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.
TOPICS
Institutions & Practices
UNDERSTANDING HOW CARCERALISM OPERATES
109 posts in ‘Institutions & Practices’
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.
Sentencing
Unfinished Business
Reckoning with the lives of all the men I sent to prison is a necessary, though not sufficient, step to reckon with the untold harm of mass incarceration.
Surveillance
The Case Against E-carceration
Electronic monitoring is not an alternative to incarceration. It's an alternative form of incarceration.
In the States
A ‘Warm’ Closure
The state of Washington plans to close 18 prison units. It sounds like progress. But don't be fooled: It's a problem.
Institutions
Where Reform Goes to Die
In its first six months, the Biden Administration has delivered major criminal justice disappointments. The problem: DOJ is calling the shots.
Decarceral Pathways
The Entrenched Carceralism of Forensics
Forensic science is not an instrument of accuracy or truth. It is a tool of the carceral state that cannot continue to exist in its current form.