Skip to main content
Hero Split (5)

TOPICS

Institutions & Practices

UNDERSTANDING HOW CARCERALISM OPERATES

142 posts in ‘Institutions & Practices’

Policing

Shattering Broken Windows

For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.

Katherine Beckett

Read More

In Depth

Making Men Pay

For incarcerated fathers, child-support and related debt create their own feedback loops of disadvantage and punishment.

Lynne Haney

Read More

Institutions

End Carceral Social Work

To stay true to their professed values, social workers must wholly disavow and remove themselves from systems of harm.

Alan Dettlaff

Read More

system actors

Busting the Myth

Many progressive prosecutors promised bold change. In Virginia and elsewhere, reformers are realizing that they’re still actors in the same machinery of injustice.

Brad Haywood

Read More

A closer look

The Real Monsters

Sex offender registries don’t make us any safer. Abolishing them would.

Emily Horowitz

Read More

Surveillance

Deconfiguring the Security State

The roots of e-carceration run deep, and we need to articulate digital abolition as the solution.

James Kilgore & Malkia Devich Cyril

Read More

In Depth

A Pound of Flesh

Fines and fees have a devastating effect on Black women and their communities. Abolishing them is the only option.

Alexes Harris, Natasha Hicks & Cortney Sanders

Read More

In Depth

Always a Mother

Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them.

Geniece Crawford Mondé

Read More

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.

Jessi Lee Jackson

Read More

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.

Dorothy Roberts

Read More

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.

Anne Gray Fischer

Read More

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.

Ana Muñiz

Read More

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.

Leo Beletsky, Emma Rock & Sunyou Kang

Read More

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.

Glenn Christie & David Rangaviz

Read More

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.

Angel Argueta

Read More

In Depth

Captive Consumers

How government agencies and private companies trap and profit off incarcerated people and their loved ones.

Ariel Nelson & Stephen Raher

Read More

Life Inside

Burn the Spot

Writing about people you encounter in prison carries special responsibilities.

Piper Kerman

Read More

campaigns

150 Years Is Enough

The case for abolishing New Jersey’s youth prisons.

Andrea McChristian

Read More

excerpt

Canaries in the Coalmine

We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated.

Sonia Sotomayor

Read More

Essay

Beyond Private Prisons

Simply targeting the corporations caging migrants and other people for profit won’t create a future without mass incarceration.

Silky Shah

Read More

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.

Matthew Caldwell

Read More

Life Inside

The Ties That Bind

Imprisonment violently separates us from those we love most. Even those we come to love on the inside.

William Peeples

Read More

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.

James Kilgore

Read More

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.

Cristian Farias

Read More

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.

Kanav Kathuria

Read More

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.

Hannah Riley

Read More

interventions

Seeing the Light

We can't end mass incarceration without first ending solitary confinement once and for all.

Christopher Blackwell & Jessica Sandoval

Read More

public health

Treating Unfreedom

Practicing correctional medicine is fundamentally an exercise in harm reduction. And it’s no match for freedom itself.

Rachael Bedard & Zachary Rosner

Read More

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.

Avinash Samarth, Michael Thomas & Christopher Smith

Read More

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.

Aly Panjwani

Read More