social movements to keep people on guard, afraid, and second-guessing their every move.
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
Erasing court costs and fines is a relatively small change that would have an outsize impact on those harmed by mass incarceration.
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
There are many forms of resistance undertaken by relatives and friends of incarcerated people, but the system renders them invisible.
A new film reminds us that caring about survivors means working to prevent and respond to all violence—including carceral violence.
The lives of undocumented immigrants are very much documented—subject to the surveillance that’s endemic to contemporary life in the United States.
The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.
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.
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.
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
Carceral settings imprison an untold number of experts—outsiders on the inside who have much to teach us about mass incarceration.
How organizing workers in immigrant detention can serve as a foundation for abolition and liberation for all.