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.
TOPICS
Institutions & Practices
UNDERSTANDING HOW CARCERALISM OPERATES
104 posts in ‘Institutions & Practices’
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.
excerpt
Sexual Policing
Law enforcement of women’s bodies is a structural and systematic form of police violence. All of us are less safe if we don’t end this brutal expression of state-sanctioned power.
Big Data
Transgressing Borders
Racist gang profiling on the street becomes hard data, which then feeds a sprawling detention and deportation machine with the imprimatur of law.
public health
Drug-Induced Panic
Criminalization of so-called drug-induced homicides is yet another manifestation of the failed war on drugs — and far from an adequate public health response.
interventions
Making Headlines
The criminal legal system is massively punitive toward people who commit sex offenses. How we treat them jeopardizes their health and safety — and our own.
Crimmigration
No End in Sight
I finished my sentence more than seven years ago. But I’m still trapped in an immigration prison, where the punishment endures.
In Depth
Captive Consumers
How government agencies and private companies trap and profit off incarcerated people and their loved ones.
Life Inside
Burn the Spot
Writing about people you encounter in prison carries special responsibilities.
campaigns
150 Years Is Enough
The case for abolishing New Jersey’s youth prisons.
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.