Shattering Broken Windows
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
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142 posts in ‘Institutions & Practices’
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.
To stay true to their professed values, social workers must wholly disavow and remove themselves from systems of harm.
Many progressive prosecutors promised bold change. In Virginia and elsewhere, reformers are realizing that they’re still actors in the same machinery of injustice.
Sex offender registries don’t make us any safer. Abolishing them would.
The roots of e-carceration run deep, and we need to articulate digital abolition as the solution.
Fines and fees have a devastating effect on Black women and their communities. Abolishing them is the only option.
Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them.
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.
For many years, I believed that the child welfare system could be reformed, but no more. It needs to be abolished.
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.
Racist gang profiling on the street becomes hard data, which then feeds a sprawling detention and deportation machine with the imprimatur of law.
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.
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.
I finished my sentence more than seven years ago. But I’m still trapped in an immigration prison, where the punishment endures.
How government agencies and private companies trap and profit off incarcerated people and their loved ones.
Writing about people you encounter in prison carries special responsibilities.
The case for abolishing New Jersey’s youth prisons.
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated.
Simply targeting the corporations caging migrants and other people for profit won’t create a future without mass incarceration.
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.
Imprisonment violently separates us from those we love most. Even those we come to love on the inside.
How e-carceration grabbed a hold of Camden is a cautionary tale for those of us who envision a future without policing.
The Supreme Court doesn’t need another Stephen Breyer. It needs someone who can openly confront the immorality of our criminal legal system.
There's no such thing as a 'humane' eating environment in a penal system that inherently produces illness and death.
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.
We can't end mass incarceration without first ending solitary confinement once and for all.
Practicing correctional medicine is fundamentally an exercise in harm reduction. And it’s no match for freedom itself.
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.
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.