campaigns
150 Years Is Enough
The case for abolishing New Jersey’s youth prisons.
TOPICS
Institutions & Practices
UNDERSTANDING HOW CARCERALISM OPERATES
95 posts in ‘Institutions & Practices’
excerpt
Canaries in the Coalmine
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated.
Essay
Beyond Private Prisons
Simply targeting the corporations caging migrants and other people for profit won’t create a future without mass incarceration.
interventions
The End of Public Defenders
One path to ending mass incarceration is ending our modern conception of public defense. And being transparent about our work is one way to start.
Life Inside
The Ties That Bind
Imprisonment violently separates us from those we love most. Even those we come to love on the inside.
Surveillance
A Model City
How e-carceration grabbed a hold of Camden is a cautionary tale for those of us who envision a future without policing.
Institutions
No More Compromisers
The Supreme Court doesn’t need another Stephen Breyer. It needs someone who can openly confront the immorality of our criminal legal system.
In Depth
The Invisible Violence of Carceral Food
There's no such thing as a 'humane' eating environment in a penal system that inherently produces illness and death.
Institutions
Too Little, Too Late
The bureaucracy in charge of parole in Georgia hasn’t kept up with the reality that the state’s prison system is a hotbed of death and despair.
interventions
Seeing the Light
We can't end mass incarceration without first ending solitary confinement once and for all.
public health
Treating Unfreedom
Practicing correctional medicine is fundamentally an exercise in harm reduction. And it’s no match for freedom itself.
In Their Words
Second Class
For public defenders in New York, representing clients unjustly criminalized for gun possession is a matter of principle. Now, they have the Supreme Court’s attention.
Big Data
Rigged by Design
Immigration imprisonment routinely relies on a racist notion of “risk” and should be abolished. A glimpse at how ICE’s pro-detention algorithm is manipulated to incarcerate immigrants shows why.
Essay
Radicalized at the Workhouse
The criminal legal system almost took my life from me. The anger that came after now fuels my life’s work.
In Depth
Carceral Wisdom
Like the value they bring to the classroom, people who have experienced the harms of the penal system have much knowledge to bring to our nation’s jury trials.
voices
Divide and Conquer
For those of us on the inside who believe in prison abolition by any means necessary, prison closures really mean prison closures. The state and some of my fellow prisoners…
interventions
The True Jailers of Rikers
As demands grow louder for decarcerating and shutting down New York City’s deadly jail complex, judges and prosecutors have escaped accountability. But they’re the ones driving the crisis.
Essay
Where Choice Ends
Unless and until mass incarceration is ended, Roe v. Wade, and reproductive freedom writ large, will never be safe.
In Depth
Follow the Science
Federal law enforcement has long called the shots in the field of drug scheduling. But in the case of fentanyl analogues, Congress has a chance to lead — by doing…
Life Inside
‘We Are Men’
On the 50th anniversary of a flashpoint of the American penal system, the cries of Attica still resonate today.
system actors
Resistance Is Futile
In ways large and small, defendants who try to assert their voice in the criminal legal system see their agency denied — including, sometimes, by their own lawyers.
book review
Trials Without Justice
Plea bargaining may be a bad deal overall. But for many Black and Brown defendants, is the alternative any better?
interventions
Decarcerate Rikers Now
Nothing short of immediately getting people out of New York City's jail complex, and keeping others from going in, will prevent the death and horror now ravaging it.
A closer look
Cracking the Black Box
One way to keep prosecutors accountable and check their carceral impulses is by shedding some light on their vast discretion to charge crimes.
excerpt
Fear of the Black Child
American society and its criminal legal system simply won’t let Black kids be kids
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.
Institutions
Maxed Out
Long a reflection of the American carceral system’s worst excesses, the supermax prison serves no just purpose and must cease to exist.
Institutions
Making Penal Bureaucrats
Now more than ever, legal education must come to grips with its role in shaping the minds of those who might help to dismantle — or strengthen — carceral institutions…
Institutions
A Most Carceral Friend
The Justice Department’s top Supreme Court lawyer is far more committed to helping prosecutors win convictions and keep people locked up than to ‘doing justice.
Big Data
The Feature Is the Bug
For all the criticism they get, algorithms can be unlikely allies in exposing deep, structural injustices that entrench mass incarceration.