Disrupting Carceral Narratives
There can be justice beyond punishment. To realize it, we must challenge the narrative that carceral violence is the only response to other forms of violence.
There can be justice beyond punishment. To realize it, we must challenge the narrative that carceral violence is the only response to other forms of violence.
Racialized and violent, modern U.S. warmaking is inextricably linked with our history of mass incarceration.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act often revictimizes incarcerated survivors by expanding the power of the prison over them.
Every Saturday, we’ll send you a digest with the latest essays from people thinking through and working for a world without mass incarceration.
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Recovering a vision of queer solidarity with incarcerated people may just be what people disaffected by the gay rights movement need today.
Public skepticism about scientific research, coupled with echoes of the war on drugs, have hindered our city’s ability to respond to our overdose crisis.
Reacquainting ourselves with practices that made prisons more permeable can be a step toward ending mass incarceration.
So-called “smart” borders are just more sophisticated sites of racialized surveillance and violence. We need abolitionist tools to counter them.
Connecting it to the fight for disability rights has helped activists in California to make exciting progress in their effort to end solitary confinement.
A candid portrait of the experience of fighting for clemency in Louisiana—a route to freedom now severely threatened by the state’s new carceral governor.
The oral histories of political prisoners shed light on their true character—and expose the darkness of the state.
Taking criminal law out of immigration enforcement is a step toward safer, healthier communities. But is it enough?
Activism must involve incarcerated people—but few outside advocates really understand the dangers and limitations that imprisoned organizers face.
Series
A collection of essays exploring how people are practicing abolition in their communities, in partnership with Truthout.
Anti-jail organizers scored important wins in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But their fight isn’t over.
The Gospel narrative places on Christians a moral burden to not turn away from the sexual vulnerability of incarcerated people today.
Life-without-parole sentences hit families especially hard. Yet they fight on, committed to their loved ones’ freedom.
Reparations for historic wrongs require concrete action, and that’s no different for the untold harm caused by cannabis criminalization.
In Illinois, ending money bond was our target. Pretrial freedom is our goal.
The work of tearing down structures of harm while building the world we want can and must start small.
Since our launch, we have published a number of essay series and collections examining drivers of and solutions to our crisis of mass incarceration. Find them all here.
Probation and parole in the United States don’t work. A longtime reformer and advocate has drawn a blueprint to end them.
No one should be made to give up their rights in exchange for being spared from prison.
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
The fight against police and prisons cannot be separated from the struggle to extend care beyond the limits of the family form.
Better research won’t get us out of our crisis of mass incarceration.
The lives of undocumented immigrants are very much documented—subject to the surveillance that’s endemic to contemporary life in the United States.
What we are reading
A selection of recent books that invite us to imagine a world without mass incarceration.
by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum
by Jocelyn Simonson
by Jane M. Spinak
by CalvinJohn Smiley
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
In order to invest in a vision for a new way of living, we have to believe in our capacity to create something better—together.
Series
A collection of essays at the intersection of labor and the carceral state, in partnership with LPE Blog.
How white, middle-class youth in the suburbs experienced the war on drugs is a largely untold chapter in the arc of mass incarceration.
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
When slain by police, Black women and girls rarely garner the same communal outcry or political response as their fallen Black brothers.
By helping non-incarcerated people to experience a human connection with people inside, volunteering can open a curtain in the mind.
Life in prison is hard. Transitioning back home through reentry shouldn’t be harder.
Series
A collection of essays examining how—or whether—public defenders can meaningfully contribute to the end of mass incarceration.
As a newly elected judge assigned to misdemeanor court in Los Angeles, a former public defender sees her new role as serving those impacted by the system.
The experiences of Michael and Zoharah Simmons show that the fight against the carceral state is embedded in a larger project of building a just world.
A close analysis of prison data can help us think concretely, and strategically, about the tradeoffs of different approaches to decarceration and prison closures.
Sentences
—Adamu Chan, an abolitionist filmmaker, in “Beauty on the Inside”
Inquest publishes new, thought-provoking ideas and essays weekly.
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